Something Was Wrong - S9 E5: Fabricated

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Kenji recruited a friend to help investigate Ardie, reporting his findings to Darcy in hopes she would see the truth. Despite her own Ardie induced trauma, Darcy dug in deeper. As Kenji’s investigation intensified, Ardie lashed out with legal action, threats, and violence. Distraught and looking for more answers about Ardie’s true identity, Kenji found more than he bargained for.Follow @SomethingWasWrongPodcast on Instagram For free mental health resources, please visit SomethingWasWrong.com/Resources See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to something was wrong early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. I'm Candace DeLong and on my new podcast Killer Psychy Daily, I share a quick 10 minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the cold-butter killers you read about in the news. Listen to the Amazon Music Exclusive Podcast Killer Psychy Daily in the Amazon Music exclusive podcast killer psyche daily in the Amazon music app. Download the app today. Something was wrong is intended for mature audiences. Episodes discuss topics that can be triggering such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence,

suicide, and murder. I am not a therapist or a doctor. If you're in need of support, please visit somethingwaswrong.com slash resources for a list of nonprofit organizations that can help. Some names have been changed for anonymity purposes. Opinions expressed by guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself or audio chuck. Resources and source material are linked in the episode notes. Thank you so much for listening. You know me, you don't know me well. Confused after receiving what appeared to be a cease and desist letter from Arty, Kenji calls Darcy. And I'm like, what the fuck is this? And she tells me, I just got the same letter from him.

And I said, what's going on? What is this all about? And she said that they had just gotten into argument, they broke up, he left, and he had sent those text messages to us, asking the cease and desist. I hadn't gone out of my way to harass the sky or contact him or anybody. He had contacted me, you know, he came to my door at the middle of the night.

He sent me videos of my ex getting his name tattooed on him. I wasn't harassing him. I didn't even know where he lived. So I couldn't go and harass him even if I wanted to, you know what I'm saying? So I was just confused. I was reading through this and I'm looking at it right now actually. And one of the things I immediately noticed about it is that the first line that says, this cease and disassist order is to inform you that your persistent actions, including but not limited to communicate with me or my family, Danielle and their daughter via any form of contact from you or any third party on your behalf.

And immediately I thought, I've never tried to contact Danielle or their daughter or threaten them in any way. So I just thought it was interesting that he specifically named them in the cease and desist. And then after reading it a few times, I noticed there's a lot of grammatical and spelling errors. It's kind of like he Googled some template online and filled it out and put his name in it, and our names in it. I get this, I'm clearly upset about it because I'm like, what the fuck's gonna happen?

You know, I'm thinking like this guy really is gonna drag us to court, gonna have to spend a bunch of money fighting this bullshit. And I don't know what to do with it. So I text Artie back. I'm like, I don't want any problems with you. I never tried to harass you or contact you. And then he basically says,

you need to sign it or else I'm taking you to court. And I said, okay, fine. I'll sign it, but where do I send it to? Because there's no return address on the letter. There's no information on where to send it. They asked them, can I have the name of your lawyer or your lawyer's address or whatever, and I'll send a copy there.

And he says, oh no, you can just send it to my personal email address. And that's when I knew like, hmm, something's not right here. Suspicious, Kenji asked Darcy why Arty wouldn't share his lawyer's information. Darcy tells Kenji that Arty is just a private person. Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy,

Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, Darcy, letters arrived, Darcy and Arty broke up for about 24 hours. During this time Darcy approached Kenji about the possibility of getting back together. She was like, oh I think I made a really big mistake with Arty. What can we do to fix this and make things better? And I was pissed. I just went off on her and I told her no, it's not going to happen.

You fucked up and you fucked up big time. And it's not on me to try and fix anything. After that conversation, she dropped it and she got back together with him immediately. Darcy, she calls me and tells me that I need to communicate with her over the phone, over voice and not over text. She can't text me anymore and I ask her why not. We have kids. I have to communicate some things with you, especially when there's things having to do with their schedule that are kind of hard to relay over voice. Darcy tells me that, well,

she can't text me because Arty has access to her phone whenever he wants and can read all her messages. She also tells me that Arty has used her phone on a couple of occasions to fabricate conversations to himself coming from her phone to use against her at some point, where he's making it look like she's done something to him. I knew that it sounded extremely alarming that he had access to her phone one that he could read her messages and two that he was using it to fabricate conversations that he could potentially use against her at some point. I asked her to see why she allows him to have access to her phone, and she basically says she has no choice.

