Was I In A Cult? - LISTEN NOW: “Nobody Should Believe Me”

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Today, we're excited to bring you a special episode from our friend Andrea Dunlop of the “Nobody Should Believe Me” podcast.Last week, Andrea joined us to share her personal story about how Munchausen by Proxy tore her family apart, and the response was overwhelming. We know many of you were left with questions and a desire to dive deeper into this rare and troubling condition. That’s why we wanted to share Andrea’s own podcast, where she explores these themes in greater depth and answers the questions that our conversation only began to uncover. We hope you find this episode as compelling as we do. We’ll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Thank you, as always, for your continued support! ——  We meet accomplished novelist and loving mother Andrea Dunlop as she embarks on a journey to understand the series of events that tore her family apart. We learn that her older sister has been investigated twice for Munchausen by Proxy abuse, which inspired Andrea to learn everything she could about this complex and misunderstood issue. We see Andrea become captivated by the story of Hope Ybarra and go along with her to meet Hope’s father, sister, and brother: the first people Andrea has ever spoken to who’ve actually lived through a case. But can anything prepare Andrea for the truth? __ LISTEN TO “Nobody Should Believe Me” here: https://www.nobodyshouldbelieveme.com/ ___ Merch is here! www.wasiinacult.com  Follow us on Instagram/TikTok/FB: @wasiinacult  Have your own story? Email us: [e-mail]  Please support Was I In A Cult? Through Patreon 

Hello everyone. Hi guys. Welcome to Was I in a cult question mark at the end? Well I was, were you? It was. And if you're a regular listener, you'd know that, but they wouldn't know that about you. Why? Because we haven't had your damned show yet. That is so your fault.

Ah! You know, Liz, it's really hard to get you in front of a mic. You know, you normally don't want to talk. You don't want to be on camera. It's really difficult to push you in front of the mic to tell your story. But I'm so used to being behind the camera. The humility is what makes her so great. It's true guys. I apologize.

We even got a very funny clever email calling us out on it this week, so I appreciate that. But yes, we will get to my story. I'm still blaming you though, Tyler. It's up to you. That's fine. I'll take that. However, we do have a lot of amazing episodes and we have amazing episodes coming up, however. We really do, guys.

We've got an ex-Q and Honor coming to your earballs soon. Oh, wow. I wish they were all ex-Q&Onors, frankly. I wish. Just doing a little bit of the research for that episode. It's triggering. I was like, I'm gonna be a little a a a a when I do this episode, but like I love this guest. She's fantastic.

She's so sweet. So you guys are gonna love it. You're gonna love her. We also have the great Dr. Nadine Macaluso coming on who was. The wife of the wolf of Wall Street. She'll be on pretty soon. Two weeks guys. Uh-huh, we have some other great ones. Jeannie, who was in Zendeck Farms, a crazy little sex cult.

We've got a really cool one that I just did yesterday that I'm really excited about. She is so sweet, so funny, and her dad was a cult leader. Oh, the punchline of this one. I don't want to give it away, but it will make your eyeballs. Yeah, we don't want that that that that my eyeballs. What about your other balls? Sorry I had to ask. I will keep those too. You don't really need them anymore. Those are dropping as well, frankly. I don't need to be surprised to have those drop. This is what happens when you don't write a script. Tyler's testicles come in. You know, you know when you go to the grocery

store and you just get two cantaloupes and you put them in the grocery bag? That's what it's like. that's what it's like for me all the time. That's what you're carrying around? Yeah, it's like that. Okay, so we do have an amazing show today, but it's not our show. It is another person's podcast and this person is Andrea Dunlop. Now Andrea Dunlop we had an episode on last week, Munchausen by Proxy. She is the host of Nobody Should Believe Me, which was inspired by her personal experience of having a sister who has had two investigations of her for this disorder. Disorder. Yeah, Munchausen by proxy. And then her podcast explores other cases, brings on experts. She really does a deep dive on this very unique and horrifying disorder.

Yeah. But she does it in a really professional, unlike us, it's really professionally done guys. It's very thorough and researched well. Not just two people talking about testicles. So to that end, we wanted to bring that show to your ears and see what you guys think and then you can go off and listen to the rest of the seasons. I think she's in her fourth season right now. Oh, Andrea is also the author of four novels, so check those out too. Her latest one is called Women Are The Fierestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestestest. tie Oh, Andrea is also the author of four novels, so check those out too.

