Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 434 - Shelby Hewitt: The 32-Year-Old 7th Grader

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Have you heard about the recent case of Shelby Hewitt? The 32 year-old Massachusetts Social Worker enrolled in two different Boston area public high schools as a sixteen year-old sophomore, and then later enrolled in another Boston area school as a 7th grader, spending nearly a year as a fake teen student before her real identity was uncovered. How??? And more importantly... why??? Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch.

Have you heard of Shelby Hewitt? Maybe you went to high school with her and you remember playing with her on the basketball team or she was your lab partner in some science class. And then maybe over a decade later, maybe your niece or nephew also went to high school with her and had her for a lab partner in science class and also played with her on the high school basketball team. While in her thirties, Shelby Hewitt conned three different schools in the Boston public school system into believing she was either a 16-year-old abused and sex trafficked foster

kid in need of some tender love and care, or even crazier, that she was a 13-year-old abused and sex trafficked foster kid in need of some tender love and care. And there are zero allegations that she did this for any romantic reasons. She didn't sneak into these schools to do anything pervy it seems. She seemingly wasn't trying to groom or hook up with any kids half her age. She just wanted to be their peer? Their friend? To be the teacher's pet again? She pretended to be a kid again even though she had a good job and a million dollar inheritance.

Just so she could well no one actually really knows why the hell she assumed the fake identity of a teen and went back to school she just did. Using resources from her job as a social worker to construct her adolescent identities she has a master's degree in school counseling, Hewitt enrolled herself into three different schools in Massachusetts and in one of those schools she enrolled as a seventh grader. While impersonating a 16 year old girl at a different school, this very grown woman successfully joined the junior varsity basketball team. Kind of embarrassing, she couldn't still make varsity. She went on some school field trips. She made friends with her fellow students, all while

also somehow working full-time for the Massachusetts State Department of Children and Families. all while also somehow working full-time for the Massachusetts State Department of Children and Families. Today we are taking a deep dive into the super weird recent tale of Shelby Hewitt. We'll meet the people she fooled and break down exactly how she fooled them, go over her arrest and charges she faced, faces, check out a couple cases similar to Shelby's, and explore the psychology behind it all. Why would anyone want to go back to junior high or high school over a decade after graduating? Wouldn't returning to junior high or high school be an absolute nightmare for most people? Where most of us counting the days until we could just

get the fuck out of junior high or high school? It's gonna be a wild ride on this week's seriously what the hell goes on in some people's heads? Why make life so much harder than it needs to be? There truly is no rational explanation for the bizarre choices that some people make, true crime, but really more like strange crime edition of Time Suck. This is Michael McDonald

and you're listening to Time Suck. Ah! You're listening to Time Suck. We're the week. We're the week. We're the week. We're the week. We're the week. Mario! I love that one. And you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, hail Lusifena, praise be to good boy Bojangles and glory be to Triple M. Merry

Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and just an overall Happy Holidays. And now let's get weird for this holiday episode that has nothing to do with the holidays. I didn't feel like a murder or a cult episode this week or anything heavy, so I went with strange. And this story is so so strange. When an adult successfully pretends to be a child I think the biggest question on almost everyone's mind besides maybe how the fuck did they fool anyone is why did they do that? I mean even if you could download your brain into a hard drive and then have your brain

You know your very essence downloaded into the body of a child Why would you want to do that? Why would you ever want to hang around with a bunch of teenagers as one of their peers past the age of around 20? And especially when you're in your 30s or older. And it's not like there's anything wrong with teenagers. That's not what I'm saying. There's a lot of cool teens out there. I have two right now.

But once you've made it through those years and all of their hormonal drama, why would you ever want to resubject yourself to all that shit? When I think of high school drama is the main word that comes to mind. Almost everything was so highly emotionally charged, so dramatic. A breakup was devastating. How can you even show your face in class now? You have to

change schools. Everyone's gonna know that Michelle Dumkin is dating Lincoln again. You're gonna look like such an idiot. How are you gonna keep living after getting that D in chemistry? There's no way you'll get into that college that you have to get into or your life is over. The college that your two best friends are going to, you must go there. If you don't go to the same school as them, I mean, how would you ever possibly recover? There's just so much fear, so much anxiety, you know, fear of not fitting in in high school, so much energy spent figuring out like who you are, how you're supposed to dress,

what kind of music are you supposed to listen to? will the other kids think you're cool if you listen to it or they make fun of you, will girls think that your new haircut is cute or stupid, will boys think that your body looks good in this new dress, but will other girls think you're dressing like a slut, will they shame you for it, will other boys think you're a coward for not standing up to Mike when he told you to shut the fuck up or he'd beat your ass in gym class. What do the other kids think about me? Ah! There was so, so much worry about that kind of stuff for me and the other kids I grew

up with back in high school. You know, being part of the in crowd, it's a wild time transitioning from being a kid to being an adult. Very chaotic time. No piece of me would ever want to go through it again. And in my experience, most people feel relatively the same. I've had daydreams, sure, of how I would do things differently, you know, in some magical world. You know, I wish I hadn't been so insecure, so self-conscious. I wish I didn't worry so

much. Turned out I don't think the other kids were thinking about me. They were thinking about themselves just like I was. I wish I would have tried harder to enjoy those years just for what they were instead of just waiting for them to be over. I was super dumb when it came to girls and way too worried about dating. I wish I could have fucking relaxed, just chilled out and had more fun, but I still don't want to go back because I feel like all my mistakes, my insecurities, they helped make me into what I am today. And I'm pretty happy with where I am now, you know, scars and all. But what if I didn't like my life? What if I didn't like myself?

You know where I was? What if what I then truly want to go back and just do it all over if I could? Maybe somehow fix my perceived mistakes and give myself better memories of those years. Maybe that's what Shelby Hewitt in some extremely deluded sense thought she could actually do. But she couldn't. None of us can. When each phase of your life is over, it is over. Right? Hard stop. That's just how time and biology work. You don't get to move backwards. You know, the best thing you can do is just be okay with each phase. And if it wasn't what you wanted it to be, well, tough shit. It's over now.

Move on. Fuck it. Try and get more out of the next phase. And just try to remember that no phase of life is ever going to be perfect for anyone. We all have our struggles at each and every phase of life so don't romanticize some phase and turn it in your mind into something that's actually not. Focus on reality. On the here and now. Look ahead. Sure it's good to plan at least a little. But Don't look back in the way of wanting to actually go back, because you can't. You just can't. Not in a real way at least. But Shelby sure seemed to try. In the case of Shelby Hewitt, the answer to the question of why did she do it, if an answer even exists, is pretty much up for debate. Shelby herself has given a few different

contradictory answers, including but not limited to, she was just doing what a psychic told her to do. She did it because she never had a family of her own, and that she'd actually blacked out for an extended period of time like over a year, and she didn't actually have any idea that she was going back to school due to mental illness. Her lawyer has asserted that Shelby has Dissociative Identity Disorder, and that her alter, whom she just can't control, is actually the one who went back to school. Many of the people who Shelby deceived have a very different theory. They believe that she did what she did because she's a cold-hearted psychopath.

Others still have suggested that Shelby is a pathological liar. Almost a year after her initial arrest, countless theories about the reasoning behind Shelby's bizarre or elaborate scheme continue to proliferate online, and until the truth is finally revealed at her upcoming criminal trial, which has been repeatedly delayed for the past six months, people will continue searching for the answer to the big question of, why? Today, let's join the search, see what we can figure out. The structure of today's episode is going to be a little different than normal. Due to the convoluted, twisted nature of Shelby's story

and all the stories within stories within stories that she spun, we will not be embarking on a time-sick timeline. Instead, I'm gonna outline in the most cohesive way I can how Shelby was able to successfully pose as an abused teenage foster kid at three different high schools around Boston for over a year. Then I'm gonna check out with the experts in psychiatry have to say about the phenomena of child imposters and

investigate how disassociative identity disorder which Shelby has alleged again she suffers from actually works. Here we go. Shelby Ariana Hewitt was born on March 19th 1991. That we know. Thank you, birth records. She was raised by her parents, Larene and Malcolm Hewitt in Sharon, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb about 20 miles outside of Boston, named after the Sharon Plain of Israel.

Pretty funny name for a town, just because of the associations with Sharon now, just being a regular name, a person's name. Saying you're from Sharon, Massachusetts, feels like's name saying you're from Sharon, Massachusetts feel like you're saying you're uh feels like it's like you're saying you're from Bob, Iowa or from I'm from Michelle, Colorado I'm from LaToya, Idaho uh tucked in away uh one of the more remote corners of town or tucked away excuse me one of the more remote corners of town I don't know why that sentence is hard for me you know uh was the family's modest ranch home which they bought the year Shelby was

born for $185,000. Although they lived in one of the richer neighborhoods surrounding Boston, the Hewits were not particularly financially stable. Shelby's mom, Laureen, worked as a secretary at an investment company and occasionally volunteered to help run a local news channel's charity fundraisers. So good on her. Nice thing to do. Shelby's dad Malcolm was the primary breadwinner in the family, working as a part-time photographer in Boston and as a part-time fast food server at various joints around town. Hustling and grinding, doing what he had to do for the fam and I respect that. Following Shelby's arrest in 2023, her father told the

Boston Globe that he blamed himself for the crimes that she committed because he said he failed to provide more for her growing up and you know what fuck that dad Do not blame yourself for what's going on with Shelby most Americans struggling struggle financially Like the majority and yet almost no American try to reenter high school by impersonating the teenager in their 30s No less because mommy and daddy were not able to buy them whatever they wanted while they were growing up. The fact that her family was not well off as others in town was not lost on Shelby, not lost on her peers either. When the Hewitt struggled to pay their mortgage which happened a multitude of times throughout Shelby's childhood, notices that the potential

foreclosure of their house would appear in a local newspaper. Apparently this was a big source of shame for Shelby. It ruined her life! Oh my god! Some kid said she was poor! Oh, when she was in high school! So she had to go back and redo her teen years! Malcolm Hewitt also filed for bankruptcy relief several times, though that piece of info was never made public. Despite her sensitivity about her family's financial status, Shelby had a pretty normal adolescent experience. She was described by many former classmates and and former teachers as a happy, a smiley girl who

loved to joke around. According to one friend, she was very quirky, a goofy kind of person. The crowd we hung out with was a very outgoing bunch, but we weren't necessarily popular. I think a lot of us would have self-identified as weird, but in a loving, endearing way. I bet most people could say that about themselves from high school. During her freshman, sophomore year of high school, Shelby excelled academically, ran on the track team,

maintained a healthy social life. However, her junior year is when things started to go downhill, Shelby's grades began to slip and her behavior in class became problematic. And rather than deal with that in a healthy way she stopped going to school she changed her name and she went full Billy Madison impersonating a first grader as a 16 year old. I want you all to meet our new friend Billy. Can everyone say hello to Billy? Hello Billy. No she didn't go back to grade school.

But if she could have pulled it off, I imagine she probably would have done that. She did struggle her last two years of high school though, the first time around. One former counselor said that Shelby would occasionally become so emotional in class that adults would need to be called in to intervene. So something serious is going on there. Because of that, Shelby ended up being enrolled in a school program for students with mental health problems her junior and senior year. Exactly what mental health problems she was dealing with though never specified. Despite the struggles she faced her junior and senior years, Shelby still graduated with a solid GPA and she

got accepted to and went on to attend Boston's Wheelock College. Go Wildcats! Seems like Wheelock was. Go Wildcats! Seems like Wheelock was a decent school before it was absorbed by Boston University in 2018. It was a very small college with a student body of only around 800. Random trivia, the original Wicked Witch of the West. In the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, I'm guessing you've heard of it,

actress Margaret Hamilton got a degree teaching there. I got a degree in teaching there. Shelby Hewitt earned her bachelor's degree in human development and counseling psychology at the school in 2013 and then went on to get her master's degree in school counseling from the University of Massachusetts Boston, graduating three years later in 2016. And according to her friends during this period of her life, Shelby, while excelling at school, also became aggressively determined to form bonds with any pretty strong older women in her life, but not in a romantic or sexual sense. In a maternal one. Which is pretty fucking weird. She's obsessed with conventionally attractive females who have authority roles like therapists,

said Katie, Shelby's friend since childhood. But not sexually. She didn't want a hot, sexy mama. She wanted a hot, sexy mother. During her years at Wheelock, Shelby became infatuated with one of the campus housing administrators and began relentlessly pursuing not a sexual or normal, you know, relationship, like friendship, but more of like a mother-daughter type relationship with this woman that this woman did not want. She tried anything and everything she could to attract the older woman's attention, including telling her that she had been sexually assaulted as a child, which was not true. She admitted to telling that lie to a few of her college friends, justifying it by saying, I need her to love me.