He demands it. She has to turn her phone over to him to prove that she's not cheating on him, that she's being loyal to him. He wanted her to limit all contact with me, even though I'm the father of our children. It was obvious to me he just wanted complete control over her. And then he told her, oh, you just assaulted me and I have a dash camera and my car's dash cam caught it. So you need to apologize and do this or that or I'm going to take you to court and I have the evidence that you assaulted me, that type of behavior. But that was it. It was more like he was trying to bait her into doing something to him so that he

could file charges against her. At this point, he had never gotten physical with her that I knew of. On March 2nd, 2020, around 11 p.m., Kenji began receiving repeated phone calls from Darcy, again, who this time was frantic and clearly in distress. I didn't pick the first one up right away because any time she calls that late, it can't be something good. She kept calling and calling, so I pick up. And when I talk to Darcy, she says she needs help. She says her and Arty had just gotten into a fight and he was threatening to call the police

on her. And so I asked her, what the hell is going on. She tells me that Arty took her phone away from her and wouldn't give it back back and he was trying to go into the settings and do a factory reset to erase everything off the phone, including like all our kids pictures videos, things that were irreplaceable because she's not tech savvy, she doesn't back up her phone regularly so she would lose them permanently. And then they got in a physical fight over it because she's trying to get her phone back. He wouldn't give it back. So I guess this happened in her living room. And fortunately, the kids were upstairs at her place at sleep. According to her, they didn't hear any of this, but she's trying to

get her phone back. He won't give it back. He's about to reset everything on her phone. So she ends up shoving her coffee table into Arty's shins, which I guess messed up his shins pretty good, and got him to drop the phone. So she's able to get her phone back and then he storms out and says her coffee table into Arty's shins, which I guess messed up his shins pretty good, and got him to drop the phone. So she's able to get her phone back and then he storms out and says he's going straight to the sheriff's to file a police report. And then she's freaking out. She doesn't know what to do.

She thinks she's going to jail that night. So she called me because she was like, hey, can you come over? The kids are here. If I get arrested right now, I need you to take them. And so that's where her head was at. Worried for Darcy and his children's safety, Kenji recalls how upset he felt in that moment. I sound calm about it now, but in the moment, I remember I had a heated argument with her about this. Just like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are you letting him have access to your phone whenever he wants it? Why do you feel like you're the bad guy here?

You didn't do anything wrong. He took your phone from you and for him to try and call the police and say that you assaulted him like that's bullshit. So don't fall for it. You need to go to the police. You need to get ahead of this. You need to tell them what happened before he paints the story that you're this crazy woman who hit him with a coffee table and assaulted him and did all these things to him. I told her to call the police. She didn't. He did go to the police and file a report, which she showed me. He texted her a picture of him at the police station holding the police report. I just felt like things were going to start getting to a point where this was going to get dangerous. And I knew that he was just going to continue to get more violent,

more physical, more abusive, all of it. And the fact that my kids were there with her when this happened, and that was also extremely concerning. Each time something like this happened, I just thought, okay, this is going to be the turning point. This is where Darcy is going to snap out of it and kind of come to her senses. But she didn't. It was just like, look, it's about the kids. My main concern, my number one concern is about the kids and their safety, and I don't trust the sky. And why can't you see that?

And she would always turn around and be like, oh, you're just jealous. She tried to paint me as like some jealous, vengeful exos trying to get back at her and interfere with her relationship with Arty. When that wasn't the case, my concern was always and is still about the kids. Number one, first and foremost, I told her many times, if we never had kids and this all happened,

I would have been gone. You would have never heard from me again. But I can't, we have two kids. I can't, I'm forever tied to you. And so all the crazy shit you do, it affects me, it affects our kids, and I just wanted her to understand that. But again, she wanted to try and gaslight me and paint me as the bad guy. And it's like beating your head against the wall, like trying to argue with someone who is so convinced that they're right.

After Kenji learned that Darcy wanted to have a child with Arty, he became even more concerned with how that would tie Darcy to Arty long term. He also worried about how it would impact their two children and their safety. Kenji's motivation to figure out who Arty really was only increased. So at this point in March, here's a plot twist for you. I contact my brother in law Mark just to kind of tell him what's been going on and kind of see what he knows, what he's heard from his side from my in-laws. When he agrees like this situation is crazy, he doesn't know what his sister's thinking,

and he asks me for a picture of Arty. I send it to him and immediately picks up the phone and calls me and he's like, dude, I used to work with Arty a year ago. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, this guy, that's him. I used to work with him a year ago. I was in shock. This doesn't make sense in my mind.

And I'm asking him, okay, you gotta tell me like, what the hell do you know? And he tells me that Arty wasn't using the name Arty. He was using some other name. I said, well, what was the name he was using? He was like, I don't know. He couldn't really remember it. And I'm like, okay. He's like, yeah. And he didn't have a British accent. He's not British. I'm like, what? He says, yeah. Arty spoke fluent Spanish at his job. And I'm like, okay, this is crazy. Like, you're messing with me, right? And he says, no, I'm dead serious.

You can call my old boss and he'll tell you. I'm asking him for more details. How long did you work with him? What the hell happened? He tells me that already worked there for about a month or so before he got fired because I guess he demanded a raise or something. I'm not sure what kind of job he did.

He did something with their website. I'm not sure. And he was threatening to hold their website hostage if they didn't give him a raise. And then the boss fired him apparently. And then already threatened to come after the guy. So the boss called the police and found the police report with them. I never got the details of the police report. But yeah, my brother and LaMarx wore up and down that this was the same guy. Shocked by what he just learned from his brother-in-law, Kenji contacted Darcy right away to warn her. Kenji was surprised when Darcy seemed unfazed by this information.