Her latest one is called Women Are The Fiercest Creatures. Without further ado, here's her episode, guys, we will, we're busy producing, busy editing, busy interviewing, busy, busy, busy coming up with new fantastic episodes for you. So, thanks for them. Oh, I have something. What? I'm going to say right here for the first time I have two films two films when I produced when I directed and produced in the Toronto International Film Festival. Q the Clap Track. Q Clap Trac. Yes! But the reason I'm saying this is not just to pat myself on the back, but for other people to do it. No, because I will be up in Toronto and I know we have a lot of listeners in Toronto. So any of our listeners, the first person who is on our Patreon who emails from Toronto will get to come to the screening and to a concert with Randy Bachman, Bokman, Turner Overdrive. The film

the film is about Randy Bachman's Lost Guitar and Tau Bachman will be there, whom we've had on the show, and it will be a party on the 12th of September. Any Patreon members who live in Toronto, first one to message. On our Patreon. Get there, guys. Two tickets to the party. That's very close to my birthday by the by. Well I'd invite you Liz but I don't really want to be seen in public with you. That's why

we do a podcast, not a TV show. So we can record miles and miles and miles and miles away from each other. That's very exciting I'm very excited for you. You saw a rough cut. I was going to say it it's really good. It's called Taking Care of Business. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking, emotional. It's an amazing, it's amazing story, amazing film. You did a great job, so. Thanks, to your compliment. I think that's it now.

I think trying to think. Is there anything else? No, there is nothing else we need to cover. In fact, do we want to record that over? I don't know. Do I want to talk about my balls? I mean, seriously? My mother-in-law listens to this. She will know that I'm disgusting. And well, that's it guys. Thanks so much. See you in a couple weeks. What if I told you that I just walked away from a wonderful and very high-profile fitness brand to pursue bigger dreams? And I broke away from my own Golden Handcuffs to pursue a more artistic life. What's up? I'm Kendall Tool. And I'm Gatley Alex and we are so excited to share our new podcast wholeheartedly with Kendall and Gately. The two of us have taken the

uncharted path and felt we were at a great place or at least at a pivot point in our lives to share our biggest tragedies and triumph. So that everyone here with us can learn from our battles, victories and our total Fups and that's from two people who to to to to to to to to to to they. their. their. their. the the. the the the the to to the the to. th. th. th. thi. thi. thi. thi. thi. thi. thi. thi. thi. thi. tha. tha. tha. tha. th. th. their their their their their their their their their their the un. the un. the un. the un. the un. the un. the un. the the the the the the tha. tha. tha. tha. tha. tha. the a. toda. toda. toda. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. today. Good Lord, yes. We're both still navigating life, and we want you to come along on the journey so we can stay in the fight to overcome whatever BS is thrown our way. It's not easy out here, but we'll be walking and talking with you through building careers, self-worth, relationships.

Oh, and get some good laughs. There's tears. T. thau. The's, there's, there's. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. the th. th. th. the th. the th. the the th. the to. the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. th. the. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. th. th. tthat's true. All with our hearts on the line. So if this sounds additive to your journey, we are here for you. Join us every week on Wholeheartedly with Kendo and Gaeli. Wholeheartedly will be available July 17. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse and this content may be difficult for some listeners. If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to Munchhausen Support.com to connect with professionals who can help. People believe their eyes. That's something that actually is so central to this whole issue and to people that experience this

is that we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If you questioned every thing that everyone told you, you couldn't make it through your day. My older sister has been investigated over suspicions of abuse, brought by the doctors who were treating her children. I'm Andrea Dunlop. This is Nobody Should Believe Me. I am a novelist. I am the author of three books, including most recently we came here to forget, which is inspired by my family's story.

My sister has been investigated for Munchausen by proxy child abuse on two occasions that I'm aware of, though I want to be clear that she has never been charged with a crime. I'll get into a little bit more detail about my family's involvement in the first investigation in a future episode. The second investigation concerned her younger child, who neither I nor anyone in my extended family has ever met, because we've been estranged from her for over a decade. The extent of my involvement in the second investigation was to share truthful background information with a detective who reached out to my family and several other relevant authorities. Everything that has happened with my sister has had a huge impact on my life, and this podcast is really about me looking for answers.