What the fuck is going on there? The administrator eventually grew alarmed by Shelby's obsessive behavior and began to blatantly distance herself from the undergrad who was, you know, creeping her the hell out. A similar thing happened a few years later when Shelby's therapist refused to continue therapy with her because Shelby made her start to feel that uncomfortable. She chased her own therapist off. That's something that happens all that often. Clearly long before she began cosplaying as a teenager while in her 30s, I mean she was dealing with some shit. When her therapist broke it off with her, Shelby told her friends Andrea and Katie that she had an emotional breakdown so intense she had to be sent to the ER of a

hospital. Then when Shelby completed her master's degree in 2016, this clearly mentally unwell person was immediately hired as a social worker for the Massachusetts State Department of Children and Families. So that's awesome. That's great. I don't know what's going on with the screening process there, but they gotta switch some shit up.

It was an entry-level position, or you know, I shouldn't say that. I say they should switch some shit up, but you know what? Weirdos slip through the fucking cracks sometimes. There's almost nothing you can do about it. Some of these people are just so good at hiding who they really are. This was an entry-level position with a salary of about 50,000 per year,

according to her union contract. As a social worker for the state, she was required to take on up to 15 cases at a time. Shelby worked at DCF for two years. Seems like, you know, not remarkably, but also he didn't get fired. You know, she was fine. She was decent in her job for two years before she quit in 2018 for reasons unknown. But it should be noted that both her mother and her maternal grandfather died in 2018, the same year she left her job with

the state. So maybe she was too overcome with grief to work or maybe she quit because she suddenly didn't need the money anymore. When her mom and grandpa died she was left with an inheritance of approximately a million dollars. She then returned to work for DCF three years later on December 5th, 2021. Little is known about what happened during her three years away from DCF except for the fact that in 2019, and this is important, Shelby went to this Walden Behavioral Care. She spent some time at this Walden Behavioral Care Center, a residential eating disorder recovery center in Dedham, Massachusetts. And she didn't spend time working there, she spent time there as a patient. And then two years

later she'll return to Walden, only this time instead of as Shelby Hewitt, she will be admitted under the name of Daniella Blake Herrera and instead of as Shelby Hewitt, she will be admitted under the name of Daniella Blake Herrera and instead of being 28 years old, she'll claim to be 16. When Shelby first received treatment at Walden in 2019 under her own name and her real age, her family was vaguely aware of it. They knew she was getting some professional mental health support but were generally under the impression that she was doing well. One relative said, we thought everything was on the right track. On December 6, 2021 thought everything was on the right track. On December 6, 2021, less than 24 hours after returning to work at DCF, Shelby headed over to GoDaddy.com, a website development and domain registrar company, most used by small businesses

and entrepreneurs, our own website, BadMagicProductions.com, associated emails are hosted through GoDaddy. Shelby created an account using a real name and the address of her father's apartment in the nearby town of Canton and then she purchased the email domain name of at mass state dot us. The reason she chose this name was because it resembled slash could be easily confused with the real domain name used by the official Massachusetts state government workers which was back then at state.ma.us. A few hours later using her newly purchased domain name, Shelby created an email account for a fake Massachusetts Department of

Children and Families social worker named Michael Kornetzky. A few months later, she'll create a second email account for another fake social worker named Michelle Delphi. Fake Michael and fake Michelle will be the keys to Shelby's elaborate con. So she put some real planning into this. Wasn't impulsive. She went she planned this for months. She actually thought about this for a long long time. The emails sent from their seemingly official DCF accounts were what made her story so believable. The message provided written evidence that the 31 and 32 year old woman was sitting in

a high school classroom, who was sitting in a classroom, was really an abused teenage foster kid. As prosecutor Ashley Paulin later explained during one of Shelby's court hearings, posing behind the keyboard as one of these DCF workers, the defendant had herself admitted as a child patient at the Walden Behavioral Treatment Center and enrolled herself in the Boston Public Schools. In early 2022, 31-year-old Shelby returned to Walden Behavioral Care,

this time as teenager Daniela Blake Herrera, sometimes called Ellie. During her second stay at the facility, Shelby, now Daniela, told staff that she hadn't purposely lied about her age back in 2019 when she was admitted as a 28-year-old. She was just so traumatized she actually hadn't known how old she was herself uh-huh despite the age discrepancy Shelby basically told the same life story in 2019 and in 2022

to the Walden staffers both times she claimed to be homeless illiterate and the victim of child excuse me and the victim of sex trafficking like I said would be child sex trafficking None of which is true She also told the staff that the name Shelby Hewitt belonged to her sister and that she used it back in 2019 in order to hide from her sex traffickers huh to reinforce her lie Daniela once showed Walden staff a news article about a man who Had her last name Herrera who had recently been arrested for running a prostitution ring in

Framingham Massachusetts but that is a it's pretty common last name. This man she said was her father and Walden Shelby slash Daniela proved to be an extremely difficult high-maintenance high-risk patient. She was prone to break out in violent emotional fits where she would do things like rock back and forth with her head between her knees, bang her skull against the wall, shit and piss herself, and scream so loud it echoed throughout the entire building.

After a fit, she would sometimes enter an apparently catatonic state where she seemed to be paralyzed and unable to see or hear anything around her. And there's a very, very, very good chance, as in it's almost certain that this was all an act. She put in so much work into acting so crazy and for what? Attention? Pity? Occasionally if Daniela experienced a flashback to supposedly being sexually

trafficked as a toddler, she would strip completely naked and seemingly dumbstruck terror then run around naked from those who tried to help her and attack them when they got a hold of her. This is so extreme. What a very strange kind of attention to want to have. When she wasn't having a breakdown or pretending to have a breakdown she was known to be shy, kind, affectionate and childish and would speak in a meek high-pitched voice, which is also an act because she did not use that voice outside of the facility. Shelby Daniella garnered the sympathy and concern of everyone at Walden. One of the other teenage, well, I almost said one of the other, one of the actual teenage patients at the facility who was very close to Daniella said that all in our group at Walden worried about her even as we had our own issues

But hers were more extreme god these other kids these fucking not other these kids these actual kids Uh who are there for real reasons? Are being out outshined overshadowed by this fucking phony how sad? Are that same former patient also said that in that in addition to everyone feeling protective of her, everyone at Walden also felt infatuated with Daniella's compassionate personality. She said, meeting her, it was like I realized I was missing a part of myself that I didn't even know I was missing. And she completed me. She is very good at preying on people with very big hearts. When news that Daniella was a fraud finally broke a little over a year later, it devastated more than a few of the patients who had known her back at Walden.

One former patient named Hannah said that the betrayal was gut-wrenching. Through tears, she told the Boston Globe, I shared things with her I've never shared with anybody in my life, and she's not a real person. There was one person in particular at Walden who grew especially attached to Daniela, and that was her therapist and a high-ranking official at Walden, Rebecca Burnett. Burnett was actually Shelby's therapist during both of her stays at Walden. So she knew her first as Shelby Hewitt, the adult woman, and then as Daniella Herrera,

the teenage foster kid. Oh my God. So she got it. She got the attention she craved from an older, attractive woman in an authority, in a role of authority here. According to Bernat, she truly believed that Daniela was a traumatized child. All she cared about was making sure that this child was safe. Bernat communicated regularly with Daniela's fake ass DCF social workers, Michelle Delphy

and Michael Kornetzky, who again were just Shelby in disguise, digital disguise, as well as with Andrea, a wealthy former prostitute who claimed to be Daniela's benefactor, which is just another one of the many fictitious characters that Shelby portrayed in order to make her deceit work as seamlessly as possible. So this fake Andrea often texted Bernat to arrange the logistics of Daniela's treatment, and one message she wrote, Hi Becky, we'll work on the following week for the neuropsych appointment,

but is there any way I can send her in a cab on Monday? Shelby also created a Venmo account for Andrea, who used it to pay Walden for all the extra services they provided for Daniela. Jesus, so most of the time, she's playing the part of a horrifically abused 16 year old, but then whenever she is needed, she takes on the persona of Andrea the benefactor, or of Michelle Delphi the social worker,

or of Michael Kornetsky the other social worker, and she's still talking to some of her friends and family as Shelby Hewitt. So she's rotating through five different personas, at least to pull off what? Being a fake teenage patient getting treated for mental illness and having outbursts where you end up fucking butt naked running around attacking people. Doing this doesn't get her any money, doesn't get her any fame. It just gets her sympathy and maybe makes her feel proud of I don't know how good of a job she's doing of just fooling a bunch of people. The longer Daniela stays at Walden, the more attached she becomes to Bernat.

It appears that Bernat is actually the one, the only Walden staff member that Daniela really truly trusted. Becky was always right there with her, said one former Walden patient. She was like the crisis manager for Daniela. Bernat became deeply invested in Daniela's well-being and was willing to do anything to ensure nothing stood in the way of her patient's treatment. When other Walden staff members raised concerns about Daniela's insurance being under the name of Shelby Hewitt, the girl's alleged half-sister, Bernat told them, don't worry about it, it's totally fine. One of the therapists suggested Daniella should be placed in a more intensive, yeah, intensive

psychiatric facility than one just focused on treating eating disorders. Bernat dismissed their concerns and when Daniella's DCF social workers began requesting Bernat allow the girl to live in her home, she agreed. That was a terrible move. That was a bad line to cross. You're not supposed to do that in the mental health field. You got to stay detached. Keep it clinical. According to a later statement, Bernat says she was initially against the arrangement, as was her partner John Smith. Yeah, I bet he was. Let me get this straight. One of your mental health patients is coming to live with us. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a terrible idea. But Daniela's social

workers, which again were her, were very persistent and persuasive and eventually they convinced this therapist otherwise. For months the fictional or the fictional DCF social workers Michelle Delphi and Michael Kornetsky told Bernat that Daniela's crisis was becoming so severe. She was being beaten by her foster parents and the only way to finally break the cycle of Daniela's abuse was to place her in the home of the only person she really trusted. Not sure how Bernat fell for this because real social workers would never advocate for this. Bernat just has a big heart I guess guess. Eventually, Bernat gave in.

Even though these social workers never once met with her in real life because they did not exist. And in September of 2022, Daniela Blake Herrera moves into Bernat's 1300 square foot condo in the upscale Massachusetts neighborhood of Jamaica Plains with her and her partner John. That same month, posing as 16-year-old Daniela still, Shelby now begins

attending Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester. Although she was able to afford some of the documents required for enrollments, most of them she was forced to leave blank. She was able to get away with this by exploiting the federal law which states foster children are allowed to begin classes immediately even if they haven't been able to provide all of the proper documentation just yet. And Shelby now had an arsenal of people both fictional and real to help her transition into life as a Burke High School sophomore. Have that go smoothly as possible. Burke administrators often

exchange emails with Daniela's social workers at DCF and we're in constant communication with her guardians Rebecca Burnett, John Smith, about how to best support their new student. Although Daniela referred to Burnett and Smith as her foster parents, that was not actually true. They never went through the state's required process to formalize any kind of arrangement with Daniela. Some speculate this is because they knew or at least strongly suspected that 16 year old Daniela Herrera was actually 30-year-old Shelby Hewitt, now 31, about to turn 31, but that's yet to be proven in court.

And I don't actually buy that. I think Bernat was taken advantage of. Her and John were duped by Shelby just like so many other people were manipulated by her. In one email to the Burke staff, Bernat wrote, Hi everyone, really glad to be talking about this together. Daniela expresses a lot of fear of not being able to learn what she's being taught. Feels like it is all very hard and is definitely holding it together at school, which is really good that she is working so hard.