And as always, Darcy's like, yes, I know, I've heard this before. Already explained the whole story to me. And I'm wondering, okay, how is he going to entangle this one? Right? She explains to me that already had gotten this job and did work with her brother. And he used a different name because he wanted to hide his true identity, right? He's a multi-millionaire, almost billionaire who was looking to start a similar business. And so he took a job there under this fake identity to try and learn the inner workings of this business

so that he could take his vast wealth and go start a similar business of his own. And me and Mark, we walk through this with Darcy and we try to tell her, well, how do you explain him speaking fluent Spanish and all this stuff? And she says, oh, that's because he went to school in Spain for a bit. So he picked up Spanish over there and just every excuse

in the book she had an explanation for. And apparently, already had claimed back in the beginning that he had a fleet of sports cars, right? So one of the cars he claimed the own was Audi R8, which is a nice two-door sports car. And already had shown a picture of the car to Darcy, but he never brought it around, right? Darcy had never seen it in person.

Well, apparently that picture he had shown Darcy was one of the customers cars at that particular business. So Mark told me, yeah, that's a customer car. That wasn't Arty's car. That was some customer who was here and Arty took a picture of it. And he was using the picture to claim that that was his car. But still, for some reason Darcy sided with Arty on this. And that's the point when Mark completely cut ties with Darcy. He was like, I don't

know what's wrong with my sister. I don't know why she thinks I would lie to her about this, but I can't have anything to do with this. This just isn't going to be healthy for me to be involved with this. So after talking to Mark, I get even more curious naturally because like what are the odds that my brother-in-law used to work with this guy year prior, and then he's given the bits of information about what name he was using. So I had to find out who is this guy. Clearly he's not a British orthopedic surgeon, and we're pretty sure that already isn't his real name at this point, so what the hell is his name? Digging for more clues, Kenji makes a post on a local community

crime watch group on Facebook, asking for help figuring out Arty's background. It's a group of people who report things that happen within the community and they're not vigilantes, but are actively involved in keeping the community safe and they have ties to law enforcement so they can get things done if they need. And the organizers, a guy who has a lot of ties to the police, he's got friends that work for LAPD and he's well respected within the community. So I figure, well, I don't know what else I can do on my own. So let me send him a message, he's named Chris, and see if he can help in some way. So I send him a message and I kind of explain the situation, and I say, hey, do you know anyone,

any detectives, any police officers, any private investigators that might be able to help me find out who this guy really is, because I'm concerned for Darcy and my kids safety with this guy. And he responds right away, and he starts to take an interest in the story just because he himself had gone through a crazy divorce a year prior so he kind of felt like he needed to help me or wanted to help me just out of the goodness of his own heart. So he reached out to some of his law enforcement connections. We got a link to somebody who we believed was

his biological father but still to this day we haven't confirmed it. And then the last piece of evidence that Chris was able to confirm for me was that his red **** it wasn't registered to him. It was registered to Danielle, his supposed ex-fiancé. I don't know about you or your listeners, but I don't know how many exes would keep a car registered in their name for you, especially if you were a multi-millionaire British surgeon. Why couldn't he pay for his car cash? Why couldn't he put it in his own name?

This is where things start to get really juicy. What if you were trafficked into a cult, over shot nine times, or fell in love with a vampire, or went into a minor surgery and woke up one week later, paralyzed? What would you do? I'm Whit Missildine, the creator of this is actually happening, a podcast from Wondry that brings you extraordinary true stories of life-changing events, told by the people who lived them.

From a young man that dooms his entire future with one choice, to a woman who survived a notorious serial killer, you'll hear their first-person account of how they overcame remarkable circumstances. Each episode is an exploration of the human spirit and personal discovery. These haunting accounts sound like Hollywood movies, but I assure you this is actually happening. Followed this is actually happening wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wundery app. This Chris guy, he basically finds out that already doesn't own any properties in Manhattan

Beach that he's likely not British and thinks suspects that he had grown up either in Texas or in the East of LA here. With this new information, Kenji debates contacting Danielle, but ultimately decided against it at the time. Darcy had told Kenji that Arty had access to her phone anytime he wanted, and he assumed the same might be true for Danielle. So he feared that if he did try to reach out to Danielle directly, it would likely be intercepted by Arty. I didn't want to put Danielle in a bad situation. I knew they had a daughter together.

In an attempt to help, Kenji's new Facebook crime watch friend, Chris, offered to contact Darcy to warn her himself. He reaches out to her and explains to her, hey, here's what I found out about Arty from my police contacts, at which point Darcy kind of realizes, well, there must be some truth to this. And she decides to break up with Arty, which sends him into a flurry. She tells him to come get his shit, he leaves, and then immediately he sends me a bunch of threatening text messages where he tries to get me to meet him at a park, so he can fight me or do something, then he also threatened to file a

restraining order against me and sent a copy to my work to get me fired from my job. A restraining order for what? I don't know. I don't think looking up someone's identity is illegal or considered harassment, but this is just what psychos like him do. It seems like Darcy's really done with him at this point, and so I'm feeling like, okay, things are finally resolving themselves. This is coming to an end.

I'm hoping that art is out of the picture. But unfortunately, a few days later, on April 4th, Darcy drops a kids off to me for a weekly custody exchange, and as she's bringing the kids inside, she comes in the door and immediately tells me, hey, I think I'm being followed. And I ask her, by who? Are you just being paranoid? And she says, I don't know, but there was a car following me when I got here and that's why I came inside. Decided to go check it out. I go to the front door, like peek out the window.

