Something Was Wrong - S21 E3: (1/2) [Michelle] You Look Fine to Me

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

*Content Warning: childhood abuse and neglect, physical, mental, emotional, and verbal abuse, rape, substance use disorder, suicidal ideation, mature themes, pregnancy loss. *Resources:State Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Numbers: https://www.childwelfare.gov/state-child-abuse-and-neglect-reporting-numbers/?rt=795Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline: https://www.childhelphotline.org/The Family Gardener: http://thefamilygardener.comFor additional non-profit organizations, please visit: http://somethingwaswrong.com/resourcesFollow Something Was Wrong:Website: somethingwaswrong.com IG: instagram.com/somethingwaswrongpodcastTikTok: tiktok.com/@somethingwaswrongpodcast Follow Tiffany Reese:Website: tiffanyreese.me IG: instagram.com/lookieboo 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Something Was Wrong early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. I'm Dan Tuberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. What's the answer? And what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head? Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios.

Binge all episodes of Hysterical early and add free on Wondery Plus. Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences, as it discusses topics that can be upsetting, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, rape, and murder. Content warnings for each episode and confidential resources for survivors can be found in the episode notes. Some survivor names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Pseudonyms are given to minors in these stories for their privacy and protection.

Testimony shared by guests of the show is their own and does not necessarily reflect 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 anybody until you talk to someone. Hi, my name is Michelle Steller and I want to share my story of neglect and child abuse and how it doesn't have to define you as an adult. I'm a nanny, but I started parent coaching.

I help people with behavioral issues they're having with their kids and meal time struggles, sibling rivalry and all of that. So I've taken my past experience and completely flipped it upside down and decided to make a career out of it and help other parents. My mom was a teen mom.

She was 17 when she had me. And my dad was 21, my bio dad and my bio mom. They were together for about two years. Eventually my mom had to sow her wild oats. She was going out a lot and she met someone at a bar. His name was Mark. And shortly after we left my dad, we moved in with Mark. While we lived with him for two years, they had another child, my brother Michael.

I remember the house and oddly enough, I do have memories of sleeping in my crib and crawling. It was just like a normal house, normal neighborhood, normal school, normal life. Mark was very normal and he was great to me. From what I hear, she was a pretty good mom during this time, but I don't really have any recollection of that. I've since discovered that that's probably because we store traumatic memories over good memories. And there are quite a few with her that have pushed those aside. But I hear she was pretty good for a couple of years. And Mark was great. He was a single dad to two sons already. He had already fought for custody of his sons. Their

mom left them. My brothers David and Joe, Mark's sons, were probably the best part of my childhood. They were great. I was very close with Joe. He was the best brother. A friend of the family, Sherry, is a very important part of this story as well. She took care of us. She was around all the time. Side note, Sherry and Mark end up together. My mom started getting a little bit crazier toward the end, like going out a lot and stuff, so Sherry became a larger part of my life. I was three and a half or four.

Michael, I think, was maybe a year when my mom and I left. She left Mark. She was just too wild to live that normal of a life. Mark was trying to keep custody of Michael. I remember us coming back to pick Michael up for the night or the weekend and Michael clinging to Sherry. Hi, my name is Sherry. I have been a part of Michelle's life since she was three years old. She has been through a lot of hurt and pain and abuse. She is a strong, loving, independent person and no one looking at her today would even know what she went through.

I met Michelle because Mark, my husband, was actually with her biological mother. They were in a relationship. Mark had come into that relationship with two boys of his own. Karen had come into relationship with Michelle, and then they had together had a son named Michael and when they separated there was custody issues and Mark fought for custody of Michael. Michelle had in the separation left with her biological mom, Karen, speaking from what I see and my opinion was they probably they were young, Mark and Karen both. They were out and going out to bars and drinking and she could be very abusive and violent when she was drunk. It was not a healthy situation. I was concerned for also Michael's safety. She was living in a house, partying and drugs And she would sleep all day long. You couldn't reach her

on the phone. She wasn't responsible enough to have her own house or provide for her children. There was a time when Karen had her boyfriend plant an eight ball or actually is it eight ball of Coke or a pound of Coke? I don't even know. I'd have to look at the notes from the police report, but on Mark to try to ruin his custody case. But somebody had tipped us off that she was going to be doing this. So we were aware of it and Mark paid attention to everything and had discovered it. He was supposed to go pick up Michael. He'd called the police and they came and retrieved everything. And it was a very ugly custody battle with

people that you wouldn't normally trust or want to be exposed to. Here's Michelle. My mom, bio mom, Karen. We'd get Michael every once in a while. During this time, she was fighting for custody of him, but Mark was always very cordial and still wanted her to have a relationship with Michael. I read through these journals that Mark kept in 1989 and 1990. He was advised to do so by his lawyer for custody of Michael. It was really interesting to go back and read through these journals and it was very validating for me.

It's like a time capsule. It's so bizarre. Sherry and I both started reading them because we were just trying to pick out stuff that was about me for the podcast purposes. It was just very enlightening to see that everything I thought happened, happened because as a child, you're like, did this really happen all the time or did it happen twice? I exaggerated it in my six-year-old mind.