I think counting at school for the purposes of supporting her worries at school would be great. Along with helping her to make some new friends, she is really struggling with how lonely she feels at school. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I bet it's kind of hard to relate, you know, to these other 16 year olds when you're fucking 30 years old. She wrote, I saw something about a soccer club or team. I think ideally she would, she should join and maybe that would be a good way for her to connect. Thank you for the communication. Best Rebecca Bernat. MSW, LICSW, CED-S. At Burke, Danielle was a pretty shitty student. Though she always attended class on time. It would stay until the very end of class. She almost never turned in any assignments and failed almost all of her tests. And she could have passed them. She was a good student. She knew

how to pass these classes. She had done well in high school before and then as a bachelor's and master's. So she's doing this on purpose. I imagine for attention, who knows, Daniela's teachers frequently forgave her shortcomings at the behest of the girls social workers who said learning was exceedingly difficult for Daniela due to all the abuse she had suffered that she didn't suffer. For that same reason, Daniela also suffered emotional breakdowns in the hallways between classes. One of her former classmates said it looked like she was crying almost every day.

She didn't want to say what she was, she didn't want to say why she was crying. Why was she crying? Just to get people to feel sorry for her? It was outside the classroom in the school's gymnasium where Daniela really excelled when she joined the girls basketball team she immediately stood out as a star player and before I share a bit about Shelby's high school basketball exploits as a 30-something time for the first of two mid-show sponsor breaks and I'm back and now let's talk about 30 I think 31 year old this point Shelby Hewitt dominating the JB high school basketball court my god

She chose the jersey 32 which would incidentally be the age shoe be turning Yeah, she has 31 now. She has 31 now her foster father John Smith regularly attended her games and the other girls on the team Would cheer her on whenever she took the court where she fucking dominated Makes me again take the old Adam Sandler movie, Billy Madison, where Sandler plays a 27 year old high school dropout, actually just, I don't think he passed any of his classes, who goes back to school starting in first grade

in order to pass all the grades, which is two weeks allotted for each grade so he can prove to his dad that he's not a fuck up and he is capable of running the family business. And there's this great scene where Billy is at recess with all these grade schoolers and just lights them up playing dodgeball. Now you're all in big big trouble. Smash them.

Taunting them. Oh, get that one kid in the face. Another kid in the head. Kidder crying. I love that movie. According to some of the girls who played with Shelby, who they knew as Daniela, though the team was very tight-knit and they were all friendly with Daniela,

Shelby always remained on the outskirts. She never stayed after practice to hang out with anyone else. Of course not. She literally had to go to work. And when they took their team picture for the school yearbook, she refused to be in it saying her foster parents did not want her to be photographed. When it was later revealed that Daniela was actually an adult woman posing as a teenager, many of the girls in the team were understandably mortified. One former teammate, Zakiya Warren, stated, ''We all used to change in the locker rooms. It's disturbing to know that.'' Yeah, that is so disturbing. She was in the locker room as a 31-year-old woman with a

bunch of 14, 15, and 16-year-old girls, getting naked. If Shelby was a dude doing this, I think there would be a lot more outrage over this because I think most of us would assume it was definitely done with sexual intentions. One of Daniela's first friends at this school was 15-year-old Janelle Lemons. Janelle saw the scared-looking new kid on her first day of school and decided to introduce herself because she's a nice kid. Daniela told her she was 16 and in foster care, that she was super nervous for classes to begin.

Janelle brought Daniela around to meet some of her other friends who all welcomed her warmly. As the group got to know Daniela, the more they felt sorry for her. She was a victim of sex trafficking and child abuse and had been in and out of foster homes her whole life. Not only that, but her current foster parents had no money to buy her new clothes or school supplies or even sometimes food. Like the staff at Walden, Daniela's new friends at Burke felt compelled to help her.

But as the semester wore on, they also started to feel a little confused. She had told them that her mom and dad had both died from drug overdoses when she was a kid, but then later told them that her dad was imprisoned for some very heinous crimes. Those two backstories don't match up. She said she had no money, that her foster parents were completely broke, and yet she had her own car which she drove to school every day. She consistently wore nice clothes and had the latest iPhone. She also said she was an immigrant from Columbia at one point, but could not speak a word of

Spanish. But Danielle's friends, they didn't dare press her on the discrepancies in her story because you know, the backstory she gave them was so brutal. Her life had been so hard. They didn't want to make it the discrepancies in her story because you know the backstory she gave them was so brutal Her life had been so hard. They don't want to make it worse by questioning the poor girl You know, so maybe she's told a few lies. Come on. Can you blame her with everything? She's fake been through Besides despite all that she had gone through but didn't really go through Daniela was a good person unlike most of their classmates instead of cute boys or Instagram trends or the latest gossip Daniela mostly talked about how she wanted to do good in the world how she

wanted to help kids just like her how she hoped that one day when she was grown up she could become a social worker she's saying this as she is already grown up and is already a social worker while she was attending school participating in extracurricular activities making friends living with a pseudo her pseudo foster parents full-time, she was continuing to work as a DCF social worker. According to the prosecutors in Shelby's case, while engaging in the charade of being a child in DCF custody and a full-time student with significant special needs, the defendant continued to work as a social worker employed by DCF and collected her state salary between

September of 2022 and February of 2023. According to the Boston Globe, Shelby's salary in 2022 amounted to $51,267 including $1,254 in overtime pay. Although her pay reflected full-time work, pretty unclear whether or not Shelby was actually fulfilling all of her duties as a full-time social worker during this period. Duties which included conducting mandatory monthly visits with her assigned families, submitting the correct paperwork for each case, attending weekly meetings with her supervisor at the agency, and generally dedicating her time, effort, and energy to protecting at-risk kids. Was she studying real at-risk kids?

Maybe some of whom who had actually been sexually trafficked so she could convincingly play one, impersonate one. It's like she was a fucking method actor. Just gave herself an acting role, you know, for a movie that doesn't exist. At the time that this period, or that this episode is being recorded, DCF has yet to verify the extent to which Shelby was able to do her job, or more accurately not do her job, while also leading a double life as an at-risk kid herself. Either way, the situation reflects poorly on DCF. If Shelby really was fulfilling all of her responsibilities as a social worker while

also pretending to be a teenager, how is it possible that none of her supervisors noticed? If Shelby wasn't fulfilling her responsibilities if she really was neglecting the children and families placed in her care, again, how is it possible that none of her supervisors noticed? According to one DCF social worker named Chelsea Velu, it wouldn't be that hard for Shelby to get away with the latter option. Chelsea and multiple other sources have stated that oversight at DCF is incredibly loose. For the supervisors, tracking the movements of their social workers can be very difficult because they're constantly going from town to town, house to house,

kid to kid. On top of that, if a social worker doesn't show up for their mandatory monthly visit to one of the families, highly unlikely that the family is going to report them to DCF. As Chelsea put it, the families placed under DCF supervision, quote, don't want to see their social worker. So they are not going to complain if the social worker doesn't come around. Yeah, makes total sense. During her first semester at Burke High School, when she is telling everyone she is so poor she can't afford to always eat, she'll be using some

of her inheritance money to purchase in full and in cash a $377,000 two-bedroom condo in central Massachusetts. However, she now rarely spends any time there. One of her neighbors said she only came by once about every six weeks. The rest of the time, as we now know, she spent with Bernat and Smith. Her life is so confusing. After a semester at Burke, it was decided by her fake social workers that the fake teenager Daniela was not getting the support she required at school, and it would be best for her to move on. The transfer to a new institution better suited to meet her fake extensive needs. I wonder if she wanted to transfer because her inconsistent backstory was causing more and more kids at school to stay away from her. She wasn't getting the attention she

wanted anymore. On April of 2023, just turned 32 year old Shelby Hewitt now starts over at Brighton High School as 16 year old Daniela Blake Herrera. She's enrolled in the school's ACES program which was designed to provide specialized services to students at risk of dropping out. At Brighton High School, Daniela was immediately swooped up by the school counselors and the ACES program staff. So here's these authority figures. I imagine some of them are women. Maybe some of them are attractive and she's getting attention from them which is exactly what she wants. Like everywhere else, Daniela, you know, paraded her sob story in a bright and she quickly became the center of attention. Which is exactly what she wants. A Boston Globe journalist, Patricia Wen, put it like this,

In a program for the school's most vulnerable special education students, an imposter was taking up an outsized amount of time and attention. And that's so fucked up. Extra fucked up for a social worker to do this. Someone who knows firsthand how badly some of these kids need programs like this. The director of the ACES program, Sarah Bouvier, held daily meetings with Daniela's teachers and counselors to discuss how the girl was doing and what they needed to do better. In an email to the faux social worker Michelle Delphi, Sarah wrote, we are working hard behind the scenes to make sure Daniela is getting what she needs here at BHS academically and emotionally. In their communication with Brighton High, Michelle Delphi and Michael Kornetsky, again, I just fake ass people, shall be made up to make her fake

I did any more convincing. Shelby made up to make her fake I didn't anymore convincing. They outlined increasingly specific and intense demands for Daniella. An email to Sarah Bouvier that Shelby sent from the account michelle.delphi at massstate.us on April 14, 2023 reads, I also forgot to include in my last email that when this child doesn't like the environment she is in because it is too hard in her mind, she acts out in ways she never normally would with the

intention of trying to get kicked out because that is what has worked in the past. Also I know her last school considered the idea of having her join their program for higher functioning kids that are low for reading and writing. The fuck, it's so elaborate. In another email to school administrators Michelle Delphphy requested that Daniella's academic workload be minimized for the sake of her mental health, and that she be permitted to drop U.S. history

as she had no interest in it. Michelle wrote, maybe she could do art or gym instead. According to her social workers, Daniella was not only severely traumatized and suffering from a myriad of mental issues, but she was also suffering from a few different physical ailments. One message from Michael Kornetzky, for example, said that Daniella was growing weaker and weaker

every day due to some prescription she had to help keep her sane. She is currently on a med that is making her like a zombie and sleeping to the day he, but really Shelby, wrote. Daniella herself was also claiming now some new physical illnesses she had never claimed before. During the first week at her new school, she told some of her fellow classmates that she had diabetes and a blood clot that could cause her to have a stroke. Okay, she has a blood clot now, worried about a stroke, and then she has the diabetes.

That's a random one for I feel like her to go after like this I don't know I don't know I guess anybody could have diabetes but huh. Unfortunately she explained due to the fact that her foster parents were broke to the point of her being near starvation there was no way they could afford to get her some help. Some alarmed students now informed Brighton staff about Daniela's tragic situation with the blood clot and the diabetes. And a consent form for the release of Danielle's medical records was promptly sent to her foster parents. Additionally, Sarah Bouvier, the director of the ACES program, emailed Michelle Delphy requesting that they meet over Zoom to discuss what to do about Danielle's health issues.

However, Michelle Delphy, aka Shelby, denied both requests. Over email, she informed the school that Danielle's foster parents were not comfortable signing the consent form, saying, I don't think the foster family really wants the school having access to her medical records, per se. I think Mom feels it's a little intrusive. And to Bouvier's meeting request, Michelle wrote, No need to meet over Zoom.

God, I so wish she would have tried to pull off the Zoom meeting. I picture Shelby wearing like the dumbest disguise, just trying to pass herself off as her own social worker. She just puts on a huge fake wig, some big sunglasses, makes her voice just like weirdly low. Uh, you think, you re- really? You think I look like Daniella in this wig? Huh, really, that's crazy.

Aw, that's definitely my real hair. Nah, I can't take off my sunglasses, Those have my pupils dilated at eye doctor plays. She continued to amass attention and suck up resources at Brighton High School as the deeply troubled and destitute Daniella. Shelby was also finding time to go on a jet-setting girls trip as herself. Late May of 2023, about a month after she first started at Brighton, Shelby, her childhood best friend Katie, and two of their other friends go on a mountain getaway to Colorado. The four women in their 30s rented a Jeep in a mountainside lodge

and spent the long weekend hiking, shopping, drinking, taking in the awe-inspiring sights of the state. What's Shelby talking about with her friends? I imagine her messing up over and over, referencing how school is going, and just speaking like a caricature of a high school girl. No, I'm not seeing anyone right now. But oh my god, this Kareem Zander in my algebra class is like totally on the football team is so hot. I think he's going to ask me how I'm coming.

I mean, I mean, there's this guy I met on Tinder named Mark mark and we've got on some dates and I want to take him home someday They're all having such a good time that they wanted to make their long weekend even longer by extending the trip to Monday But Shelby refused according to Katie Shelby was adamant about needing to return for work. I asked if we could shift the trip or stay another day But she said she absolutely could not because of work and she didn't have any paid time off The other girls were bummed to leave but but they understood Shelby's predicament, right? Work comes first. Little did they know it was not her career that was on the line for Shelby if she didn't make it back to Massachusetts. It was her meticulously crafted fake identity and the entire life she built around it.