I don't see anyone there. I decided to go out into the street and maybe see if there's a car hanging out on the street, watching us, trying to figure out what's going on. As I go to open my front door, immediately, I feel someone pushed the door into me and it hits me. And this person throws a stack of papers into my entryway and then just immediately turns around and starts running. And the whole time they're doing this, they have a camera, or their phone pointed directly at me filming the whole thing.

And yeah, they start running away from my doorstep. And immediately I'm like, hey, hey, what the hell's going on? So I chase this person outside and I try and stop them, just ask them, who are you? What's your name? What are you doing on my property? And it's a girl and she refuses. She refuses to say anything. I try and grab her phone from her, the stopper. She's continuing to record me. I do manage to physically stop her on the street and I'm holding her wrist a little bit and trying to get her to stop recording and tell me who she is. She won't say a word to me.

And moments later, I hear someone say, stop, stop. Let go my friend and I look up the street. And there's Arty on the sidewalk. With a car parked in the middle of the street, he's telling me to let his friend go. I'm kind of confused. I didn't know what was going on at this point. So I let the girl go. She goes off running with Arty. Arty says a few words to me and I tell him to come, you know, say them in my face.

He doesn't, of course. He just stands there and tells me to come after him if I want to piece of him. But then he immediately turns around and just runs away with his friend. They hop in to what I believe is her car and they take off and the interesting thing was he was driving the car and that was a car I'd never seen before. I get a picture of the car as it's leaving, I get the license plate number, and I tell Darcy what just happened. And she's like, I've never seen this girl before, I've never seen that car.

So Darcy immediately calls our new friend Chris for help, because she didn't know what to do. And within a few minutes, Chris happened to be in the neighborhood, we gave him a description of the car. He says, okay, let me see if they're in the neighborhood still hanging out And he actually finds them at a nearby grocery store parking lot down the street And they're talking to a couple of sheriff's deputies in the parking lot Chris goes over and Parks a couple stalls down from already in his friends car and he's trying to listen to their conversation to see what they're telling the police officers

And immediately Chris calls me and Darcy and says, hey, sounds like they're trying to file assault charges on you or something saying that you assaulted his friend. And she's trying to say that she's got all these marks on her and all this stuff, which she didn't, I didn't hurt her or anything. I was just trying to stop her and figure out who the hell she was and what she was doing on my property. But the other thing he immediately tells both of us is that, yeah, and didn't you say this guy's British because he wasn't using a British accent at all.

And then we were both kind of floored when we heard that. My brother-in-law Mark, he had said that already hadn't used an accent when he worked with him a year prior and here we are with Chris saying basically the same thing. He was confirming that he out. Arti doesn't have an accent. basically the same thing. He was confirming that he out. Party doesn't have an accent. So that was like, okay, well, there's actual first hand confirmation of that. After Ardina's friend talked to the police in the parking lot, they leave. Chris follows them. They go across the street to another parking lot and another

strip mall, they go switch cars, him and his friend go get at a her car, getting to his car, and they just hang out and they just sit there in the parking lot talking for, I don't know, 45 minutes or an hour. And Chris is like, yeah, just from the looks of it, Arty's clearly in some type of relationship with this woman. So about an hour later, Arty finally leaves to head home and his friend gets out, gets in her car leaves also. They head their separate ways.

Chris decides to follow Arty to see where he goes. You know, he's thinking that maybe we can finally figure out where Arty lives. So Chris follows Arty for about 15 minutes and watches him as Arty gets out and walks across the street to an apartment building and it turns out it was the same apartment building that I had found that Danielle had lived at when I looked her up a few months prior. Chris continues to watch Arty, and he sees Arty walk up to the apartment building. He's got a garage door opener of some sort, opens the gate, lets himself in, and walks right into what I believed was Danielle's apartment at the time. I think for all of us at that point, that was confirmation that this is what Arty had been hiding this whole time about where he lived. He didn't want anyone to know that he was living with his ex-fiancé still.

I don't think I mentioned this earlier. I mean, he's also pretty much living with Darcy at this point. He's there all the time almost every day. So while Darcy has her doubts, I mean, she's also kind of deeply invested into this relationship at this point. And given her personality and how stubborn she is, she also doesn't want to admit that she's wrong or that she made a mistake or that maybe this guy really isn't who she thought he was. She didn't really have a lot to say to justify his behavior. During this time, she was just kind of quiet and she'd also said that she was done with him. Chris takes off and he's like, well, I'm not going to just sit here

and just wait for him to come back out. I think we know where he lives now. Later that evening, Kenji received a text message from an unknown number claiming to be Odie, the woman who threw the stack of papers at him earlier in the day. And the text message basically said, hey, I'm filing a restraining order against you and I'm going to the police for the violent assault you committed on me earlier today. But the way it was written, it sounded just like Arty. I'm guessing it was another woman he was involved with. And then apparently later that evening, you know, after receiving that text message from found out her name was Odie later on, Arty relayed a message to Darcy saying that we needed to pay him something like $15,000 orals.