He would write stuff like, Karen doesn't have a home at the moment, Michelle question mark, or Karen is driving around in a mail truck. I wouldn't let Michael go with her because there's not proper car seats or seats at all because it's a mail truck. And then he writes Michelle? So all throughout this time that he was fighting for custody of Michael, he still had concern for me, which I didn't know until very recently. So it's been very eye-opening

for me. When we left, it got pretty tumultuous. She's an alcoholic and a drug addict, and she got really heavy into cocaine at this point. It was the 80s. Her and I kind of lived all over the place. We actually lived at a motel for a little while. That was one of my favorite living arrangements. I should mention that my mother was a stripper at this time. This is important because I was left to fend for myself because she worked late. She did a lot of drugs and she slept most of the day, which is one of the things I read in the journal. A lot of the times he called, she was asleep and it was the middle of the day and I wasn't at school. So we lived at this motel and I made friends with a little boy who lived in the room next to us and his parents were a mess as well. He would come over every morning and I would

go through her purse and take a lot of single bills and then we would go to this restaurant next door. They had a Ninja Turtle game and we would just like play the Ninja Turtle game for hours and then we would eat food and hang out. Also, the motel had a vending machine. So a lot of times my meals consisted of vending machine foods. When I was living with Karen, I missed a hundred days of kindergarten, roughly the same for first grade. It was to the point where the state was going to step in. But luckily, they passed me through. She never, ever abused me. It was like, I was just with her. She wasn't my mom. I was just with her. I was just there. I'd like to say that there was an excuse for her behavior, but there's not. She had a great

upbringing. Her dad was a police officer. Her mom was a stay at home mom. She pretty much lived your quintessential 1960s life. She was always wild. When she was a teenager, she got into drugs and she was also very pretty, popular, and manipulative, and charismatic. Everybody who met her loved her. You were drawn to her. She kept up a very good facade. No matter how bad things were, she could always fake it.

She gets away with everything. She's so manipulative. Like if she got pulled over, she would give them her sister's license. So it would go on her record. She just never grew up. So then as time went on, we started moving all over. So we lived in Detroit and I've since driven through the area now just out of morbid curiosity and it was not a good area. And I just think about myself as a little kid walking around the neighborhood. I was always left to my own devices so I just found stuff to do all day. There were homeless people who lived in this alley near our house and I would just go hang out with them every day. And we would eat candy together, and they just took me under their wing.

It's funny because I don't even think Karen, my mom, knows that. Like why would she? She was just kind of off in her own world. It eventually turned into me taking care of her. If she got home from work at the early hours of the morning. She would come in and she would pass out. I would like take off her boots and remove her earrings so she would be comfortable. Which looking back is a little sad, but it was my life. It was pretty normal. Her partying got really

bad at one point. We lived in this house for maybe six months, which was a really long time for me. And it was the party house. There was just parties constantly. And I remember being scared a lot because I didn't know a lot of these people and none of them were ever really coherent because everybody was drunk or high. I just remember there being lines of cocaine on our glass table always. Any time of day there was just so much cocaine. She would be so out of it that there was a time I remember where I was trying to get her attention. I was like, Mom, Mom, Mom. And she just looked down and she goes, Who is this kid? And to me, that was really scary. I was like, Okay, so now

she doesn't even remember me. When we lived there, I stayed in my room a lot. Like as soon as the parties started, I would go in my room. And there was actually a teenage neighbor next door who used to babysit me sometimes. Sometimes when the parties were like really out of control I would climb out my window and go to the neighbor's house. As an adult now I just don't understand it. It's just so beyond. There was no adults around. No one was watching. I really just lived my own life. Sometimes she would randomly get arrested, usually for she was supposed to pay child support for Michael, because Mark, at that point, had gotten custody of Michael.

But Michael became a very important link for me to maintain that relationship with Sherry and Mark. Sometimes she would get arrested and then just disappear for a few days. I remember one particular occasion where we had just moved in with these guys. I did not know any of them. They were complete strangers and she got arrested. So then I just lived with these people for three days. That was really bizarre. And I remember at this point, she had multiple warrants out for her arrest. So every time she got pulled over, she ended up in jail. Luckily, I was never sexually abused by any of these people.

I remember her asking me once, we were playing hide and seek or something. I think this was probably the only time we ever did. And I couldn't find her. And finally she came out and she said, do you think I would leave you? And I said, yeah, like so obvious. And she was so taken aback by that, which surprised me because I'm like, yeah, of course you would leave me. You leave me all the time. After that, we started living all over. We would just kind of live with whoever was giving her drugs. We would live somewhere for a couple weeks and then in the middle of the night we would

leave. And then we'd go live somewhere else. She was very wild. A total party girl. And would just get us in these really bizarre situations. For instance, one night we were sleeping on a waterbed and I think it was the guy who rented the house that we lived in. I don't know.

He came upstairs with a knife and just started stabbing at the bed. He was trying to stab her. I remember water going everywhere and then her and I having to jump out the window. There was a bike on the porch that I had been using and I was like, oh, I'm going to miss my bike. That was our life. Constant chaos. We were hard to find. Nobody could find us for like a whole year because we were just in the wind. She had also had another child during the years I lived with her. The baby's dad, was he at least around at that point?