At this point in time, her friends were still pretty completely unaware that Shelby was pretty successful and impersonated a minor. However, they had started to notice some strange things about her behavior. For starters, they noticed that Shelby's broad smile was now adorned with braces and now look, lots of adults get braces. Very few adults in recent years get like the the obvious metal braces with like neon colors for the rubber bands. I feel like Invisalign is way more popular than that. So these...

The blue braces made the 32 year old woman appear very girlish, as did the trendy Gen Z style clothes she had started to wear. The Botox, they assumed she was getting injected into her forehead to make her skin smoother. One friend also noticed that she had a girlish bracelet bracelet she wore with the name Ellie etched into it. When she asked Shelby who Ellie was she said it was just her nickname back at Walden. And I found this picture online of her dressed as this high school persona with this with this graphic tee with flowers on it and frilly sleeves and this blue denim baseball cap you know and her braces with the bright blue bands and she's sitting down at this ice cream shop with this

goofy kid smile on her face with this fucking big sundae in front of her. It is fucking disturbing. Especially when you compare this photo to pictures taken of her in court just a few months later when she was dressed age appropriately. She carries herself so differently in each photo. She really got into character as a kid like she went full cosplay like if she didn't actually go to high school and just did this like for Halloween it would be funny she would look like she's just playing a sketch comedy character like like when Jimmy Fallon plays Sarah right the host

of this fake you know YouTube teen show called Eww. I posted a pic on Insta and it only got like three likes. I'm literally dying. Ew, that's like not a lot of likes. I know, and one of them is from my dad. Ew, no! I know how to get some likes. Another thing that struck the people around Shelby as odd was how she talked about her job at DCF. One friend recalled over a group dinner earlier that year when Shelby arrived to the restaurant,

worked up and angry and just, you know, swearing about her job. She told him she was doing some social work with the Boston Public Schools, where she was also a student, and she was, quote, fighting with the principal to get services for a vulnerable foster child. And the child she was talking about was, of course, herself. Shelby's friends also noticed that she said things about work that didn't always add up. For instance, best friend Andrea told the Boston Globe that at one point during the spring of 2023, Shelby told her she was no longer working at DCF, that she'd gotten a

job as a school counselor at Burke High School. But then soon after that, Shelby said she was working as a school counselor at the nearby English High School, not doing a great job of keeping her bullshit straight. And when Andrea said, wait a minute, I thought you were at Burke, Shelby rolled her eyes and just spat at her. You have such a bad memory. Andrea said, this has become a habit of Shelby's recently.

If you questioned her, she retaliated with malice and spite. It was your fault, not hers. You didn't remember correctly. You were trying to start some shit. She didn't like to be challenged, not even on the smallest, most insignificant things. In the end, Shelby's friends agreed to leave Colorado when they were supposed to, going back to that, and Shelby did get back to Massachusetts in time for school on Tuesday. However, it wouldn't matter that much because her time at Brighton was quickly coming to an end. Whether it was because she wasn't

getting the attention she so desperately craved in the school any longer, or because the staff was beginning to catch on to her scheme, or maybe she just got bored of it. After just a few weeks of Brighton, the student known as Daniela Blake Herrera simply disappeared. Not just from Brighton High School, but just from existence. Less than a week after she vanished from Brighton, Shelby Hewitt re-emerges at English High School under a new disguise 13 year old foster kid Ellie Alessandra Blake. Yep she's even younger now. She's 32 years old at this point pretending to be a 13 year old and while she is short and she's

petite I don't know exactly her height and weight but when you see her next other grown-up she can tell if she's small and she does look young for her age she doesn't look anywhere near 13. Ellie Blake, by the way, is the name of a character. Actually before I go, yeah, Ellie, Alessandra Blake, yeah. And Ellie Blake, name of a character from Disney's 2018 musical adaptation of Freaky Friday. In the movie, Ellie Blake is a teenage girl who magically switches bodies with her mom, Catherine, stuck in her daughter's body, which is a pretty gross sentence with or without context.

Katherine is forced to return to high school as Ellie Blake. In other words, Ellie Blake is an adult woman pretending to be a teenager. Shelby's never confirmed this, but it has been widely speculated that this is where her pseudonym came from. And I mean, come on, it has to be. That'd be one hell of a coincidence.

I mean, is she doing this just because she's like the world's biggest Freaky Friday fan? I want to stay a kid and not a grumpy grown up with these wrinkles and this stress, the pressure and that fletcher. Oh my God, it's such a mess. I've never seen this. Now I'll pay. 13-year-old Ellie Blake had the same backstory as 16-year-old Daniella Blake Herrera. She was a foster child who had been a victim of sex trafficking and child abuse, suffering from a mass of disorders and ailments so tragic that you couldn't even begin to possibly comprehend them. And some of her disorders made her look 20 years older. Fucking crazy. disorders and ailments so tragic that you couldn't even begin to possibly comprehend them.

And some of her disorders made her look 20 years older. Fucking crazy. According to enrollment documents that shall be falsified, Ellie Blake was also the foster child of Rebecca Burnett and John Smith and her social workers were still Michelle Delphy and Michael Kornatsky. On June 8th, 2023, Ellie Blake officially joined her fellow 13 year olds in the 7th grade class of English High School, which offered grades 7-12, as opposed to 9-12 or 10-12, like most American high schools.

So I mean, in most schools she's a junior higher. In most junior highs, I think, well, I know there's a lot that are 6th, 7th, and 8th. I know there's still some that are 7th and 8th, so she'd even be on the younger end of junior high. Well, junior high kid, be on like the younger end of junior high. Well, junior high kid Ellie Blake, not well received by her classmates. They desperately avoided sitting next to her in class and in the lunchroom. None of the other kids would speak to her unless it was to make fun of the wrinkles on her face. They relentlessly mocked her for looking like she was 30 when she was just 13. Yeah, of course they did! They're fucking junior high kids. They're fucking monsters.

Like, what was she thinking going that young? What you reading? Loser. Revising human reproduction. Don't bother. Ain't never gonna happen to you. Like it's gonna happen to you. Say that again.

Well, go on. Can I just get past, please? Can I just get past, please? Did she want to go back to that? It does crack me up to think about an after-school special, like melodramatic B-movie scene, where some junior high bullies are pushing a girl around in the bathroom or something,

except the kid that they're pushing around is 32 years old. What's the matter, Ellie? Why are you crying? Sad no one took you home from the bar last night? Did the barista not get your pumpkin spice latte right when you drove yourself through Starbucks this morning Ellie on the way to junior high? What's wrong Ellie having a hard time at work? Smelly Ellie bet she has a baby in her belly smelly Ellie looks like a soccer mom named Shelly. Within the first few days of Ellie's arrival at Ingalls High but really it's like junior high the staff begins receiving urgent messages from the girls social workers demanding the students bullying Ellie for looking old

be punished. This is making me imagine trying to enroll right now as a high school student or junior high student at 47 years old. Stop making fun of all the gray hair in my beard guys! It's very stressful getting sexually trafficked, okay? That is why I have so many tattoos. My traffickers forced me to get tattoos, some of them with band references from bands that were in their prime before you were alive. All part of the abuse! A typo written email, sent from the fictitious Michelle Delphi to one of the school guidance counselors read,

Ellie's had a really bad day at school yesterday. She cried all evening, doesn't want to go back. I guess the kids told her that she looks like someone's mom. And looks 30 years old. Ellie's really sensitive about people commenting on her face and how she looks older. It's a huge trigger point for her. Did Shelby actually expect to return to seventh grade at the age of 32 and have kids not make fun of her for looking old? Was she actually crying at home over this? She probably was.

Also, I bet some of the kids weren't making fun of her. I bet I know who was not making fun of Shelby at school. A lot of the boys. Dude, Ellie has like, lady tits. I call dibs on new girl. Fake social worker persona Delphi went on to explain that in addition to all the other traumas and afflictions and disorders the poor girl suffered from, Ellie also, on top of everything else, had a genetic condition that caused her body to age more rapidly than a normal child's, causing her to appear older than she actually is. Of course. The school immediately jumped into action to save poor Ellie from her tormentors.

The bullies were identified. They were given a stern talking to. Ellie was put into contact with the school's culture manager, who would help her come up with strategies for dealing with these mean, mean kids. For fuck's sake. Those kids must have loved it when this story broke. I fucking told you she was an old lady! I demanded an apology! Fake social worker Michelle Delphi was then really updated about all the steps

taken to ensure the bullying would not happen again and Ellie had the resources she needed to cope with these bullies. In response, Delphi wrote, Sounds like a good plan and appreciate the support. It's Becky Bernat's first time as a foster parent and Ellie's first time back in school. So it's been an interesting transition. Oh, it sure has. So now that issue has been resolved and yet school principal Caitlin Murphy does not feel relieved.

There was something off about the whole situation. And she was determined to get to the bottom of why her new seventh grader looked like she was exactly the same age as many of the mothers of her other seventh graders because she literally was. Murphy began reviewing the school's email history with Ellie's social workers and foster parents and came across something odd. Michelle Delphi's email address ended in at mass state dot US but all the other DCF social workers at the school that the school worked with had emails under the domain of at state.ma.us. Uh-oh! Little bit of a big red flag there. Alarmed Murphy immediately sent a

message to the enrollment staff. Can someone look at the documents that Ellie was registered with to be sure that we are confident that there is not something amiss here? Something feels like it's not adding up. At the same time that Murphy was starting to catch on to the rouse, Ellie was pulled from class by her alleged foster father John Smith. She told the front office that the school was no longer a good fit for Ellie, even though she'd only been there for a week. And he was now going to enroll her in a Catholic school. Not clear in sources if Ellie just pretended to be John here and sent an email or if she somehow

convinced the real John Smith to come in and talk to the school. The swift removal of Ellie Blake made Caitlin Murphy and the rest of the staff that much more suspicious. At some point that day while searching through what scant files they had on Ellie Alessandra, a staff member discovered a signed consent form with the DCF letterhead which granted Rebecca Bernat the right to make medical decisions on 13-year-old Ellie's behalf. But there was something wrong. The DCF letterhead had a typo. Instead of Department of Children and Families, it read Department of Children Rinned Families. They also discovered that, amongst other missing documents, school had never received a copy of Ellie's birth certificate. Eventually, someone called DCF and requested to speak to social worker

Michelle Delphi, finally. However, as the person on the other line bluntly informed them, no one by the name Michelle Delphi worked at DCF. Another big red flag. The next call the school made was to the police. On July 15, 2023, the police searched the Jamaica Plains condo of Rebecca Burnett and John Smith where Shelby had been living for the past year as Daniela Herrera and then Elsie Blake. The search was conducted by local officers in conjunction with the state's human trafficking unit and it didn't take them long to find evidence of Shelby's crimes in her bedroom. On June 27, 2023, a warrant for Shelby Hewitt's arrest is filed with the West Roxbury District

Court. She's wanted on four charges of forgery, two charges of false variety, and one charge of identity fraud. On July 17, 2023, Shelby Hewitt turns herself in at the Boston Municipal Court in West Roxbury. She's immediately taken into custody and placed into a juvenile detention facility where she remains today, fucking dominating the other children. No, no, she doesn't go to juvie. But that would be a fitting addition to the story. No, Shelby remained silent the entire time, instead allowing her lawyer, Timothy Flaherty, to speak on her behalf. She explained to the court that the reason Shelby didn't turn herself in earlier is because

she was in residential treatment for her various mental health issues. He did not, however, offer any more details on where she was being treated or for what. Shelby's now held on a $5,000 bond which she easily posts. She's got all that inheritance money still or a good chunk of it. On November 15th, 2023, Shelby's indicted on three counts of forgery, two counts of common-law forgery, one count of larceny, over $1,200, one count of identity theft, one count of making false claims to employer, and one count of uttering, which is the crime of passing off a forged document as a real one with the intent to defraud someone or some entity.