Odie was going to press battery charges against me and get me fired from my job and all kinds of stuff. So this is where it was starting to fit together for me that this was kind of Arte's thing. This is how he makes a living. He goes and he threatens people and black males them and tries to extort them out of money or steal money from them. I got a phone call and a letter in the mail from the police a few months later, and the detective I spoke to said, hey, just letting you know, you're having like this,

I forget the CVC code, but it's basically a battery charged file against you. And I'm shocked, you know, this has never happened to me in my life. I've never met any charges pressed against me. Never been arrested, never been a jail. Anything like that. My record squeaky clean. I kind of tell the detective the whole situation. Here's what's happening. Here's what this guy's doing. What do I do? And he was like, well,

unfortunately, we see this kind of thing a lot. And from personal experience, he told me, you probably have nothing to worry about. More than likely, she's not going to show up to the Arraignment hearing. So, your arrangement dates in October. I wouldn't really lose sleep over this until then. And then the day before your Arraignment hearing, call the court and see if any of the charges have actually been filed. Because I guess there was another step she had to go through to actually formally file the charges against me. So, long story short, October comes around, I call the court. She hadn't filed anything the day before the hearing, so I go to the courthouse the next day and they just sign off and say, okay, she hasn't filed

anything and here's your proof of appearance stamp, go on your way. She really had no case, there was no evidence, she wasn't bleeding, I didn't hurt her, she had no bruises, no scratches, nothing like that. So it was just hearsay, and she didn't show up. It was just obviously to me now, just a way to try and extort me and Darcy out of $15,000 or whatever they wanted. So later that evening, Darcy's kind of concerned for her safety. She's getting threats from Arty because he's pretty much been exposed at this point, when she's afraid that he might retaliate. So I tell her, hey, why don't you go stay at your parents or go stay at a friend's house

just somewhere safe. Just for, I don't know, a few nights until this kind of settles down a little bit. After that confrontation, Darcy had been keeping her distance from Arty until April 9, 2020, when Darcy saw Post on Arty's Instagram, saying he'd been hit by a car and was in the hospital. The post was allegedly made to Artie's account by his friend, whom we will refer to as Alicia. I find out from a friend that someone named Alicia had posted an Artie's Instagram story, saying that Artie had been hit by a car and was in the hospital and he was in and out of consciousness and she didn't have a lot of information from the doctors, but she would follow up and reach out to everybody

and let them know if he was okay. When Darcy sees this too, she immediately gets concerned and tries to reach out to Arty to see if he's okay. I told her not to. This was clearly an attempt by him to try and grab whatever attention he could from anybody, including her. But you know, Darcy's going to do what Darcy's going to do, and sure enough, she reached out to him. And that was that. And they resumed their relationship shortly after that. And we looked, and there was no evidence of any pedestrian collision or anything like that. He had no visible injuries when Darcy saw him a few days later. But yeah, this was his way of kind of roping Darcy back into this whole situation all over

again. So later that month, you know, in April, against my better judgment and against my therapist advice, I continue digging into arti because there's still a lot of unanswered questions about who this guy is. And I still didn't know what the nature of his relationship was with Danielle this time. I had my suspicions, but no confirmation. So I was digging around on Facebook one night, and I don't know why I didn't see this before,

but I found some old pictures of arti, you know, tagged with a few different people from eight, nine, ten years ago. One of them, predominantly, was a woman named Linda. She seemed to be in a lot of these pictures. And in fact, in one of the photo captions, she referred to him as Big Brother. And clearly looking at the pictures, they looked nothing alike.

You know, I didn't think that he was actually her Big Brother, but my guess was that they were really, really close friends at that time. And looking at the pictures just based on 8, 9, 10 years ago, Arte's claiming there'd be a British surgeon. He's about 35 years old. These pictures would have put him to be about 26 years old or so. And he's not dressed like a doctor. He's obviously in California hanging out, going to bars. And I think he had told Darcy before that he had immigrated from the UK, I think five or six years ago. So these photos I found they all kind of contradicted his story.

But they also got me curious. She must have been close to already at some point. Must know quite a bit about him. Maybe she has some answers for me. So I decided to message her on Facebook and I asked her, hey, I know this is weird, and I'm sorry to bother you, but I have some questions about someone you may have been friends with in the past and concerns The safety of my family and surprisingly she responds immediately and says, oh, yeah, sure no problem Who are you looking for information on and I give our arties name and Almost exactly like nine or ten minutes later. I get a barrage of text messages from arti saying like hey

You asshole you stop contacting my friends. If you do this one more time, I'm going to call the police and file another restraining order on you for harassment. He is clearly pissed. Kenji didn't hear back from Linda anymore after that. He did, however, hear about it from Arty. So I get a bunch of threats from Ardie saying he's gonna call the police. They're gonna come over right now and talk to me.