The stories I'm going to be sharing about my sister in this podcast concern my lived experience with her, and mostly happened prior to her having children. I'm not a medical professional, and any opinions that I share in this podcast are just that, my opinions, informed by research and my own experience. We're going to be getting into all of the nuances of this in future episodes, but I wanted to start you off with a working definition of Munchhausen by proxy because there is so much confusion around this term. We used the term Munchhausen by proxy a lot in this podcast

because it is the most well-known of the terms used for this, but Munchausen by proxy actually encompasses two different things. One is the act of medical child abuse, which involves a parent or caregiver fabricating, exaggerating, or inducing illness in their child. The second is factitious disorder imposed on another, which is the DSM term for individuals who commit medical child abuse in order to obtain emotional gratification. So even though this is a mental illness, it is rarely diagnosed, and it's never diagnosed in the absence of a conviction for medical child abuse. Even in the most famous case of our era, the Dede Blintered case,

she was never officially diagnosed with infectious disorder imposed on another or Munchausen by proxy. She was also never charged with a crime. When I started writing my third novel, We Came Here to Forget, I really quickly realized that it was going to be about sisters. And then I started getting into the topic of Munchausen by proxy more directly and realized that it just felt very urgent for me to write about. And I think that a huge part of that was because I was working through my own feelings about that while I was getting ready to become a mom.

When I first came across Hopiabara's case, it was in Deanna Boyd's reporting for the Fort Worcestar Telegram. There were just these uncanny similarities about really Hope's life and the story of her family, that struck me right away as being so similar to my sister and my family's story. When I was pregnant with my first child, the specter of these investigations into my sister just hung really heavily on me and in addition to that, you know, her absence from my life during this time was really palpable. She'd been out of my life for many years by the time my daughter was born.

And after some of the things that she'd done, which I'll get to, I felt really strongly that she needed help. Because of that, she cut me and my entire family off. After the second time she was investigated, I set out to learn everything I could about Munchausen by proxy in attempt to come to grips with what had happened in my family. As most people would, I went online and I found the website of Dr. Mark Feldman, who is a professor at the University of Alabama and one of the foremost experts in the world on Munchhausen by proxy and other factitious disorders, and I reached out to him. The American Psychiatric

Association since 1980 has recognized factitious disorder as an ailment when the person induces or feigns illness in themselves and that's called either factitious disorder or post imposed on self or more commonly Munchausen syndrome. When the person is feigning, exaggerating, or inducing illness in another person, that's still a factitious disorder but we refer to it often as much as a proxy. And then malingering is when a person does it not for emotional gratification, but more to acquire tangible goals like money, disability payments, or other rewards like evasion of

criminal prosecution or evasion of military service. So there are subtle differences, but they're important because in some sense, Munchas, by proxy, is paramount because it's a form of child abuse. The others are not. Until you understand the psychology behind it a little bit, in that, you know, folks that have Munchhausen, that psychopathology, they get a dopamine rush from the attention that they get for having a medical issue. So it can be seen like an addiction. So when you understand it in those terms, it's a lot easier to understand the why.

It's a maladaptive coping mechanism that people use to get attention that they feel they need and can't get otherwise. Why a particular person develops it, that is more of a mystery than what it actually is or like how it functions. So all I knew was that my big sister had a today, that is a today that it actually is or like how it functions. So all I knew was that my big sister had lied to me about something really serious, and that is a very hard thing to wrap your head around. I've spent the last decade of my life trying to make sense of my history with my sister, and it is complicated. And it's complicated to talk about.

The truth is, there is so much about our shared history that I will never know. And I find myself still trying to make sense of memories that don't make any sense. There are some incidents where I do know definitively that don't make any sense. There are some incidents where I do know definitively that she lied. And those are the memories that I can share with you. Many others, I can't. So I was reading everything I could get my hands on about Munchausen by proxy at the time.

I was doing interviews on the topic. I was talking to a lot of experts and throughout all of that, you know, I found that this story of Hope Yabara and her family just really stuck with me. I just had this very strong feeling that I could get to the bottom of something that I needed answered for myself by talking to Hope in her family. I started trying to get in touch with Hope's family members. I knew she had three siblings. I reached out to Robin Putcher and she just happened to be to be the to with Hope's family members. I knew she had three siblings. I reached out to Robin Putcher, and she just happened to be living at the time

about an hour and a half south of me. So she was actually the first person that I sat down to Seattle, drove south to the Tacoma area where Robin was living at the time. You too, because I'm such a humber. I did have a dog. So what was Hope like growing up? She was like the perfect sister, you know, she was the perfect student.