During Shelby's arraignment on December 12, 2023, she pleads not guilty to all nine indictments, which include five felony counts of forgery. During the hearing, it's revealed that Daniela Blake Herrera is the name of a real foster child of Massachusetts state custody. Not just a random name that Shelby made up. She actually stole this girl's name and apparently identity. Stole her backstory. A girl who had really been through some horrible shit to make what she's doing even more gross here. Following her arraignment, Shelby's released on that $5,000 bail, ordered to stay far away from any Boston public school employee, any and all schools in or outside the BPS district, any witnesses to her crimes, and to have zero contact with any child under the age of 18,

especially the child whose identity she has stolen. She is also ordered to cease her social work with DCF. Parents of children in BPS were understandably outraged over Shelby's release. The mother of a 15-year-old girl who'd become good friends with Daniela at Burke High School was quoted as saying, we are the victims, not her. She's the person who pretended to be a student, 16, 13 years old, sitting amongst our children. In another interview, the concerned mother said, I just can't wrap my mind around it. She's a grown woman and she's friends with kids my daughter's age and she's taking a seat from a child that should be there.

Yeah, none of us can fully wrap our minds around this. Though Shelby remained silent outside the courtroom, her lawyer made a few comments to the press. I can certainly understand the outrage the parents would feel. I certainly would feel the same as a parent of my child was in a school that was not being properly supervised Oh, yeah, totally asshole. It's the school's fault get the fuck out of here. Could the school have done a better job Yeah, sure. I imagine so but it wasn't the teachers or the administrators who were impersonating a kid. It was your client

I hate when fucking people try and shift the blame like this. It's so slimy Though Shelby's trial was originally slated for the fall of 2024, it has been repeatedly pushed back for a couple reasons. Over the summer, her lawyer, Timothy Flaherty, suffered from serious injuries in a car accident and was therefore unable to attend court in person. And then Shelby was similarly incapacitated due to being at a treatment center out of the state. But treatment for what? We don't know. Could just be more scammy bullshit. Probably is. But more than anything, the ultimate reason the trial has been delayed so much is because according to Timothy Flaherty, he has hired a psychiatric expert to try and evaluate Shelby, and the evaluation is complicated. It's taken a while.

Mm-hmm. That I'm not surprised by. She is clearly not well in a very unusual fashion. At the time of this recording, it remains unclear whether Shelby's trial has actually begun or not. So back to the big question now. Why the fuck did Shelby do any of this? Before attempting to answer that question, time for today's second of two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. And now back to that question. Why did Shelby do all this?

Following her arrest, Hugh had made a series of phone calls to her loved ones to apologize for lying to them. And now back to that question, why did Shelby do all this? Following her arrest, Hewitt made a series of phone calls to her loved ones to apologize for lying to them. Because of the field she worked in, most of Hewitt's closest friends had backgrounds in mental health or therapy and were accustomed to supporting people in crisis. So many of them did pick up the phone. They did give Hewitt a chance to explain herself. However, according to one source, none of them are taking anything said by Hugh at face value. Not anymore. But yeah. I mean, there's being empathetic and standing by a friend when the chips are down. And then there's just being a fucking idiot, a fool and asking to be manipulated by somebody who hasn't just made a few isolated mistakes, but has done something very disturbing and concerning as part of a huge ongoing

pattern, you know, really in-depth for a great length of time. To her friend Andrea, Hewitt gave three reasons for pretending to be a sex-trafficked teenager. The first and most perplexing was that, and I love this so much, a psychic told her to. You know how them psychics be, always trying to get you to re-enroll in high school or junior high no matter how old you are. I mean, that's classic psychic behavior. According to Andrea, after Hewitt's mother died in 2018, the two women went to go see a psychic

to help her process the loss. When Hewitt was making her grand apology to her, five years later, she revealed to Andrea that she had returned to that psychic multiple times without her and that the medium had implored her to quote, revisit her childhood in order to heal her past trauma. He would say uh he would apparently took the psychic's words to heart and then decided the

best way to act on her advice was to literally revisit or relive her teenage years. Highly doubt that's what the psychic was intending if she ever even went back to talk to that psychic. Uh in another call a few days later he would offered Andrea a new explanation for her actions She now said she had always been desperate for a stable family life and that she had knowingly posed as a foster child in order to satiate that desire Uh-huh Yeah, okay. You're in your 30s now Shelby. You do not get to go back and relive your childhood not like this Not without very likely suffering legal consequences then instill another call heitt now swore she had no idea what she'd been doing the

entire time she was this student or these students because she has Dissociative Personality Disorder or excuse me, Identity Disorder, also known as DID, previously called Multiple Personality Disorder. She said another personality took over. She doesn't even remember pretending to be a teen. That wasn't even her. Get the fuck out of here. I imagine her continuing to call Andrea, sharing increasingly bizarre excuses.

Andrea, you have to believe me. I was forced to go to those high schools. Look, you can't tell anyone, but the FBI hired me. They recruited me to be part of a secret program designed to figure out how predators trick kids into meeting up with them. They needed me to gain these kids' trust so I could tell them how I did that. So they could then build out a new program letting kids know what to look out for. I'm not a monster. I'm a hero. I'm a hero.

I'm someone so dedicated to protecting children, I've become children. Andrea, no, listen. I didn't want to pretend to be a teenager either, but the aliens who abducted me and tortured me, who gave me so many anal probes, they made me do it. If I didn't go back to school, they were going to take me and drop me off on another planet that's only populated by scorpions and cannibals. Okay, now let's talk about Dissociative Identity Disorder because you really have this. I'll dig into what this disorder entails if it is even a real disorder. To quote an article posted on Psychology Today's website, February 7th, 2023. In psychiatry, there's no more controversial diagnosis than Dissociative Identity Disorder,

the disorder formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. While more people think the disorder is real today than in years past, there are still those who claim that people who say they have DID are just really good actors, skilled manipulators who really commit to different personas like a method actor would and just refuse to admit that they're bullshitting because you know they get off on the attention they're getting from authority figures like therapists for exhibiting different personalities and for being able to survive you know alleged abuse so severe it would have destroyed them had they not manufactured these different

personas. That being said, assuming the disorder is real, which most therapists seem to currently believe, what is it? According to the National Center for Biotechnological Information, dissociative identity disorder is a contentious mental health condition that typically arises as a result of traumatic events to help people avoid unpleasant memories. Patients with DID have two or more distinct personality identities, each with its memories, characteristics, and attributes. For some with DID, the difference between their personality identities, with its memories characteristics and attributes. For some with DID

the difference between their personality identities also known as personality states or alters short for alternate states of consciousness can range from very subtle to the absolute extreme. A person's altar may be a different age race gender or religion than themselves the host they may also have a different taste in music, movies, activities, or food. They may walk differently, talk differently, interact with the world differently, have a different posture. The list goes on and on. Even if you don't know what Dissociative Identity Disorder is, you know, I guarantee, or actually is, I guarantee you've, you know, seen it before on TV. One of the most famous depictions of DID in recent media is in the 2016 psychological thriller Split, the movie starring James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy.

In Split, McAvoy plays Kevin Wendell Crumb, a traumatized man whose mind is buried under 24 different personalities collectively calling themselves The Horde. Members of The Horde include a naive 9-year-old boy with a lisp named Hedwig, a middle-aged man with severe OCD and a penchant for spying on naked teenage girls named Dennis and the megalomaniac cannibalistic superhuman called the Beast. Although Split's a great movie, it's not an accurate portrayal of dissociative identity disorder. According to the fifth and most current edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,

the DSM. There are five pieces of criteria a patient must meet in order to be diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Criteria number one. Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinct personality states. The disruption of identity or in identity involves marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency accompanied by related alterations in effect, behavior or affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and or sensory motor functioning. Criteria number two, recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal

information and or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting. Criteria number three, the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, and other important areas of functioning. Criteria number four, getting roughly fingered in the supply closet of the high school bandroom by a senior boy when you're a seventh grade girl but not pressing charges on said boy because while he is 17 you are 32. Real criteria number four now, the disturbance is not a normal part of broadly accepted cultural or religious practices. For example, in children, the symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates or other fantasy play.

Criteria number five. Hitting the game winning shot at the state high school basketball tournament and then celebrating by using your real ID to buy all your teammates alcohol, which you then invite them to come drink at the two-bedroom condo you bought after you got your master's degree. Real criteria number five now. The symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance, for example blackouts or chaotic behavior during alcohol intoxication, or another medical condition, for example complex partial seizures. One of the most common misconceptions about the idea is that it happens when the mind is split open by the horrors of extreme trauma, cracking in half like a ripe coconut, going, coconuts, splitting into fractured pieces of false selves. However, that doesn't actually seem to really be the case.

Although DID does occur as a psychological response to trauma, it's not because the mind has been broken or shattered by the unbearable weight of it, it's actually the mind's way of protecting oneself from it. Let me explain. The idea is currently believed by those who believe in the possibility of this disorder to first start developing in children under six and only in children under six who are experiencing long-term repeated trauma such as sexual or emotional abuse. In order to cope, the child will compartmentalize their traumatic experiences, then displace the memories of those experiences onto a different facet of their identity. According to Dr. Melissa Kaufman, director of the Dissociative Disorders and Trauma Research Program at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts,

the reason DID can only develop in children and not adults is due to their limitless imagination. During early development, children possess a wonderful capacity for magical thinking. For example, some kids believe that Superman is real and that someday they will be able to fly too, said Dr. Kaufman. Yeah, I was literally that kid. But honestly not sure what this says about me. I legitimately believe that I might someday gain superhuman abilities far past the age of six. Pretty sure I still thought there was at least a chance I was gonna be able to do some superhero shit at the age of 11 or 12.

Dr. Kaufman goes on to explain that because children did not have a proper gauge on the limits of reality, their minds have no problem with the concept of, quote, turning into another person, end quote, so to speak. Therefore, a child experiencing ongoing sexual abuse might think, it's too overwhelming to feel such fear. It's too dangerous to feel such anger. It's too real to know what is happening to my body.

That's not me. That's someone else. Dr. Kaufman said that by thinking like this, the child is able to displace the overwhelming thoughts, feelings, and memories onto different personified aspects of self and separate from their painful circumstances. This not me experience is the cornerstone of DID. For children DID can be an effective psychological mechanism for coping with trauma. In those early years of the disorders and

development, children with DID very rarely experienced full-blown identity switches. Instead the overwhelming majority only experienced overlaps or interferences between their two personality states. However, as the disassociation continues into late adolescence and adulthood, long after the danger of the trauma is no longer present, separation between identities becomes more acute and the symptoms more severe. DID is one of three types of disassociative disorders, which are mental health conditions that develop out of severe trauma, where people experience a feeling of detachment from the thoughts, bodies, realities, environments, actions, and memories.

The other two disassociative disorders, besides DID, are disassociative amnesia, memory loss of traumatic events, and depersonalization slash derealization disorder, feeling like you are outside of your body or that the world around you is not real. I get that latter one sometimes if I've dropped a heavy dose of acid. That the world around me is definitely no longer real. Sometimes that feeling lingers to a certain extent for better or for worse for the next few weeks. Such a strange feeling. People with DID can experience the symptoms

of both disassociative amnesia and depersonalization, oh my God, derealization slash derealization. Oh my god. D-real-ah- D-realization disorder. That's a fucking mouthful. What do you have? Oh, I have depersonalization. That's nothing. I just have a little depersonalization slash derealization disorder. Oh, there I got it. It can occur in someone with DID but not vice versa. For example, in addition to having multiple distinct identities, people with DID also experience huge gaps in their memories about things like everyday events or their own personal history. And when someone with DID switches from one of their identities to another, they

often experience that out-of-body sense of detachment from reality unfolding around them. With DID, the process of switching can take seconds, minutes, or even days and is completely involuntary. Contrary to popular belief, people with DID, they can't just summon their altar on command whenever it suits them best. They have no influence over which identity is controlling their behavior. Guided by a licensed therapist, it is possible for someone with DID to gain a better understanding of what triggers their switches and therefore find ways to manage slash cope with them better. However, the switches will always be involuntary. Not only are people with DID unable to control their switches, they

also oftentimes switch without even realizing it. Everyone has varying levels of awareness when it comes to their interchanging of their alters. While some people are able to detect an imminent switch due to the physical symptoms that precede it like headaches or dizziness, others only know a switch is taking place when they find themselves in a situation or location and they just have no idea how they got there. And that would be fucking terrifying if you really had this. As I said earlier, the diagnosis of DID is still somewhat of a contentious one.