And I calmly respond to the text messages and I say, contacting a third party isn't harassment. I didn't harass Linda. Kenji had learned much to his frustration that Darcy and Ardie had gotten back together. Again, trying to get through to her, he sent Darcy copies of the photos that he had found. And then I immediately called her, basically asked her like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are you still with this guy? No one understands it. You know he's not who he says he is. There's no way this guy is a doctor. Look at the pictures. Does this look like a doctor to you? Is 26 years old,

clearly not at Oxford or in the military or anything that he claimed to be. And Darcy had no answers for me. She just told me the butt out of it. One early May morning, Kenji got a text from their daughter's iPad saying, Hey, it's Darcy. My phone isn't working. So if you need to get a hold of me, email me. And I immediately responded and asked, What happened to your phone? Then she tells me, oh, already and I got an argument and he smashed my phone and left with it. And I said, left with it. She's like, yeah, he took it. I said, he took your broken phone. She said, yeah, he took my phone. I can't get it fixed. He knows my passcode. I don't know what he's going to do with it. He says he's not returning it. So I'm like, okay, well, we need to get your phone deactivated.

I need to go on my cloud remotely wipe it, erase everything so he can't get any of her personal information off of it. And then she also tells me that a couple of weeks prior to this, during another argument, already had taken her Apple Watch and smashed it on the ground. And I'm just like, what are you doing? And now already starting to get more increasingly violent. Now he's destroying her devices. Now he's been controlling who she can hang out with. He's had access to her phone, reads all her text messages, reads all her emails.

So I'm just trying to get through to Darcy and try and figure out, why are you back with this guy? What good is he doing for you? And she doesn't have an answer, really. The next day, Kenji took Darcy to get a replacement phone. We reported her old phone stolen because I was concerned that Arty was going to use her old phone to Simiswapper, which is a technique to circumvent two-factor authentication so that he could get into her social media accounts, bank accounts, anything sensitive

like that. So it was really concerned that if you got one of her bank accounts or one of our joint bank accounts that he would basically disappear with all the money, we got that taken care of. And once again Darcy says, oh I'm done with him, I'm tired of this, but he somehow sucks her back in. Darcy was also telling me stories about how I already had bragged about cheating on her with other women. I'd sent her explicit photos of himself with other women, and also she mentions during another conversation around that time, that already is actively working to get me fired from my job,

and he's gonna do it unless we give him $10,000. And then Darcy admits to me that she's been paying already small amounts of money here and there to kind of keep him quiet and keep him from going through with it. And I'm just like, why are you giving him any money at all? That's exactly what he wants. But she felt some need to try and protect me. I told her multiple times I can take care of myself. I don't think there's anything already can do to get me fired from my job because I hadn't

done anything wrong. This is just what already does. This is how he makes his money. So at this point, things are getting kind of serious. Arty's getting more violent. He's getting more threatening. So I decided to hire a private investigator to see what they could find out about Arty and his identity.

So I found a reputable one online, contacted them. And a few days later, they sent me a report of what they had found. They found out that Arty's name was pretty much fake. I mean there was no record of it before 2009, 2010. The identity just kind of appears out of nowhere. They found out that he had no assets, no leans, no judgments, you know, pretty much nothing tied to his name. No money, nothing. He was also using the social security number of someone who we believe is a cousin or a distant relative of his, and in addition also using a variation of that social security number with the last couple of digits flipped. And the PI told me that

this is a common tactic that scammers use. They'll go in and fill out a credit application or some form, you know, housing application, and they'll mistakenly quote unquote, write down the wrong social security number and later come back and say, oh, I always get the last couple digits mixed up or something like that. Also, he found out that already had three other

domestic violence restraining orders that had been filed against him in the past. In addition to the one that we had found against his ex-girlfriend, Tami, unfortunately, that was the extent of what we found in the report. But the PI told me, yeah, I've seen a lot of people like this. This is how con artist operate. And so we pretty much knew, you know, based on what Chris had helped us find. And then this private investigator, that Ardys identity was completely fabricated. After getting the report back from his PI, Kenji felt justified in his suspicions about

Arty, but he decided not to take it to Darcy because he thought she would show the evidence to Arty, and he would just come up with more excuses However, he did share what he found with someone else He shared what I found out with her parents and some of her friends and her mutual friends and lean on them and hope Maybe they could use that information and help talk some sense into her But no one could really get through to her still. For this period of time through her relationship with Arty, she was also staying at home, and he wasn't really working, or he claimed to work here and there, but to me it was obvious

he didn't have a real job, so these past few months were kind of like a vacation for the both of them. They had to hang out and spend all their free time together, neither of them had any real responsibilities to take care of. So finally at this point, in the early June, Darcy finds a job because she knows reality's coming, she knows we're getting divorced, and she needs an income so she goes back to work. After 8 years as a stay at home mom. Her parents also thought that her getting this job would probably help her distance herself from Arty. It would get her outside of being trapped in this bubble

with already. She would get to interact with other people and start making some money on her own and seeing how difficult life is as a single mom when you have to support yourself. Late in the evening of June 9th, 2020, Kenji's phone started blowing up with calls from Darcy once again. Kenji was half asleep when he decided to finally answer and see what was up. And Darcy's kind of frantic on the phone. She tells me that her and already had just gotten into a fight and he had thrown one of

her cats. He had punched her in the face, kicked her in the stomach and then stormed out of her house. And then on his way out, he had stolen both of her garage door openers. And then when he got into his car, he kind of slammed his car door into her, leaving a big dent, and then took off. I'm alarmed immediately because my kids were with her when this happened.