She was the oldest and she had all the responsibility in the house and she never let that bother her, you know, like parents put a lot of weight on their kids, especially a mom of four dinners and getting us in the shower and the laundry and that was all hope's kind of responsibility and she just carried it. It wasn't like at the end of day she goes, I shouldn't have to do this or why do I have to make dinner? She just did it. As I was talking to Robin, that feeling that I'd started out with of Hope's life and family being a parallel to my own was just deepening in this really extraordinary way. I really wanted to talk to the rest of her family and just fill this picture out and so I was able to get in toucester and her younger brother, Nick Pitcher, who both live in Fort Worth, Texas. My name is Paul Pitcher. I'm the father of Hopi Bar.

We didn't really notice anything, any issues whatsoever, before anything started happening. And it was, everything was cool. Hope's younger brother Nick really looked up to her during their childhood. So Hope was the oldest of the four of us. We were really, really close, especially as I got into high school. And that's really where my relationship with Hope had grown a lot. She was the first person in my family that had gone to college. Mom and dad were always really proud. She did really well.

She was doing well in her life, and was kind of an inspiration for me. I could talk to her about what she had gone through, how she got to where she's at, and lean on her for kind of a resource because I wanted to go to school. I wanted to eventually be able to help take care of mom and dad and do all of that stuff. Again, Robin, Hope's younger sister. You know, she participated in all of our stuff. My brother, my sports events, and she would be our taxi or a chauffeur and she still had such an exuberant social life. You know, she had friends and she was in clubs and she was in marching band. In jazz band, she paid the saxophone and then she played the clarinet in marching band, you know, and she could play the piano and her and my mom shared that commonality I could never learn, you know?

She just was very outgoing. I'm just sitting here smiling because I think talking about this part, it th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th th the th the the the the the the the the thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thi the the th I think talking about this part, it reminds me so much. You know, my sister was so fun. She had this incredibly light-hearted personality. She was magnetic. She was smart. She always had a ton of friends.

She had this really close circle of friends from band. She played the French horn. I looked up to her in terms of, you know, just in the way that little sisters look up to big sisters. She just seemed to have things, you know, more figured out. She always had boyfriends. She's incredibly warm, very smart. And so funny, so silly. People loved her.

Pretty green eyes, really All-American girl next door sounds like hopeless really similar. So striking to me. That's scary. Yeah, it's almost like it's a little eerie. There was certainly a definitive moment where I lost my sister. You know, 10 years ago ago I remember really vividly having what may turn out to be the final conversation that I have with her in my

life, but at the same time I also felt like I lost her little by little. In my memory, there's a person who is this funny, vibrant person with all of these interests. Someone who's a swimmer loves horses and who was the partner in crime to all my childhood adventures. Someone who was this loving, warm person. And she just disappeared little by little over the years. And her strange behavior has just escalated. Here's Hope Ybarra's father, Paul Pitcher, who told me about an incident that happened to Hope in high school.

So, you know, really wasn't until about 16 when she fell out of bed on a, we just tiled her floor and she fell on the towel floor and heard her back supposedly. Like she couldn't walk and she was, you know, she was in a wheelchair for a couple months and thinking back, this was probably the first sign of some things amok, but being young parents ourselves, we just kind of blew right through it and rolled her around in the wheelchair and she was in the band. And so we went to Texas Stadium. The football team was playing in playoffs and the band was out on the field and we rolled her out in her uniform out onto the field. My boss got to roll her back and we were doing wheelies and everything and it was a good six

months, eight months of heavy caregiving, heavy, you know, heavy, heavy love and for all of us. And finally she got better but there was no rhyme or reason. Two or three doctors said there's nothing wrong with her, there's no reason she shouldn't be walking. My sister had the same thing at the same age, not from falling out of bed, but she had when she was 16, she's really active, it always been healthy, she was a swimmer, and she had this mysterious back injury and it wouldn't go away, and she was wearing this big plastic brace, she convinced doctors to do surgery on her..... th. th. th. th. th. I I I I th. I th. I th. I th. I th. I th. their the the their the the the their the the the wouldn't go away and she was wearing this big plastic brace. She convinced doctors to do surgery on her. I want to clarify here that I didn't know then and I still don't know how many of my sister's