As recently as the 1980s, many, many mental health professionals argued that it did not exist. That the reported cases of it were actually the result of social contagion or hypnotic suggestion. As the 21st century got closer fewer and fewer professionals continued denying the existence of DID however some still disagreed on whether or not DID is an independent disorder or a by-product of a different one. For example in 1993 two researchers concluded that DID is actually a consequence of borderline personality disorder due to the fact that the two conditions share many of the same symptoms. However, that was then disproven by further research and it was established that although

borderline personality disorder is very prevalent in patients with multiple personality disorder, it is not universal and is a separate and distinct disorder. The extensive overlap between the symptoms of DID and other psychological conditions also lead to a lot of the confusion that surrounds the disorder. For example, according to the American Psychological Association, their 2013 Diagnostic Manual, because so many individuals with DID suffer from depression, they are often misdiagnosed with major depressive disorder. However, as the manual points out, rigorous testing will reveal that some with DID does

not actually meet the criteria for major depressive disorder because the depressed mood and cognitions fluctuate because they are experienced in some identity states but not others. It's also complicated. Additionally, people with DID are often misdiagnosed with things like bipolar 2 disorder due to the sharp and unexpected shifts in their mood and behavior or with schizophrenia due to the personified internally communicative inner voices of their alters which are mistaken for psychotic hallucinations. My god. People with DID also often have PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and given how similar the symptoms are distinguishing between the

two disorders can be very difficult. However, what differentiates the two is the core diagnostic criteria for DID which is the presence of two or more distinct personality states and the division of identity with recurrent disruption of functioning and of self. According to the National Library of Medicine, the final reason for the controversy surrounding DID is the fear that convicted criminals will claim the diagnosis in order to escape punishment, quote, by a gullible justice system which attributes behavior to another personality and does not hold the perpetrator responsible and that definitely has happened. And that all brings us

back to the case of Shelby Hewitt. When Shelby's court proceedings first began in 2023, her lawyer, Timothy Flaherty, stated to the press, this is a young lady that has several mental health challenges and she has been dealing with it on a lifelong basis. It is well documented and she is continuing to deal with it. But it's not well documented. It's documented that she has mental health issues, but it is not documented that she has multiple personality. They will not say like what she has dealt with her family, her friends. No one is coming out of the fucking woodwork and saying, oh yeah. No she I've definitely heard about her having DID. It's all brand new. As the

hearings continued, Flattery or Flaherty maintained that Shelby has long suffered issues with her mental health, though again he never specified what she suffered from, never offered a diagnosis. That only came finally in November of this year of 2024 when Flaherty alleged to journalist Patricia Wen of the Boston Globe that Shelby has been recently diagnosed with DID. Shelby Hewitt is a young lady who has suffered from DID for years and despite receiving significant inpatient care she continued to live with the pain and suffering caused by the disruption in her consciousness, memory, and identity by this disorder.

Well despite Flaherty's claims many who were once close to Shelby not convinced at all about this diagnosis. They find it very suspicious and you know very convenient. Andrea for example Shelby's former best friend her best friend until very recently recalled a period of time from 2013 to 2016 when Shelby was working as a residential treatment counselor at Franciscan Children's an institution for children and adolescents with severe behavioral and emotional problems. Over the years Andrea heard countless stories from Shelby about the difficult patients she worked with at Franciscan, many of whom were suffering from disassociative disorders and tendencies. Shelby complained to Andrea on multiple occasions

about these patients, talking about how they adjusted their behavior and spasmodic tantrums in order to manipulate the staff and get what they want. So like was she like jealous of these kids get what they wanted? Essentially she believed that the kids who claimed to have DID or something similar full of shit kids she worked with on a regular basis kids that perhaps she was studying when she thought of trying to pull off this weird scammer hers Shelby bragged that she could see right through their theatrics Even though the rest of the staff couldn't on one occasion, Andrea remembered Shelby told her that one of her patients had thrown a massive tantrum but was quote, totally faking it, as Shelby will

then soon do. Shelby's other friends also expressed uncertainty about the DID diagnosis. According to that Boston Globe article, they can't help but see her as a master manipulator who could con anybody and wonder if Hewitt has some kind of psychopathy where empathy is always fake, not real. According to the National Library of Medicine, psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by a deficient emotional response, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance in criminal behavior. Although DID and psychopathy are both conditions involving complex mental states, they're very

different. Where DID is a dissociative disorder that develops out of trauma, psychopathy is a personality disorder thought to be caused by genetic variants, like born with it. In addition to the people who are once closest to Shelby, many experts in psychology have also speculated that the high school imposter does not have DID. Although none could actually conduct a proper assessment of Shelby, a number of psychologists interviewed by the Boston Globe stated their initial impression was that there is little to no evidence of DID in Shelby's behavior and actions, and therefore it's very unlikely

she suffers from the disorder. And they said this is primarily because of the calculated and balanced way Shelby managed her two distinct identities over a very long period of time. Shelby scheduled her life out in order to be a certain person at a certain time. She was an adult when she needed to be, like at Andrea's wedding or during that girl's trip with her adult friends. And she was a teen when she needed to be, like at tryouts for Berks High School girls basketball team. As the psychologist pointed out, someone with DID wouldn't have such control of multiple

identities all working towards a common goal. A speculation surrounding whether or not Shelby has DID persists, a very valid question to ask is, what else could be wrong with her? Well as Dr. Todd Grande, mental health expert, licensed professional counselor, and a youtuber with a very dry sense of humor I am very fond of as pointed out, one condition that is constantly brought up in cases like Shelby's is pathological lying. When an adult is caught impersonating a child or thought to be impersonating a child, the media is quick to label them as a pathological liar. Take Natalia Grace for example. A Ukrainian orphan with

dwarfism who was adopted by Americans Michael and Christine Barnett in 2010 and according to the Barnetts Natalia was a grown adult woman posing as an orphan child. According to Natalia the Barnetts adopted her when she was six years old. According to the Barnetts Natalia was homicidal and violent. According to Natalia the Barnetts are abusive and cruel. The Barnetts say that when they moved to Canada in 2012 without Natalia, they did so to save themselves from a murderous child imposter. Natalia says that when the Barnettes abandoned her in Indiana in 2012, she was just 9 years old, and that they moved to do just what I said, just to abandon her.

As the story unfolds, both the Barnettes and Natalia Grace have been accused of being pathological liars in the media. Which like I said earlier, pretty standard in cases like these. Another example of this is a story, and this is fucking insane. This is even more insane than the story about Shelby. The story of Monchur Frederick Bourdain, a French serial imposter who repeatedly assumed the identities of missing kids throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Oh yeah, Shelby Hewitt is not the first person to embody this very specific strain of crazy. This guy's even more despicable, quite a bit more. Frederick's first successful impersonation was that

of Nicholas Barclay, a 13 year old boy who disappeared June 10th 1994 in San Antonio, Texas. And this is so fucked up. Three years later in 1997, 22 year old Frederick cons both Spanish and American authorities into believing that he is the missing Nicholas Barclay, and he has flown to San Antonio to be reunited with his quote family. The Barclays are overjoyed to have their beloved son back, who was now 16 years old and who somehow now had dark brown eyes instead of bright blue eyes and brown hair instead of blonde hair and Already had a serious case of five o'clock shadow in Texas new Nicholas is

Interviewed by the FBI about his abduction He told agent Nancy Fisher that he'd been kidnapped by a band of specially trained military men who used him for scientific experimentation oh boy According to one source Frederick told brutal stories of being forced to eat insects, having his hands broken, and his left foot broken by a crowbar. The kidnappers allegedly put needles in his eyes, used some kind of solution to change his eye color from blue to brown. Most disturbingly, he claimed these men sexually assaulted him and the other

children they abducted. Frederick lived in the Barclays' home, posing as their missing son for five fucking months before the FBI found out he was a con artist. And then the family of the real Nicholas Barclay had to grieve the loss of Nicholas all over again. This asshole added so much trauma to people who had already been through so much. During this trial, Frederick pled guilty to perjury and obtaining and possessing false documents. Also told the jury he had been a victim of child abuse back in France and that he had assumed the identity of the missing boy and gave his family false hope that their son had returned all because he just wanted a loving family to call his own. These

manipulative fucks. This enraged the entire courtroom. Nicholas's brother Kerry, who suffered a full-on goddamn nervous breakdown after Frederick was exposed, testified before his sentencing saying, He has lied and lied and lied again. And to this day he continues to lie. He bears no remorse. Frederick was sent to prison for six years, three times what was recommended in the sentencing guidelines. In custody, he told authorities that while pretending to be Nicholas, he discovered that the missing boys mother Beverly and older brother Jason were Responsible for his disappearance. So now he eludes that they fucking killed this kid. That is so low No one believed him as

FBI agent Nancy Fisher pointed out you can never trust the words of a pathological liar Fisher said he tells lies or no scutti she said, he tells 99 lies and maybe the hundredth is the truth, but you just don't know. Upon his release from prison in 2003, Frederick moved to a small town in southeastern France where he assumed another new identity. He now told authorities he was a 14-year-old named Leo Balli, a French boy who had been gone for almost a decade, disappeared almost a decade prior. At the request of the police, the 30-year-old Frederick was examined by a doctor who somehow concluded

that he was in fact a teenager. God, so he's claiming to be 14 because this kid disappeared when he was like four. Luckily, the police were not convinced. They decided to conduct a DNA test which proved that he was, you know, lying out his ass again. He doesn't get sent to jail this time for some reason and then he does it again. After a brief stint impersonating another missing Spanish teen Ruben Sanchez Espinosa in 2005 Frederick took on the identity of an orphan named Francisco Hernandez Fernandez with his receding hairline and wrinkly forehead. Now 32 year old Frederick got a house at a children's shelter somehow and attended a local

junior high school for a little over a fucking month! As a 32 year old man losing his hair before he got found out. Because of these exploits and more, Frederick Bourdon has been dubbed the chameleon by the French press and is known as one of the most prolific and pervasive pathological liars the country has ever known. How great would it be if he just now went missing? Like really went missing. If he went on a hike alone and then, I don't know, fell to his death and then no one found his body, it'd be pretty poetic. So what exactly does it mean to be a pathological liar? Despite popular belief,

pathological lying, not a psychological disorder, nor is it an actual mental health diagnosis. Pathological lying, currently referred to as a chronic behavior that contemporary researchers are trying to change or excuse me though contemporary researchers are trying to change that. Pathological line was first identified in 1891 by a psychiatrist named Anton Delbruck. Delbruck Christian the concept with the Latin name pseudologya fantastica and defined it as falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view which may be extensive and very complicated manifesting over a period of years or even a lifetime and almost a

century and a half later we still have just as vague an understanding of pathological line as Delbruck did back then. According to one 2016 study in the modern age pathological line remains a barely intelligible concept short of any professional psychiatric consensus and clear definitions in professional references. The crux of the argument surrounding pathological line is similar to that of DID. Experts can't reach an agreement on whether pathological line is a symptom of an existing psychiatric disorder or is a separate and distinct disorder in and of itself. Even though pathological line has no clear definition, prognosis, or etiology amongst professionals, there is general consensus

as to its core elements. Pathological line is loosely characterized by a person who has little control over their impulse to lie, lies for no apparent reason, and lies excessively and repeatedly, so much so that it impairs their functioning in their occupational and social life. Now just because you lie doesn't mean you are a pathological liar. Lying is an inherent aspect of human behavior. It's something we do almost as soon as we learn to talk and it's not always a bad thing. According to the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, to lie is to make a false statement with the intention to deceive. Normal non-pathological lying incorporates obvious motivation for lying.

A person who lies has some interest and gain from doing so. A child's first successful lie, which is normally achieved between the ages of 2 and 4, is actually considered by experts to be an important milestone for their mental and emotional development. This is because when a child lies, it demonstrates their burgeoning understanding of their own personal autonomy. As we grow up, lying becomes an important skill that we use for a lot of reasons, many of which are not harmful but are instead a type of kindness like being polite. Somebody you don't find attractive. Let's say somebody you find actually

kind of repulsive. If they were to ask you like, do you find me attractive? And you were like, oh, fuck no. Oh my God. I would literally rather throw myself off a fucking cliff than to have to be sexual with you. That'd be pretty mean. Pretty mean thing to say. And so, you know, it would be nice to lie and be like,

yeah, no, you're very attractive. Oh my God, you're beautiful. That's a nice lie. You know, there's a, yeah, like polite, protecting yourself is another way to lie. If some psychopath, you know, is like, where do you live? You know, and you're afraid for them to find out your house and you're also afraid to upset them, you know They'd be pretty stupid to be really honest. Like I can't lie. Here's my address. I used to fucking give him a fake-ass address

You know, you can lie to protect a loved one lie to maintain your privacy avoid, avoid embarrassment, getting out of trouble, and so much more. Even lying for the thrill of it is considered fairly normal. You know that most people do that once in a while. The main difference between normal and pathological lying is that normal lies are told for a discernible reason. The validity or ethics of that reason doesn't matter. It's just important that there is a reason, that the reason can be identified or understood by an outsider.