Thankfully, they were asleep upstairs, but still, they were at her house when this happened. So Darcy's frantic on the phone. She's asking me, what do I do? What do I do? I say, call the police. You know, what are you calling me? You need to call the police. And she says, okay, can you come over? Watch the kids while I talk to the police. In case they wake up, I don't want them to see the police here and freak out. So I drive over there, check on the kids, they're

passed out. Luckily, I don't think they saw anything. The police show up shortly after, and then I don't know. We spend the next hour or so taking a report because she's giving them all kinds of details about all these prider incidents. She's told me about, and then also everything that's happened tonight. They're taking photographs of the damage to her car. He had split her lip open when he punched her and she had like marks on her hands and arms. And she's talking to the police. She's asking them, what do I do?

How do I stop this guy? Because she's going through and telling them the whole story too. And they tell her you got to get a restraining order. That's the only way to stop them. So they grant her an emergency protection order that night. And they say, okay, this emergency order is good for five days, but you need to get to the courthouse ASAP

and file for a domestic violence restraining order. And then they also tell her, unfortunately, we have to file a case with DCFS because this incident occurred while your children were present. So the police opened a case with DCFS, which is the Department of Child and Family Services. And during all this, Darcy's visibly upset, I try and sit down and have like another conversation with her, where I try and figure out what's going on here. Why are you continuing to keep this guy around? He's getting more and more violent. What's he gonna do next? Next time is you gonna stab you,

shoot you? Is he gonna hurt the kids? She agrees that she needs to get rid of him, she's done with him, but she says this whole time she's been under his spell under his control When she tells me you wouldn't understand you're not in a relationship like this You know, you don't know what it's like to be controlled by another person Around 2 a.m. The police left and Kenji finally felt a little bit of relief. I go to bed finally thinking Okay, this is all over. She's gonna file a restraining order and this is gonna be done So two days later Darcy gets to the courthouse, files a restraining order, she has multiple pages of evidence and just details about all these different things that Arty has done to her that I didn't even know about. In her restraining order, so what she described happened that night,

she said that her and Arty had gotten into an argument about ending their relationship, happened that night. She said that her and already had gotten into an argument about ending their relationship. Already was demanding that Darcy answer some questions. She doesn't specify what. And she says when she refused, he intentionally opened his car door, forcefully to cause damage to her car. And she has the pictures of that attached. She walked away from him and he followed her back into her home. He grabbed her cat by the scruff and she screamed. She told him to let the cat go and He grabbed her cat by the scruff and she screamed. She told him to let the cat go and he threw the cat across the kitchen.

And then he went to leave after she told him to get out. He slapped her in the face and cut her lip. He attempted two other times to punch her in the face, but she dodged those. She tried to close the sliding glass door to keep him out and he was trying to force it open. Eventually he got it open and then with full force, kicked her in the stomach. She stumbled back and told him he better leave.

He went back to his car, slammed the car door again into her car, called her a bunch of names, then drove off. She asked him repeatedly to return her garage door openers that he had in this possession and he refused. During the course of their argument, Arty took Darcy's garage opener and also hacked into her garage door keypad and reprogrammed the password. Darcy said that he also grabbed a container of motor oil, held it inside her car, and threatened to pour the oil all over her seats if she didn't answer his questions. Darcy also told Kenji that

Arty had taunted her with text messages and pictures of other women that he had bragged that he had cheated on her with. Then she goes on to document an argument that happened the night before June 8. During that argument he spit in her face, he sprayed deep spray, bug repellent all over her car in an effort to damage the paint. At one point, he went inside and grabbed my phone, he unlocked it and began deleting text messages, photos, etc. He refused to give it back every time I asked.

He also logged into my Facebook account and drafted a post exposing personal and embarrassing medical info to all my friends and family and threatened to post it. He also grabbed my cat and threatened to kidnap him. Also he threw my phone on the ground. So that was June 8th. When June 6th, she says, during an argument, he and I had while I was taking a shower, he unlocked my phone, he didn't have the password, and he factory reset my phone, causing me to lose all my information. He also hacked into my iPad and laptop and reprogrammed the password so I couldn't use them. And then another instant, June 5th. This is all happening days apart.

We got nearly heated argument while discussing things, he attacked me and pushed me forcefully, causing me to fall into the floor, and my side was sore for two days. He repeatedly called me a cunt, a whore, a bitch, and berated me verbally. He would then say I needed to do things like cut off contact with my friends, but I'm going through my electronic devices at any time he wanted, to lead contacts and pictures of people he didn't think were good for me. He told me I had to record all pickups drop-offs to my ex's house to verify I wasn't talking about anything that wasn't related to my kids. He made me provide my location on my phone at all times so he could verify where I was.

He prohibited me from going to my gym or talking about our relationship with my friends. In May 2020, he hacked into my Instagram from another location while I was at home and posted extremely embarrassing things in order to emulate me. He also showed me a screenshot of my friend's list and said he would contact every person on the list and tell them personal embarrassing things about me so he could let everyone know what a dumb bitch I was. He told me if I couldn't protect my ex from talking badly about him, he would have him fired and ruin my life. He threatened to contact my parents and grandma and ruin their lives and stress them out so much they would die. He contacted my best friend after an argument and threatened to have CPS take her kids away because he claimed I had provided him with info that implied she was an unfit mom.