No, rumor has it he had like 19 other kids with 19 other people. My youngest brother, let's call him Matthew, he was youngest of her children. He was not even one when I was taken away from her. That was hard too. He, I think, had the worst from the get-go. He was born addicted to cocaine. He was a really tough baby. I remember him crying a lot. I remember her being like so out of it and me begging her to drive me to the store so we could get milk for him. And I remember when he was a baby, me going to the store to get milk and putting it in a bottle and giving it to him. And in hindsight, like he wasn't supposed to have cow's milk, but I didn't know that. I was seven.

He was crawling around and these people were shooting guns at the floor. And I remember running and like throwing my body over him as if I'm going to block a bullet or something as a seven-year-old child. When biological dad Keith wanted to get custody of me, Mark was helping him. They shared a lawyer. So at one point, Karen was doing so bad, and she knew that Keith was trying to get custody of me that she actually gave me to Mark and Sherry. I was about seven, so it was shortly before Bio Dad Keith got custody of me. So I lived with Mark and Sherry and my brothers, Joe

and David and Michael again for a little while. I remember going to school every day, like going to first grade. And there's a lot in the journals also about stuff that Sherry was doing for me. Reading through these journals has been eye-opening. Mark and Sherry have always been my parents. I was just making my way back to them all these years. And I had never really thought of it that way. Here's Michelle's adoptive mom, Sherry. In that time, you know, I didn't really know what was going on with Michelle, nor did we have any say in it because Mark wasn't her biological father either. And then she had

another kid with another guy. I actually babysat him, which was supposed to be one day while she could go to work. And she left him with us for like two nights. You couldn't get a hold of her and she would never come back and retrieve him. That's how she lived. That's how she lived with Michelle too. We didn't have control over any of that. We were on the outside taking what we could get. The only thing we had control of was Michael's visitation. It was

important for us, for Michael and Michelle to have a relationship. We tried to leave that open for the kids, for them to have a relationship. Obviously, we couldn't rely on Karen to achieve that. She was drunk all the time. At that point, Michelle, she kind of was with Karen all the time. I don't think that she felt that her life was wrong. Michelle would tell me stories about eating out of vending machines and going to different houses. And at age seven, do you really have a grasp on what's normal? Karen, I want to say that she loved Michelle, but she loved Michelle as best as she could. She couldn't provide what was necessary for

Michelle to have a safe, stable, loving environment, which kind of brings us to how Michelle got to us. Karen was not able to provide these things. It might have been like a year after she left Mark that Michelle had come to live with us because her truancy in school was so terrible. Mark and her and I had discussed Michelle living with us, going back to her old school and having a normal everyday life and Karen could have her on the weekends, which would allow Karen to work and Michelle to be safe, go to school, be fed, all of these things that every child should have.

So I was actually partaking with Michelle's every day, as opposed to just an acquaintance situation. That would be months of Michelle living with Mark and I, and she was going to an elementary school that she had gone to earlier. So it was consistency, which was something Michelle lacked. It was Mark's boys, Mark, Joe, Michael, and Michelle. Karen would get her on the weekends. Mark and Keith had talked during that time. It had come up that Keith wanted to fight for custody of Michelle. Karen got wind of this. Michelle had been with us, but she was

actually with Karen and they were at her mom's house and they were packed up. I don't know where Karen was planning on moving, but she was planning on moving out of state so that she could keep her daughter. It was during that time that the police showed up at her mom's and took Michelle with her biological dad, Keith, who was fighting for sole custody. Karen had to see Michelle when the court said it was okay. She didn't have any rights at that point in time. At least talking with her mom, you could rationalize with her a bit.

She did want Michael and Michelle to have a relationship. And she did allow Michelle to come and stay with us when she knew she wasn't capable of giving Michelle what she needed. But when Michelle got taken from Karen's custody and placed in Keith's custody, shit really got bad. Really bad. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenbaum. And in our series Legacy, we look at the lives of some of the most famous people to have ever lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve. In this series, we look at J. Edgar Hoover.

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Follow Legacy Now wherever you listen to podcasts. Divorced beheaded died, divorced beheaded survived. We know the six wives of Henry VIII as pawns in his hunt for a son, but their lives were so much more than just being the king's wives. I'm Arisha Skidmore Williams. And I'm Brooke Ziffrin. And we're the hosts of Wondry's podcast, Even the Royals. In each episode, we'll pull back the curtain on royal families,

past and present, from all over the world, to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty. We rarely see Henry VIII's wives in their own light, as women who use the tools available to them to hold on to power. Some women won the game, others lost, but they were all unexpected agents in their own stories. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing, but more often than not,

it comes at the expense of everything else, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow even the royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Go deeper and get more of the story with Wondery's top history podcasts, including American Scandal, Legacy, and Black History for Real. Everybody knew I was in this horrible situation with Karen.

Nobody could have foreseen that it was going to get much worse. Sheri and Mark, they had to give me back to Karen. And a couple of months later, BioDad Keith got custody of me. Karen and I were living with my grandma at the time. He had come to the door and I opened the door and I didn't recognize him. It took me a minute to realize who he was. Karen shut the door on him. He left and then he came back with four police officers.