On the other hand, lies told by a pathological liar will appear so pointless, so purposeless. Like, why the fuck would you lie about that? That's a pathological liar. Someone who is constantly making up shit, we're like, why would you even say that? I didn't even... no one cares. Like, a pathological liar might tell you that they watched Friends the night before, when really they watched How I Met Your Mother. It's a valueless lie. It has literally zero consequences, but they lie Friends the night before when really they watched How I Met Your Mother. It's a valueless lie. It has literally zero consequences, but they lie all the same. Recent studies have shown that although their lies appear futile, pathological liars are often compelled to deceive others by internal motivations that they might not even be aware

of. For example, let's say somebody grew up in an abusive household where they constantly had to lie in order to escape harm. In this case, lying becomes a maladaptive coping strategy that their mind associates with safety. And for them, it just feels safer to always lie than to tell the truth. In a 2020 study aimed at testing whether pathological lying can be defined as its own diagnostic entity, 623 participants age 18 to 60 were surveyed about their lying behaviors. Of these 623 participants, 83 either self-identified or had been

identified by others as a pathological liar, which they defined as telling numerous lies every day for a period of longer than six months. The surveys revealed that quote, people who identified as pathological liars reported greater distress, impaired functioning, and more danger caused by their lying than people not considered pathological liars. Pathological lying seemed to be compulsive, with lies growing from an initial lie and done for no apparent reason. So why did Shelby Hewitt do what she did? Is she a pathological liar? Does she have Dissociative Identity Disorder? Is she a psychopath? I have no fucking clue. I'm not a psychiatrist I can't diagnose shit all I can do all any of us can do is speculate and I have speculated about Shelby as have so

Many others, let's first check in though with what some others have thought in a segment. I probably don't use enough here idiots of the internet Idiots of the Internet. Idiots of the Internet. ABC News posted a video about Shelby's arrest a year ago, December 13th, 2023. It's titled, New Charges for 32-year-old Woman Accused for Posing as High School Student. It has just over 763,000 views as I record this almost 4,000 comments Let's see what some people are saying about Shelby and most these comments by the way not idiotic pretty pretty rational top commenter commenter at

Xammerjammer has almost 7,000 likes for his comment or hear her comment of Anyone wanting to attend high school a second time equals completely insane Yep 200 people have replied so far. They all seem to agree with Xammer. At Jalexis G221 replies with, right? Could never. I have nightmares about having to go back lol.

At randomuser9868 replies with, for real? High school was fucking hell. At stayfocusjv replied, right? High school was okay, but when I have dreams about it. I wake up in cold sweats At late blossom posted something I also considered This is strange. I would really like to hear why she did this when I heard she was a social worker I thought maybe she thought this was some kind of way to get a child's eyes a Child's eye view of being in school or something and I did wonder that for a

bit myself but then why didn't she claim that after her arrests and why go to three schools wouldn't she have gotten the intel she wanted it just one and she never submitted any research results after her arrest no I don't think this was about that at all this was never about the kids it was all about her at Chanel 7623 post a great idea hire her her as a cop. She obviously knows how to go undercover. I mean that's a fair point. If you could get Shelby to focus she would fucking kill it as an undercover cop in the right role. At Alsayid cracked me up by posting, hey if she identifies as a teenager then schools should affirm that.

I mean there are a small group of people who seem to believe that we should respect whatever those around us choose to identify as and I know that's the extreme minority but they exist and this is a good example of how that mentality is just utter nonsense. And again the overwhelming majority people when talking about you know identity they're not doing that but sometimes good to use an extreme example to make a solid point. If you're a 32 year old woman you should never get to identify as a teenager. At Andrew Clark 6618 brings up a good point posting hold her accountable just like you would a man. You better. True yeah if a dude did this oh my god he'd be getting fucking crucified. But 32 year old man as

I mentioned earlier got caught enrolling in seventh grade. Regardless of why he did that, 99.99% of people would assume he was doing it to fuck kids and he'd be prosecuted accordingly. At average Joe, RUATJ agrees with this assessment, as do many others in the comment thread. They posted, if a 32 year old man did this, he would be crucified and there would be outrage. He is a predator, he wanted to take advantage of kids, but since it's a 32 year old woman, it's okay. Poor lady, hope she gets the help she needs. LOL, this society is a joke. And now one more silly one. At heavy-duty supernatural chick 3619 posts, she should open her own skincare business.

It's flawless. And she passed as a high school student. I mean, fair. She has great skin. That'd be a pretty funny twist if, you know, after getting out of whatever legal trouble she's in, she just fucking kills it with some new skincare line of lotions and serums and stuff. The majority of the comments under this video, I would say well over half, all just ask a variant of the same question, why? Why did she do this? We'll pop out of here and I'll make ask a variant of the same question. Why why did she do this? We'll pop out of here and I'll uh, I'll make my guess Okay, some quick armchair psychology here

I think Shelby Hewitt did what she did simply because the food you get at a high school cafeteria is she did simply because the food you get at a high school cafeteria is far better than the food you will get at any restaurant you can find for the rest of your life. Think about it. Tater tots? Fucking crispier. The milk? It's creamier. The spaghetti meat is... it's spaghetti meatier. The cheese slices are... are pizza... pizza-ier. No. I think she did what she did because she strongly craved not just attention, not just any kind of attention, but a very specific kind of attention, specifically maternal attention from female authority figures in her life, like her therapist, Rebecca Burnett. She was fixated, hyper fixated on this very specific form of attention, attention she

likely also got from female teachers and administrators at the schools she went to, you know, counselors, etc. Who felt bad for her for being sex trafficked, for being picked on by her classmates, etc. Imagine we all know or have known someone who seems to enjoy negative attention, right? Attention they get from playing the victim. I certainly know these people. Casually now. They might consistently share woe is me posts on social media. They might ask you, you know, how you're doing. Not because they care about how you're doing. They just want an excuse for you to ask them how they're doing, and then they're going to share some sob story like every fucking time. No matter how their life is actually going.

No? And this is not a normal person just having like a rough year or a rough month or a bad day. This is someone regardless of how life is going, they consistently go into full on Debbie Downer. Right, I've known so many people like this. You know, you give them a lot of attention for this behavior and if you keep giving them a shoulder to cry on, oh my God, you poor thing, oh, I'm so sorry. They will just keep feeding on your attention. And it feels to me like they aren't feeding on it.

There's a lady at the gym I go to who's like this. I actively avoid her now because for the last couple years if I engage in any conversation, I'm talking literally every single time without exception that I've had a conversation with her over multiple years, it is always negative on her end. She is always frustrated with something and shares that out the gate. She's upset about her work, she's upset about the weather, she's annoyed with her son. She's annoyed with her husband. She's annoyed with her workout. Just fucking life in general. And her complaints rarely seem valid. They always seem petty. Like, why are you even saying this? It just feels like she is constantly fishing for comments of like, oh gosh dang. Oh you poor thing.

Oh what? Oh my goodness. Why do people do this? Well, for many reasons. Maybe they're lonely. They just, you know, that's how they learn at some point in life to get attention. Growing up, maybe they have very low, low self-esteem. They learned at some point in life that this wasn't just an easy way, right? To get validation from others for people to acknowledge their fucking existence, you know, for people to focus on them, to talk about them. Maybe they're truly narcissistic and they just strongly, you know for people to focus on them to talk about them Maybe they're truly narcissistic and they just strongly, you know pathologically crave others focusing on them even if the focus is negative and

They might have a truly, you know, truly a genuine personality disorder histrionic personality disorder HPD That's a mental condition that causes people to act in a dramatic and emotional way to get attention. The word histrionic means dramatic or theatrical. For people with histrionic personality disorder, their self-esteem depends on the approval of others and does not come from a true feeling of self-worth. They have an overwhelming desire to be noticed and often behave very dramatically or inappropriately to get attention. Histrionic personality disorder usually begins in your late teens or early twenties, shows up in women more often than men. It's rare but not

extremely rare. Showing up in around a 1% of the population. Also not very well understood personality disorders including histrionic personality disorder among the least understood mental health conditions. Studies that have been done about histrionic and other personality disorders have identified several factors that may lead to the development of histrionic or these other personality disorders, genetics. Histrionic personality disorder tends to run in families, so scientists think that there may be an inherited link.

Childhood trauma, children may cope with trauma such as child abuse or the deaths of a family member that later as an adult may be disruptive or problematic in their life and become part of a personality disorder. Parenting styles. Children who experience parenting styles that lack boundaries, are overindulgent or inconsistent, may be more likely to develop histrionic personality disorder. In addition, parents who display dramatic, erratic, volatile, or inappropriate sexual behavior put their children at risk for developing this condition.

Some researchers think that problems in parent-child relationships lead to the characteristic, lead to the characteristic low self-esteem in people with HPD. Did Shelby already have dramatic personality tendencies and then her parents over-indulge these tendencies? They somehow reward her for acting out in negative ways? In addition to probably having some kind of personality disorder, she is also it seems clearly a pathological liar. Someone who tells lies constantly and lies that don't necessarily help her.

Like how she gave her best friend three different reasons for why she did what she did. How was blaming a psychic for pretending to be a seventh grader gonna help her? It wasn't. How did pretending to be a student help her in any real tangible way? It didn't. So why do it? Because, I don't know, because she could I guess. Maybe it wasn't any deeper than that. We wanted to be, we wanted to have some big plan. We want to believe she was working towards some kind of big goal with all of this, but maybe not. Maybe there was no real plan. Maybe she just initially started telling small lies at Walden Behavioral Care, that residential eating disorder recovery center in

Detum, Massachusetts, where she first went as herself. Maybe she did have an eating disorder initially when she went through the first time and then while she was there, she shares a tale based on one of the kids she used to work with as a social worker. A kid everybody gave so much attention to. Oh man, that's so how lucky for them to get all this attention. They felt so bad for her. This kid who actually was homeless, illiterate, a victim of sex trafficking. And now Shelby shares a little bit of this. You know, if she gets caught in this lie, oh well, she can check herself out. Never have to go back to the facility. Never see these people again. Low, you know, consequences.

But she doesn't get caught. She gets so much attention and she likes it. She loves the way the way the attention feels. You know, it's like a drug. She likes it so much she constantly thinks about how good it felt when she was discharged or you know after being discharged and she wants to feel that again. She wants Rebecca Burnett, a therapist, who gave her you know that attention there to give her more of that attention. Attention she craves going back to when she was an undergrad. You know back at Wheelock when Shelby became infatuated with a campus housing administrator. A woman she lied to going back to when she was an undergrad. You know, back at Wheelock, when Shelby became infatuated

with a campus housing administrator, a woman she lied to about being sexually assaulted as a child, a woman she admitted to lying to, to a few of her college friends, justifying it by saying, I need her to love me. This is a tension she has clearly craved since she was an undergrad, if not earlier than that. So now she does something crazier.

She goes back to Walden, behavioral care, under the persona of a 16 year old who was homeless, illiterate, victim of sex trafficking, and she gets even more attention from Rebecca Burnett. And it feels so fucking good. Feels so good she doesn't want to give it up. So she doesn't. So she now pushes Burnett to be her foster mom and then to keep getting attention from Burnett. She goes back to school. She's so damaged. Oh my god. She requires so much attention to fix. You know, and she gets more attention at school. She gets more attention from Burnett. Then maybe she starts to do well in school or if she

were to start to do well in school, then maybe Burnett would not give her the same kind of attention. So she has to act out. She has to go to a new school. You know, she's bullied or whatever. And she just keeps doing whatever she knows will keep Burnett focused on her her on feeling sorry for her It's like she's an addict but replace heroin or crack or meth with a very specific kind of maternal attention The kind of attention this kind of attention was her drug and she was wildly addicted That's the best I got that's the best guess. I got it. What the fuck is going on here? that Shelby Hewitt is an addict and

Unhealthy attention from women in authority roles. That's her drug weird fucking drug. I guess why not? You know people have weird sexual fetishes, you know, I shouldn't say we're just not supposed to say weird I'm supposed to kink shame unusual Unusual in the sense that very few other people have them, you know, so why wouldn't somebody have a very unusual addiction? them. You know, so why wouldn't somebody have a very unusual addiction? Pretending to be a kid, you know, that's her way of getting the her fix. That's way of her getting the the most of the drug she needs. Fucking weird. What? It's a weird world or weird species. Time now for today's takeaways. Time Shuck Top 5 Takeaways.