April 4th, 2020. He chased me down after seeing me on the street with his car. He repeatedly tried to run me off the road, including driving on the other side of the road, cutting me off and chasing me. We ended up in the parking lot of a 7-11. He got out and stood in front of my car so I couldn't leave. Earlier in the day he threatened to shoot me. I feared for my life and I called 911. Other incidents in April of 2020. He threatened me multiple times saying our conversations had all been recorded by his dash cam and phone. He threatened to serve me with a restraining order if I didn't atone for the mistakes I had made. He also said he could do whatever it takes to make sure I would lose custody of all my children, including planning a

kilo of drugs in my car to have me arrested. He said he could do whatever he wanted and get away with it because all the judges were friends of his and also because money gets you anything, insinuating he would pay off anyone it takes. February of 2020. During an intimate encounter he filmed without my consent and refused to delete it. He claimed to be a physician but has no license. He went so far as to provide medical advice to my neighbor. The constant threats and lies are extensive and he has even gone as far as producing fraudulent websites and documents in order to sustain this false persona. And that's the end of the restraining order. This is written with her own handwriting. These are her words coming out of her mouth so everything I've told you so far. This is the truth. I'm not embellishing this or making

this up. There's no other side of the story. our side of the story and my side of the story are the same. Fast forward to June 18th, 2020. Can you receive an alarming email while it work? Arty had followed through with his threat. I received an email from our legal team at work saying that they received a complaint about me from someone named Arty and they'd like to set aside some time to discuss it with me. Sure enough, this was Arty's attempt to try and get me fired. So the very next day I met with our compliance director and the head of our legal team, who basically told me that Arty had filed a complaint stating that I'd used our company's database

to look up personal information about him and his friends. The funny thing is, you know, our company, we don't really store a whole lot of personal information, email address, phone number, maybe an address, but nothing real sensitive, nothing that I didn't already know about him. In addition to that, Steve also told me that already had sent him a bunch of text messages. I think they were text messages that he had fabricated between Darcy and himself and Darcy and myself to make me look like some person who was going to come after her and hurt him and hurt her and all this stuff to try and paint me that way so that he could get me fired. So quickly, I tell Steve, hey, I don't want to get into too much detail, but here's a rundown

of who this guy is and what he's been doing to our whole family for the past six plus months. Fortunately, a couple weeks later, I get an email from Steve saying that they basically couldn't find any evidence that I had ever searched for Arty's information in the company database, and I was basically cleared of any wrongdoing in the investigation. But still, I was very upset that Arty had even tried to contact my work to get me fired. And it wasn't embarrassing, but it was kind of like, okay, what can I really do? I've been through so much at this point. We're also in peak COVID, so the world is just kind of crazy everywhere.

Three days later, on June 22nd, 2020, Kenji received another set of texts from Arty. He tells me that Darcy's been lying to me and she's still been in a relationship with him. Then he says he's gonna have Darcy arrested in front of our kids because she's a violation of his restraining order. Again, I immediately call Darcy once I receive the text messages and ask for the thousandth time like,

what the fuck are you doing? And then she basically says that she doesn't care if everything about him is fake. She doesn't care what we found out about him so far. She says she's in love with Arty and wants to have this child with him. And in my mind, I don't know what to do with that. I'm just kind of floored. This is the first time she's coming clean in six plus months and being honest about why she's keeping Arty around. I'm just furious. I'm already stressed enough from having to deal with this whole situation at work from a few days prior. We just had this big incident a couple weeks ago, a week or two ago where he had

beat her up and left and she filed this detailed restraining order that just recounted so many incidents of abuse from already. And she's still bringing him around her kids, it just doesn't compute in my mind. My mind almost completely shuts down, I'm just like, I have no idea what to do. I'm literally speechless at this point. He's going to be around my kids for the next 18 years potentially, so I really need to know who this guy is. The private investigator wasn't able to dig up too much other than the proof he was fake, but we still didn't know his real name. We still didn't know where he was from. So with that in mind, with all those concerns, I finally decide, well, the reason why he's been so protective of Daniel and their daughter

is that Daniel must be one of his victims also. When I highly doubted she was in on it with him, I highly doubted she was actively helping him do this. I really was convinced at this point that he must be doing the same things to Danielle that he was doing to Darcy, controlling her phone, controlling who she talked to, and what friends she was around, all sorts of stuff. So at this point, I'm like, screw it.

I'm gonna contact Danielle. That's next time on Something was Wrong. Something was wrong is an audio chuck original. Thank you so much to our team. Executive producer Ashley Flowers. Coordinating producer Mike McDonald. Mixing and mastering by Kyle O'Connor, created, reported, and hosted by me Tiffany Reese. Our theme song was originally composed by Think you know me, you don't know me boy It up, it up, it up, it up It up, it up

So what do you think Chuck, do you approve? BOOM! Hey Prime members, you can listen to something was wrong early and ad-free on Amazon music. Download the app today or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. you