I remember them trying to get me out of the house. I was holding on to Karen and I remember four police officers carrying me out, which in hindsight, like, let's do better. That was super traumatic for a seven-year-old. And then boom, I don't live with my mom anymore. That was it. for a seven-year-old. And then boom, I don't live with my mom anymore. That was it. So this is like the only consistent parent that I had in my life, as terrible as she was. She was my person. We were like almost codependent. Being taken away from her abruptly to go live with strangers, she knew it was coming because she skipped court dates. I had no idea. But I've since talked to bio dad Keith about it. And he was like, yeah, it was in the works for a long time. There were multiple court dates, and she just never showed up. So then he was granted custody. The police stick me in the car.

And all I remember is his wife, Dora, turning around from the front seat and saying, How are you? How am I? I was literally just ripped away from the only parent I've known by the police and stuck in this car with strangers. So I'm great, thank you. I remember thinking, who's going to take care of my mom? Which is proof of how parentified I had become. It was a while before I saw her again. She was really bad at this point, like really heavy into drugs, really heavy into drinking. It was probably a relief, if I'm being honest.

So I didn't see her for like maybe a year. I moved in with them, I was seven, but it was October. So I turned eight in November. Who was living with you in the home when you then moved in with your bio dad, Keith? His wife, Dora, and their two children, a girl and a boy. They were so young. Actually, I don't even know if my sister had been born yet when I moved in. I remember it being normal for a little while. It was all very awkward because I didn't really know them. I had only seen BioDad Keith maybe two or three times, so he was a stranger to me. I shared a bunk bed with my brother. Let's call him

Kyle. I think maybe my sister was born shortly after I moved in, and she was in a crib in Dora and Keith's room. I was going to school consistently. I eventually caught up, but I remember being really behind. In the beginning, I was eating regular food and going to school, and it was sort of normal. It was foreign. It was a very different landscape,

moving from Detroit to the area where Keith and Dora lived. In Detroit, I was the only white child in my class. Where we lived was very different. That was a huge change for me. But I fit in pretty well. I was always very adaptable. I had a good sense of humor. I was obviously mature for my age, which turns out is not a compliment. It's just because I didn't have a fucking choice. We did go to church on Sundays. It was more led by Dora. That was more her thing. Keith was just going along with it. I wouldn't call him like a church-going person. It turned pretty quickly. Dora, she would say stuff like, oh, you look just like your

mother. And she wasn't as pretty as my mother. So she had like this weird resentment toward me, toward a seven-year-old girl for looking like my mother. It was like it had broken up her vision of this ideal family that she wanted or something. I don't really remember having much free time. I think the chores and stuff started pretty shortly after I moved in. I took care of the kids a lot. Dora was very lazy. She would make me get the kids dressed, give them baths, get them ready for school, get them ready for church. If the baby was sick, she would wake me up in the

middle of the night to clean up the throw up, take care of the baby. How much was your bio dad Keith around during the time when you lived with them. He worked a lot. It was very important to Dora that her kids went to Catholic school and they weren't exactly in the tax bracket for that. So he was working doubles, triples, midnights. I don't really remember him being there often. So a lot of this he wasn't aware of. It just got worse as the years went on. I got home from school and I did chores for at least six hours, well into

the evening. I washed the walls a lot, cleaning the bathrooms. They just got more and more ridiculous. We had these stairs that were going down to the basement and they had like those metal, like little slats on the edge with the grooves in them. She would make me scrub them with a toothbrush. I would have to kneel on the step below it. So those grooves were right on my knees and I just remember it being so painful.

She would make me do that one a lot. We had a dog who was not trained, so I would have to clean up that in the basement constantly. And then it just got more and more rigid. The chores would become timed. It would be a very exact time. And if I went over a minute, then she would cut an inch off my hair. A big part of Dora's abuse toward me was humiliation, psychological, like warfare tactic type abuse. I was physically abused, but it's not like I was covered in bruises all the time. There was no one to talk to about it.

Nobody understood it. So during the time, I was almost like nobody's putting cigarettes out on me or breaking my arms. I almost gaslit myself into being like, well, nobody hurts me in that way. Once my sister moved into the bunk bedroom with my brother, I went to the basement. It was unfinished, cement floor basement and there was a couch down there. And that was my bed. No blanket. I remember being cold all of the time. No proper pillow. It was just like a throw pillow that came with the couch. There was a bathroom down there. It had like cinder block walls. There

was a tiny shower. It was like prison. It was a lot of cement and cinder block. And it slowly became me being more and more ostracized from the family. I would be doing chores while they ate dinner. And then when they finished dinner, I would clean it up. So I wasn't like part of the family. I was very much separated from the family. I didn't have toys or belongings. I was never allowed to watch TV. I didn't watch TV for the whole time I lived there. There was no downtime. And then it just spiraled. It almost became a hobby for her. Again, who do you tell, like, oh, I have to do too many chores and I get haircuts. Everything she did was calculated very premeditated. I wasn't allowed to eat much. That became a big part of the

abuse was starvation. Three days was the max that I ever went without food. I started sneaking foods but she very quickly caught on to that and started counting crackers and measuring juice. Everything was measured and counted. So I would try to go for stuff like peanut butter, because it's really hard to measure peanut butter. Summer was terrible. School was where I got most of my food from. Friends would give me food.