Number one, Shelby Hewitt, a 32 year old social worker for the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, conned hundreds of people into believing she was an abused, traumatized, homeless teenager for almost an entire year. Her deception was so successful that she even convinced her therapist to take her in as her own foster child. Number two, the first place Shelby posed as a teenager was at Walden Behavioral Care, a residential eating disorder recovery center in Detum, Massachusetts. She was actually treated at Walden twice, once as her adult self, and then again as 16-year-old Daniela Herrera. Number three, in September of 2022, while still working full-time at DCF, Shelby enrolled

at Burke High School as Daniela Herrera. In order to make her story more believable, she fabricated two fake DCF social worker personas and sent emails to the school counselors advocating for Daniela from these fake accounts. The following semester, Daniela transferred to Brighton High School for a more specialized education. Number four, in June of 2022, Shelby discards her Daniela identity and creates a new one, 13-year-old Ellie Blake. As Ellie Blake, Shelby enrolls herself in the seventh grade at English High School near Boston in less than a week. The principal of the school found

discrepancies in her registration files and discovered her social workers were fake. The police were called and Shelby was finally arrested. Number five, new info. Although no criminal charges have been filed against, Rebecca Burnett and John Smith both have retained lawyers to help them defend their innocence in the court of public opinion. Bernat's attorney has stated, the criminal defendant deceived and victimized John Smith and Rebecca Bernat. John and Rebecca are among numerous people who genuinely believed a desperate young person was in need. Despite this, many of Bernat's former colleagues have been outspoken about their belief that the therapist was in on the scheme with Shelby.

And that there was no way she didn't know the truth. But again, just like with Shelby herself, fuck why? What the fuck would Burnett gain from that? What could she have possibly gotten out of that? I think Burnett was likely another victim. And I think former colleagues can't understand how she could have been duped because Shelby's behavior is that unusual. It's that atypical and confusing. Her case is so unique, so rare, even psychological experts just cannot wrap their heads around it. Time shock, top five takeaways.

Shelby Hewitt, the 32 year old seventh grader. Such a fucking weird sentence. That's been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for all the help and making time suck. Starting with Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins this week. Lindsay and I have been off this past week. I don't know what we got. I don't know if we got like COVID for the fucking 27th time.

So much brain fog. So they didn't show too much in this episode. Thanks also to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode. Design merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. Thank you to Molly Jean Box again this week for her initial research. And thanks also to the All Seen Eyes moderating the Cult of the Curious private Facebook page, even to the holidays, the Mod Squad. Making sure Discord keeps running smooth. Yeah, a lot of fine folks out there.

And now let's get to today's updates. Updates! Get your time sucker updates! An anonymous super sucker has shared some dick for us to laugh at. They sent in a message with the subject line of another Richard writing, hey Dan, I've been a huge fan since I heard crazy with the capital F way back when. Thank you. I had to write in and tell you this, my wife and I both work at a company that handles a lot of official documents that require your real legal name and we have both come across a

man named Richard Sniffin. I'll say that again, Richard Sniffin. I don't know who he is but I'm gonna say that again. Richard Sniffin. I don't know who he is, but I'm sure he has some stories. Many thanks to you, Lindsay, and the rest of the Bad Magic crew, Anonymous. And the little PS, if you happen to read this on the show, yeah, please don't use my last name. I'm actually breaking the law for coming here. I didn't use either name, my friend. Dick Sniffin. Holy shit, Anonymous. I googled Richard Sniffin online. I don't know why I had to add online there. Where else would I do? I googled it on a fucking chalkboard. I went to an old chalkboard and I was like, hey chalkboard. I tried to engage Siri in the chalkboard. Hey chalkboard. Tell me about Richard Sniffin.

Nothing happened. Uh, no, I googled his name and found an obituary for a man named Richard Sniffin, Sr. Who died at the age of 61 and Sr. obviously implies Richard Sniffin Sr. who died at the age of 61. And Sr. obviously implies that after growing up, tortured with the name of Dick Sniffin, he cursed his own son with a similar fate. And then I read the obituary, sure enough he did. This Dick Sniffer Sr. was not surprised, or I'm not surprised, a martial arts instructor.

I mean, it makes sense you'd really want to learn how to defend yourself if your name is Dick Sniffin, old Dick Sniff. That's fantastic. Now for a message from a Danger Noodle survivor, Sharpsack Jessica Branton, who wrote it with the subject line of tales from a Pentecostal survivor. Hi Dan and the rest of the Bad Magic crew. I just finished the Melindi Doomsday cult suck and boy oh boy did it take me back to my childhood. I grew up in a very small, very rural community in South Carolina and for the majority of my

childhood my parents were members of the Pentecostal Holiness Church. I could spend hours going on about revivals being forced to fast as a child getting a silent treatment from my dad for not speaking in tongues correctly and so on. I'll try and keep this short and share with you the first time I witnessed snake handling. Oh boy. I think I was about 10 or 11 years old when we drove to the middle of who fucking knows where to a large tent set up in a cornfield for a camp meeting that our church was putting together with some other local churches. My god, this is some backwood shit.

People were talking in tongues, dancing and screaming much like the clips you played in the Melindecult suck, which was super common to go on for hours of these things. The main pastor was pulling people out of the audience and laying hands on them. From an early age I wanted nothing to do with any of this and learned that if I appeared to be so overcome with the spirit that I faked passing out people would leave me the fuck alone and I could just wait it out until I could go home. That cracks me up just picture as a kid just fucking this laying in the back of this tent just pretending to sleep for like two hours like when is this over? When does it be over? So I did just that

But then I was called upon by the pastor a few minutes past to people touching me and speaking in tongues slash praying over me Once they left I got up and tried to return to my seat However, everyone was now gathered around the main pastor guy. I looked over in curiosity and saw he had a plastic bag from Dollar General. That's so perfect. That's weird, I thought to myself. But then this motherfucker pulls out a three to four foot long snake out of his goddamn Dollar General

bag and everyone begins hooping and hollering like it's the greatest thing they've ever seen. This cracks me up after the Shelby Hewitt thing. I'm like, oh man, how did this, why did this, why would this person do something this crazy? And then there's like a lot of people who do some stuff this crazy. This is equally as crazy to me as what Shelby Hewitt did. When you're like, I know what God wants me to pull, me to pull this rattlesnake out of a dollar general bag in the middle of a fucking cornfield. Oh my god. Okay, there. Who knew howling. I stared my most.

What the fuck is actually happening? Stare while the snake immediately latches onto this dude's hand and begins coiling around his arm. I look around to see if anyone is going to help him, but instead everyone is just screaming praise the Lord's while the band gets even louder. Eventually the poor family that owned the farm next door called the local fire department who tried to intervene but the preacher kept screaming, I only need the Lord I rebuke thee. But then they forced him into the ambulance. I never found out what happened to that pastor. I'm not gonna lie. I don't even fucking care what happened to him. Live or die. I don't fucking care. If you're gonna be that guy and you're gonna be that fucking dumb with a snake don't even give a shit if you fucking die at the hospital.

Never found out what happened to this pastor. Witnessed similar snake handling experiences several more times, all of them ending up in someone getting bit and experiencing less than holy side effects. Hella rude of Jesus, by the way. Since then, I've moved across the country, become a therapist. Go figure on that one, right? Gotten married and started a family. Between my husband's weird Mormon poophole loophole upbringing

and me regularly seeing preachers getting handsy with danger noodles, we are hoping to raise our son to be more kind and compassionate without the help of religion. Anyway, I hope you got a kick out of my childhood trauma. We love you guys. Three out of five. Wouldn't change a thing. Your loyal space to Jessica. Oh my God. Ah, Jessica, danger noodle? Danger noodle. That is the best term for a snake I've ever heard. Also could be a great name for a rapist penis. Also a great name for like a punk band. Fucking, I don't know, danger noodle? Like

a silly punk band. Bravo. What an interesting childhood you had. My god, you saw not one, but several grown men willingly get bit by rattlesnakes in fucking tents to prove devotion to God. And you had to pretend to pass out to avoid having grown-ups get handsy with you at revivals. Oh, the crazy ways we meet Zachs try and find meaning for our lives. Good on you for becoming a therapist after all that shit. Curious what you think about the case of Shelby Hewitt. And now, one more from helpful sack, Ashley Dixon. Good on you for becoming a therapist after all that shit. Curious what you think about the case of Shelby Hewitt.

And now, one more from helpful sack, Ashley Dixon. Took some time to write in with the subject line of what's the damn email. As she wrote, dude, you say reach out to Timezuck but never spell out the damn email. Bojangles like the chicken joint? Bojangles like he has a southern drawl with that limp and eye patch? Spell it every once in a while on the podcast or people are gonna get lost on the interweb. Also as much as I'm loving the nightmare fuels because damn man you got some talent But this is bothering the hell out of me. You shake your head. No you nod your head. Yes. You can't shake your head Yes, every time you say it the teacher side of me screams in agony and the OCD and crazy brain cries a little

Seriously though loving the creature store creative stories and the OCD and crazy brain cries a little. Seriously though loving the creatures store creative stories and the twisted turns you make keep up amazing keep up the amazing work with all you do that's very nice. Fellow writer and reluctant high school teacher Ash. Ash thank you you just helped me so much with nod versus shake. I don't know why I was doing that. I would write shake I'm like it doesn't feel right. They're shaking their head but how do I how do I you know discern if it's a yes or a no shake? Because it's not a fucking shake. It's a shake for no. You're shaking left and right. You're nodding up and down for yes. I just had a mental block for the word not, I guess.

I don't, yeah, I write those stories so last minute at the recording. I sadly, I've had some people reach out to offer their editorial skills, and I want to take one of them up on that. I haven't even reached back out to them. Because first I have to get ahead enough to actually have time for them to edit it So I record each one a little nervous of like I know I fuck something up and that's what I was fucking up consistently So I hope I remember that for the next nightmare full story And I wanted to say over the years messages like yours have helped me so much. I'm so grateful I love feedback. Some people really hate it. No, I love it. I still may never have a future as a newscaster, but I do pronounce more words correctly than I used to. And I

do have better grammar than I used to because of messages just like this. Oh, man. Like I didn't realize I was going back and forth between past and present tense all the time in my stories until someone wrote in and pointed that out. If anyone else like to send in a message to help me get better, that sounds like do it. Or if you want to send in a message to help another listener feel less alone while they're going through some shit, even better. Or if you want to share something to make us all laugh or to learn more about a topic we've already covered, please send an email to Bojangles at timesuckpodcast.com that is B-O-J-A-N-G-L-E-S Bojangles at timesuckpodcast.com. B-O-J-A-N-G-L-E-S at

timesuckpodcast.com. Thanks for the reminder to do that Ash. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to shoot us a message. Thanks time suckers. I needed that. We all did. Thanks, Time Suckers. I needed that. We all did. Thanks for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast. Scared to Death, Time Suck each week. Short Sucks, a nightmare fuel on the Time Suck and Scared to Death podcast feed some weeks. Please don't try and go back to high school this week. Or to 7th grade.

Unless you are a teenager. Unless you are like a 7th grade age person. But if you're in your 30s or older, what the fuck? No, move on. It's over. You don't get a redo. Focus on your future. Stop caring so much about high school and junior high. The only people in their thirties that really care about who they were in high school and still talk about it a lot, those aren't people you should be worried

about trying to impress or emulate. They're pretty pathetic. Don't be pathetic as well. Instead, keep on sucking. Toss. Ad Magic Productions. If you just have to go back to school though, make sure and get in a game of dodgeball and fucking dominate.

Now you're all in big, big trouble. This will be so much fun. That's how you redo school. Oh yeah, oh oh oh Keep going round Oh yeah, oh oh oh Oh yeah, oh oh oh Playground Domination Oh Lunchtime!