ailments that she had in high school and beyond were real and how many were fabricated. She had a series of surgeries on her back and knee that look different to me and my family now looking back knowing what we know. There is one incident that stuck with me because we did have evidence. When she was in high school she started losing her hair. Obviously that is like the sort of nightmare thing for a teenage girl. My mom took her to the dermatologist to have a look at it, and dermatologist

pulled my mother aside and said, she's not losing it. She's shaving it. That was a very definitive, like, oh, we know that she was faking that. I think my parents tried to get her to go speak to a therapist at the time and she just sort of blew him off. You know, she was always able to explain these things away. She always had an uncanny ability to just sort of like move forward. My parents have gone through all that same thing of like in the light of what happened after but you know so much of what doctors base everything off of is what the patient's reporting their pain to be, right?

Again, Robin. So seizures in high school and then the, you know, the paraplegia that came along with that and then her miraculous recovery came about her senior year. So her goal was to be able to walk across the stage. So she managed to be able to regain her ability to walk just in time to be able to walk across the stage and graduate. And then she was walking in, then she went to college. Yeah, it was really similar with my sister, actually, it was there are things that I think for my parents, they can look back even further.

For me, definitely high school is where, yeah, she started having all these problems with her knee, with her back. She had a couple of surgeries, and even then it's just, you know, the doctors were basing what they were doing off of what she was saying. That summer, they packed her up and they brought her to school over in El Paso, Texas, and it was this very typical taking your child to the university. My mom and dad went and helped her pack into her dorm and she was doing great, you know, very typical things. She was participating in band, obviously. She also picked up jujitsu and was taking classes at night to be able to you know defend herself and she was all the sudden just thriving again in school and then my mom got a call that Hope had had a seizure at

school. They had found her in her dorm on the ground and so my mom of course rushed down there and mortified that her daughter is so far away and needing her. So she got her back on her feet, got her back into school, made sure everything was fine. Then when she was in college, she'd met her husband to be Fabian Ybarra, and they had actually had their first child while Hope was still in school. She managed to have this baby and she's supposedly had complications, broke her tailbone. So my mom was there nursing her back to health, you know, with this new dad and this new mom and the new dad didn't know how to take care of a child and they shared funny stories.

He peed on them, the first diaper change. And still, at this point, she was th, she was th, she was th, th, th, th, th, th, the the the the thi thi thi thi thi thi thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, tho, tho, tho, tolde, tolde, tolde, tolde, tolde, tolde, tolde, tolde, tolde, tolde, tolde, to to to to to to to to the, the, the, the, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thr-s, throwne, throwne, thoooooooo them, the first diaper change. And still at this point she was a couple years into her schooling, she was going to become a veterinarian. She decided now as a new mom that she couldn't do that because she was had to care of the family and so she changed her program and got her degree in chemistry. And so then they got married a great beautiful wedding and had another child after that. Very typical family she was working is a chemist.. She. She. She the the th. She th. She th. She th. She thist. She the thiist. She thiist. She the the to. She was a chemist. She was a chemist. She was a thi. She was a thi. She was a to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to become to become to become to become to become to become to become she was to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be to be thi. She was. She was. She was. She was. She was a the the the the the the the the the the the the the te. Shea. She has the the the the the the the the the the the the the beautiful wedding and had another child after that. Very typical family she was working is a chemist. He was a school teacher. They were raising their now two children.

They had a home. Just so I could say the All-American dream. Even at this point, everything we had been through, nothing said something wasn't right. It really seemed like Hope had everything someone could want, including a happy marriage and beautiful family. When we spoke to Fabian Yabara in Fort Worth, he had a somewhat different take on things. I don't think we were in love, I think we're just trying to make it work. After like the second year, my son, I think that's when it started.

Something clicked. I believe when my first daughter, the middle child, when she was born, that was, that's when you saw everything changed. And they had a two-story house and seven months along, Hope felled on the stairs and went into preterm labor. And so here this baby was born, 28 weeks, she was a pound and a half or, you know, some ridiculously small weight, and she spent months in the NICU. And so here we are now a family dedicated to taking care of hope and her family and her kids and she's power throughing everything and still being a devout mom and wife and managing it all

so well that's whenever you could start to see that things were changing a little bit with hope. I can't even say that she lost her light at that point but but that's whenever things, that's what sets the rest of things into motion. After Hope had her second child with Fabian, she later told her family that she was pregnant with twins. This detail of the pregnancy with twin girls really stuck with me because we'd had an identical situation in my family where my sister told us that she was pregnant with twins. So when I was in my 20s, she was with a partner and she got pregnant. You know, they were engaged, so it was a really exciting thing.