My garbage picked a lot. For me, it's lived in my head for 25 years. So like saying it out loud, saying that I garbage picked food is like so fucked up. One time I tried sneaking orange juice. She had food that was just for her kids and her family, she would say. I was very separate. She didn't want me touching it. And I remember I snuck orange juice and I didn't know that she had measured it. I was in the bathroom She didn't want me touching it. And I remember I snuck orange juice and I didn't know that she had measured it. I was in the bathroom up on the counter cleaning the mirror and she came in, grabbed me by the hair and just drug me off the counter

down the hallway and just banged my head up against the wall. She was so mad that I drank something that was her kids. That was the last time I did that. Obviously, that was when I realized she was measuring. Hair pulling and hitting me in the head became a big physical abuse because it was easily hidden. There were a lot of times where like, my hair follicles would bleed or I'd be like bleeding on the head,

but no bruises that anybody can see. She thawed it out before she did it. Everything was thoughtfully done. A lot of the stuff she did to me, she would do in the middle of the night. This was her coming up with new ideas of things to do to me, to torture me. The food deprivation was a big one, and then the sleep deprivation. It got worse with time and became more and more maniacal. A lot of it was cleaning. She would wake me up in the middle of the night, three in the morning, and make me scrub the foyer floor for an hour with a toothbrush. She would wake me up and tell me to reorganize the linen closet.

And then it started with stuff like quizzing me on things when there just wasn't enough to clean anymore. She would make me read articles from Reader's Digest. She would go back to bed. I would have to wake her up to quiz me. And then if I got it wrong, I'd have to reread it. The longer it took me to get it right, the less sleep I got. So my punishment was no sleep, because she'd be like, as soon as you get this right, you can go back to sleep. She would make me sit in the basement at this desk next to the bathroom. And sometimes I would fall asleep.

If I didn't wake her up in like a normal amount of time, then she'd come and check. And I remember waking up, she was dumping water on my face as my head was like falling back from sleeping, which as an adult I realized is fucking waterboarding, which is a war tactic, which is insane. That happened on more than one occasion. CPS was called a few times. I know once was one of my friend's moms. I don't know who the other one was.

But every time they came, she just like sweet-talked them. And the house looked normal. It was very clean, obviously. She would say that I shared a bedroom with the kids and they went on their merry way. Very little was done. Her mask rarely slipped. She got away with it for so long because she was really good at pretending, especially around her family. Like at family functions, there were a couple times where I think family members saw her slip up because I would eat a lot, right? At functions, I would sneak as much food as I could. My goal for those eight years became eating. I just had to find where the next food was going to come from because it was very rare. So at least family functions, I would eat a lot. And I remember her multiple times pulling me aside.

She was like, yell at me through her teeth. She'd be like, don't you dare take any more food. You're going to get it when we get home. And I do remember on a couple of occasions where family members would be like, what did she say? And then she'd immediately snap back into her fake, nice self. Her mom lived with us. She was really kind to me. She snuck me food a few times, but then I heard Dora yelling at her to stop doing that and to mind her own business. I think her own business. I think her own mother was probably scared of her.

I feel like you have to be evil to do what she's done. I mean, I'm no doctor, but it's fucking evil. It's also bizarre and sick in the way that she wanted to do this to you so bad that she was also willing to be up in the middle of the night to torture you to do these things to you. There's this list of signs of narcissism and then signs of Machiavellianism. I just would love to like read these to you. They're breaking it down like how you would decipher the difference between narcissism and Machiavellianism. So with narcissism, it's saying like self-centeredness, grandiosity, lack of empathy, sense of entitlement, exaggerated self-importance, attention-seeking behavior, egocentracy, need for admiration,

inflated ego, obsession with success. Whereas Machiavellianism is manipulativeness, cunningness, strategic thinking, pragmatism, focus on achieving goals, willingness to deceive and exploit, lack of concern for morality, willingness to use others for personal gain, ability to charm and influence others, and a desire for power and control. And then the sadism, the literal enjoyment of inflicting pain on another person. When I read that, it just sounds exactly like Dora. That's interesting. She definitely enjoyed it. I mean, you would have to, to like set an alarm for 3 a.m.

And she would stay up and watch me to make sure I didn't fall asleep. I was very isolated. I mean, my younger siblings kept me going, honestly, because they were like my only source of joy at the time. But other than that, there wasn't much. And of course, your siblings, they're living in a total different universe, right?

Because they're treated differently by her. Completely differently. She like doted on them. She was fine toward them. My younger brother got to the point where he started sneaking me food. So he knew kind of what was going on as much as an eight-year-old can.

And he would be like, why is my mom so mean to you? Why does my mom hate you so much? It became more obvious the older he got. My younger sister, Megan, she was too young. I was, however, allowed to still visit Sherry, Mark, and my brother, Michael, and my other two brothers. I maintained a relationship with them. It was pretty frequent in the beginning, maybe every month or something. And then as things got worse with her, that lessened. Because when you're abusing someone, you want to isolate them. I remember when I would go to their

house, I would like binge eat so much. In my child brain, I thought, well if I could just eat enough now, that will sustain me till Wednesday. Which is not how that works. So it became less and less. By the end, maybe I saw them once a year, but they couldn't do anything. Like, they looked into it, but they were quite literally powerless. And they didn't want to rock the boat because they wanted to still see me. Sherry, however, went to college near where Keith and Dora lived. So she would bring food and hide it in the bushes near the corner of the street. And then I would get it on my way to school and then hide it in my locker. It would be like Nutri-cane bars or stuff like that where

I could like keep it in my locker and be sure that I at least had that to eat every day. Help without rocking the boat because they would have been cut off so quickly. She was fully in control. Biological dad Keith, he was working midnights and he wasn't there. I didn't know him so there wasn't like that level of comfort and she was always telling me that he didn't like me to not even look at him. He didn't love me. I was always telling me that he didn't like me, to not even look at him. He didn't love me. I was only here because my mom didn't love me and she didn't want me and there was nowhere else for me to go. She had like drilled this into my mind. I couldn't even look at him. So talking to him seemed out of the question. It turns out she was saying the same stuff to him, that I didn't love him and I didn't want to talk to him and I hated him, which isn't an excuse because he was

a grown man and there was enough going on that he should have stepped in. He didn't really talk to me much and I didn't talk to him. She had played us against each other. I do remember them fighting about me. And I remember at one point like her threatening that if he left that she would make sure he never saw the other two kids again. So then to me, it felt like I was being sacrificed for them. I remember them arguing about like me going to live somewhere else. And I would think like, yes, please. I ran away multiple times. Nine was the first time. I remember by the time I was nine and a half, maybe ten, being suicidal. Within a year and a half, it was bad enough that I didn't want to live anymore. There was one point when I was 11 where I ran away and I

went with my bio mom, Karen, and we ended up going to court for child abuse charges. In the courtroom, they actually had me go in the back and talk to the judge, who was a very old man. All I remember is that I was in court for child abuse on my 11th birthday. I remember going in the chambers, speaking to the judge and telling him, and he said, Well, you look fine to me. I don't see any marks. And it was so, so dismissive. Well, a judge is even higher than a police officer. So if a judge doesn't believe me, I don't stand a chance.

I'm Dan Tuberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. Like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis the state tried to keep on the down-low.

Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well you were holding something back. And tension, I. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. You're, oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the witches of Salem?

Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical. Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app

or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. From Wondery Plus. From Wondery, I'm Indra Varma and this is The Spy Who. This season we open the file on Oleg Penkovsky, the spy who defused the missile crisis. It's 1960 and the world's on the brink of nuclear war. However, one man in Moscow is about to emerge from the shadows

with an offer for the CIA. His name is Oleg Penkovsky. As a Cold War double agent, Penkovsky wants to supply the US with the Soviet Union's greatest nuclear secrets. But is this man putting his life on the line to save the world, or is he part of an elaborate trap? Follow the Spy Who on the Wondry app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of the Spy Who defused the missile crisis early and ad free with Wondry Plus. Dora took me out into the hallway and she was sweet talking me. She was a totally different person. Everything's going to change. Everything's going to be better. I love you. You're going to be part of the family. Really made me believe her. And for the longest time, I was so mad

at myself for letting that work, but I've since forgiven myself because I was 11. Well, technically 10. It was my 11th birthday. It was very much me being like, never mind. Then bio mom Karen being pissed at me because now I made her look like an idiot. She finally took it seriously, all for nothing. And then it was like, well, it's not that bad

if you went back. And that became the narrative, which is probably because if she admitted it, then that would be on her for not doing anything to try to get custody of me back. She never tried. She knew what was happening and she didn't do anything. Things were better for like maybe a couple of weeks.

And then that just quickly quickly faded. That might be the catalyst for when it got so much worse. She would do really malicious things just to fuck with me like she would order food from a restaurant and make me go pick it up and then I would have to carry it home smelling this food after not eating and she would say I'll know if you take anything. It was just like a form of torture. Again, so hard to prove. Wearing me down as a human being. She got more and more creative, I guess. If I did something wrong during the day, let's

say I forgot to bring my science book home, she'd wake me up in the middle of the night and make me write it a hundred times. I will not forget to bring my science book home. She'd wake me up in the middle of the night and make me write it a hundred times. I will not forget to bring my science book home. Just like mind-numbing. I thought I was losing my mind because I was so tired. She would wake me up and be like Michelle Michelle and to this day I cannot stand when somebody whispers my name. It's triggering. I do remember like sleepwalking a lot and doing really weird things in the middle of the night because I wasn't getting normal sleep. She would wake me up every day and say, don't forget you're worthless and nobody loves you. Worthless was a big one. That was her go-to. You're worthless. I would just not respond.

As time went on it got worse. I wasn't allowed to shower very often, which I'm assuming is because she wanted me to smell and to humiliate me at school, which wasn't working because everybody knew my story. But then when I was allowed to shower, it was in the basement shower because she didn't want my dirty body anywhere near where her family showers. I wasn't allowed to use hot water because I wasn't worth it. So I was allowed to take only cold showers and they were timed. She would stand at the bathroom door timing me for three minutes, which was plenty of time when you're taking a cold shower. You're not going to

really lollygag in there much. I was enslaved. That's what it feels like. Just like breaking me down as a person. I was kept very separate from her family. I wasn't allowed to use the washer and dryer. She didn't want my disgusting clothes touching her family's clothes. I only had three outfits at any given time to embarrass me, so I'd have to wear the same thing over and over and over again. I was only allowed to have one pair of underwear. So at the end of every day, I had to wash my clothes in a cement laundry tub with a bar of soap because I couldn't use the washing machine.