It was like a really happy piece of news. And she told us that she was having twins, and they were, you know, twin girls, and I was living in New York at the time. I was saw her when I was home for Thanksgiving, and I was so excited. I knew their names. We bought gifts. My parents and I, we're all out of town.

I think we were out of town together. We're in Las Vegas. And my sister called us, she was about six months pregnant at the time, so pretty far long. She called us, and she said that she was going into labor early and she was going to the hospital and my parents like scrambled to get a flight home. She was calling and giving us updates and I was having these long conversations with her and she was saying, they've got me in the hospital, they're holding me upside down so the

babies stay in, kind of like a little bit gallows humor about it and and then she lost the babies and I was so sad for her I was so excited to be an auntie and I really felt that grief of like losing those two little girls and then thin. I was so excited to be an auntie and I really felt that grief of like losing those two little girls. And then things started to unravel really quickly. I think it was my dad who called me and said, you know, there's something about all of this that's not adding up. And I spoke to the friend who my sister had told me, took her to the hospital when she was losing the babies. That friend told me she had

the understanding that my sister's fiance had been the one to take her to the hospital and that they'd been there together when she lost the babies. That was impossible because he was living in Tennessee at the time and unbeknownst to me at that moment was no longer her fiance. When I got his version of events many years later, he told me that he'd had doubts throughout the pregnancy and eventually surmised that she had probably never been pregnant at all, which is the conclusion that we'd all eventually come to. I did confront her on this once.

During my final conversation with her that I had, which was during the first investigation into her, and I asked her how she expected me to believe her when she'd lied about something as serious as an entire pregnancy. She didn't deny it, but said indignantly, I don't know why you're bringing that up now. This fact of the fake twin pregnancy is the most striking similarity between my sister and Hope, and I asked Robin about it. Do you remember finding out that the pregnancy hadn't been real?

So I remember her losing the twins and us coming and mourning with her. My sister's belly was very real. I saw the ultrasounds. I held them. My sister was pregnant in that moment, in my mind. So when my sister was pregnant, reportedly, with twins, I put my hand on her belly and felt a baby kick. And I now know that that wasn't real,

but my experience was real, and I don't even know what to do with that. The twins that she lost were Alexandria and Alexia, so my son's name is Alexander after theins, that come to find out never, they never existed. It took us probably a couple months to realize that the babies weren't true. We mourned these babies. The final deciding factor is my mom found the urn, and she opened up the urn and it was empty. That to my mom was enough closer to realize that my sister was not telling the truth about anything.

For me, the thing that I could never do and that I do not foresee having an opportunity to do in my life is to sit down with my sister and say I can help you. But that's true that I could help her. Like one of the things I've really wrestled with in this podcast that I didn't really even realize I was holding on to is this hope that I'll do this and that she'll hear it and say, I'm exhausted, I want to come home. Help me come home. In the next episode, we'll do a deep dive into Hopiubara's case and talk to her family about what it was like to try to unravel all of her lies. If you've been listening to this podcast and some of the today, and some of the the the the the the the case and talk to her family about what it was like to try to unravel all of her lies.

If you've been listening to this podcast and some of the details sound very familiar to you from your own life or someone that you know, please visit us at Munchausen. tho'n'n' told us. We have resources this show in the topic of Munchhausen by proxy, follow me on Instagram, at Andrea Dunlop. If you would like to support the show, you can do so at Patreon. tho-Com slash Nobody Should Believe Me. And if monetary support is not an option for you right now, you can also rate and review the podcast on Apple

and share on your social media. Word of Mouth is so important for podcasts and we really appreciate it. Nobody Should Believe Me is a production of large media. Our lead producer is Tina Noll. The show was edited by Lisa Gray with help from Wendy Nardy. Jeff Gahl is our sound engineer. Additional scoring and music by Johnny Nicholson and Joel. Also special thanks to Maria Pallogas, Joel Noll and Katie Klein for project coordination. I'm your the the the the the the the the the th the th. I thi thi thi the thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thoe thoe thoe thoe thoe, thoe, thoe, thoe, nobody thoe, thanks to Maria Palliologus, Joel Noll, and Katie Klein for project coordination.

I'm your host and executive producer Andrea Dunlop.