However, I could wash their clothes, fold their clothes, put their clothes away, iron them, and hang them up. I was not too disgusting to touch their clothes, but my clothes were, apparently. So I spent a lot of time in the basement doing that. It was just kind of like my own world, like my own life, I guess. And then she started like rarely saying my name. She would just refer to me as her, again, to break me down and dehumanize me. She would cut my hair all the time, but then for Christmas, she would buy me hair accessories. And then when I opened them, she would laugh. So it became more stuff like that. Everything I did was wrong.

If I walked too heavy on the stairs, she would then make me walk up and down the stairs 50 times, which was exhausting for somebody who wasn't eating or sleeping. She would often tell me that my mom was coming to pick me up for the weekend and watch me while I just sat in the front room waiting for my mom's car. And I found out later that she was calling Karen and canceling, but still watching me sit there waiting for Karen to show up. She got meaner with time and dehumanized me more and more.

It got to a point where I wasn't even allowed to come home after school. She would make me go to the library and I would have to stay at the library until it closed around eight. And then I would walk home and start my chores. And I would do that until like maybe 1 a.m. and then I could go to bed. Let's say the library was closed. I would come home from school and I would have to sit on the back porch until her family in quotes went to bed.

And then I was allowed to come in and start my chores. Every once in a while she would throw food in the dog's bowl and say if you want it it's there. So giving me the opportunity to eat but from a dog's bowl. She would also have like alternatives for food so she would let me drink powdered milk, which is disgusting. Or she would dump an egg into a bowl and stick it in the microwave until it was rubbery. And she would say, if you're really that hungry, you'll eat it. She wasn't even trying to really be sneaky about it.

As time went on, I cared less and less and was like, what the fuck else can you do to me at this point? For instance, I would clean something and she would come in and say, no, you didn't do it right, do it again. And then I would just sit there for 20 minutes, not doing anything, and then I would go get her and she'd come back and be like, now that's how you do it.

And to me, that felt like a little win. Like, I didn't do anything, joke's on you. And then she would try to create this relationship between her and I. Like, she would make me give her massages. Like, I really was her servant, which is crazy. She realized she could make money off of me. So, she started recommending me for babysitting jobs at church. And then she would keep the money, of course. And I was happy to do it because I loved being around kids because they are the opposite of soulless like she was. It was a break from the house.

And most times when you babysit for people, they're like, oh, help yourself to anything in the fridge or the cupboards. As you can imagine, I took full advantage of that. I would obviously binge while at these people's houses. And then I would sometimes steal food, which I don't feel bad about because I was starving. So I would steal food and hide it in different spots of the house so that I could ration it out. But of course, he quickly picked up on that. So when I got back from babysitting jobs, she started checking my pockets. So that was short lived. Recently, I've been comparing my hands to like my friend's hands who are my same age. I'm like, why do my hands look much older? And then I remembered being a kid and my

hands always being really dry and cracked and bleeding from always having them in buckets of like bleach and pine saw. Her hatred for me was more important than her own self preservation. The risk versus reward was worth it. Even the like lack of showering. So I always had like greasy hair. She did take some risks, but none of them were so high risk that she was gonna get in trouble for it. I wasn't covered in bruises. I wasn't missing teeth. It's just like all these little things that keep eating away at me. In seventh and eighth grade was when I went to the Catholic school and the class sizes

were so small. In seventh grade, there were only 16 kids in all of seventh grade, which for me was lovely because everybody was friends. My friends knew what was going on, but I had sworn them all to secrecy, and we were children, so they abided. So at that school, I think there was some inkling with one of the teachers slash nuns. Every Friday, we had Dress Down Friday, and everybody would wear not their school uniform, but I was never allowed to because clothing is also a part of the humiliation process. And the nun would bring me clothes to change into on Fridays. But again, is that abuse? It was so hard to prove. 7th and 8th grade, when she would try to do something to humiliate me, like if she chopped

all my hair off, and I'm talking embarrassing, embarrassing haircuts. Think Dumb and Dumber. So when I went to this school I would walk in and they'd be like, oh she got to you again huh? I wasn't embarrassed because everybody just knew it wasn't my fault. So I really loved that school. Mark and Sherry, they wanted to help me. There was nothing they could do. They had no rights, no claim, nothing over me. They weren't related to do. They had no rights, no claim, nothing over me. They weren't related to me. They couldn't have done anything. And they were the only people who would have. So those stipulations are absurd to me as well. The only person who could have done something was my mother, Taryn, and she didn't or couldn't or wouldn't.

There was no hope for me. The people who could do something wouldn't, and the people who would do something couldn't. Here's Michelle's adoptive mom, Sheri. I compare it to like a Cinderella story. The emotional abuse that she endured living with Keith and Dora was profound. So profound that I reached out to a lawyer a couple times to see maybe I don't have rights but maybe Michael has rights, you know, as a child and them being siblings. There's got to be something that we can do to protect this child. There was just nothing. I called a lawyer twice and there was just nothing we could do. She just had to endure it. The schools weren't stepping in. Her stepmom, Dora, had her taking care of the house

and cleaning everything and scrubbing everything and not feeding her properly and telling her she's worthless and all kinds of ugly stuff. We used to live in the city, which was maybe 20 minutes from her biological father's house. But then once we were married, we moved out to the country. It's an hour away and my husband worked out in the city. So we would try to communicate with Keith as much as possible to try and

make sure Michelle still had a relationship with Michael. He would pick up Michelle Friday after work and bring her here for the weekend. And then Monday morning when Mark was going into work, he would drop her off back at her dad's so that she could go back to school. There was no reciprocation from Keith's end or Dora's end to make sure that Michael and Michelle had a relationship. Keith was pulling back as the time went on. It was almost like they used us against Michelle. If they wanted to punish Michelle, then they would say she couldn't come over for the weekend. They would play games with us, saying yes, come and get her and then call at the last minute and say don't come and get her.

Like Mark and I getting married, she was supposed to be coming to the wedding and at the last minute and say, don't come and get her. Like Mark and I getting married, she was supposed to be coming to the wedding and at the last minute they tried to say she couldn't come. It's a very upsetting situation when you're in it. Of course you want her there. She's part of your life and you have these puppet masters just constantly playing you all. There was a lot of that. Michelle wasn't with us half as much as we would have loved to have had her. It was very inconsistent. There might have been a month or two that passed, say she's seven or eight, till the time where she was 14 or 15. It really got hard. I would drive into the city. I was going to school still out there. I would hide food under a tree. When she was here on weekends, I would say, okay, I'm coming out on the stakes. I have school. I'm going to hide food under

a tree for you. I'm going to give you money so you can buy lunches at school. There was one time when I drove her back in the morning and they had her in a summer camp program. Dora refused to let me pack a lunch for her. She would not let me do it. So I dropped Michelle off and Dora was at work. So I was able to kind of hang out and Michelle was supposed to walk to camp from her house. I told Michelle, there's no reason for you to walk. I'm right here. I will drive you to camp. She got in the car and she opened up her lunchbox and it was just really disheartening to see what she had packed her for lunch. My memory of it was two pieces of healed bread with peanut butter, nothing

else. That's it. I don't understand why I couldn't have made her a lunch. So I actually drove to a store that had a little deli in it and we loaded up her lunchbox and got extra stuff. There was one time in specific, I remember a memory she shared with me was she was sitting at the table eating something Dora had come into the room, pulled it from her and said, this isn't for you, this is for us. And she threw it on the floor for the dog. They kept her in the basement on a couch, that's where she slept. We've never ever in all the years placed one foot inside that house so I couldn't even tell you what it looked like. It was almost like a secret.

They would always send her over in something that was way too small for her and she was never allowed to bring any clothes with her. They would cut her bangs off completely and I do hair for a living so I know what I'm talking about. Her bangs were probably only an inch long, so a lot of the times they would stand up. They were always cut crooked. I do feel honestly that Dora did that to her on purpose,

just to make her school life difficult and making friends. And of course people are gonna tease her. She's wearing clothes that don't fit her and her bangs are cut off. It's very difficult to be emotionally on your knees when someone else is controlling every bit of it. She was abusing Michelle. She was masterful at what she did. I definitely feel like it was more about humiliating her to every sense that she possibly could. Like I said, Dora was really good at what she did. I probably only met her in person like once or twice.

I've never met in my lifetime anyone so spineless to let their child be abused by someone that's supposed to love them. I would never have even tolerated that for a second. But though as difficult as it was to see her, we never gave up. We were the only glimpse of normalcy that she had. Her weekend visitations that she could come here, she'd show up on Friday and she'd eat herself sick. She would be sick by the end of the night by how much food she consumed. And then when she was leaving Monday morning, like Sunday night, she would start getting sick, anxious, sick to her stomach, crying. But you know, the lawyer said that there's nothing we could do. Calling Child Protective

Services, would that have been better for her? I don't know because she was able to come and see us. She would come here every other weekend or she would stay for a couple of weeks in the summer. If Keith lost custody and Karen didn't have custody and they were going to put her in a foster situation, would that have been better? And that's not what Michelle wanted us to do. So we just kept hiding food under a tree and giving her money. When she was in a school that had the lockers,

giving her stuff that she could take to school and stick in her lockers, Nutri-Grain bars and stuff like that. I believe her dad worked at night, so no one was there to save her in the house. Did you guys ever try to like talk to Keith about it separately? Yes, we did. Every time we tried to take action, the result was Michelle paid more for it.

If we did anything or said anything or talked about it, then she wasn't allowed to be here. And that was worse for Michelle. At least she had a chance to get out of there. It was her only out. She didn't get to see Karen at all and she didn't get to see her grandmother at all until the school district finally, finally helped her. Here's Michelle. I went to a public high school for my freshman year before I escaped. When I was in high

school, I was 13, 14 at this point, she would wake me up. I would get ready for school and she would tell me to wait downstairs and be quiet. And she would have Keith take the younger kids to school. And I would hear him ask where I was and she would say, the bus already picked me up. And then after they left, she would come down and tell me to walk to school. Mind you, the school was two miles away. I was late every day because obviously the bus hadn't come and gotten me. So I was walking to school two miles every day in inappropriate clothing. I never had winter boots or a proper coat. This was Michigan. It was very cold. The teachers

and principals started to take notice that I was coming in late and that I wasn't dressed properly for the weather. So they started asking around to all my friends. Well, I had sworn them all to secrecy, but one of my friends told them everything. 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.

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