Jill | Betrayal Weekly

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Speaker 1 Hey, Betrayal fans, I have exciting news to share. Season three of Betrayal is now a docu-series on Hulu.
It's the gripping story of Stacey Tyler and the doctor who betrayed them.

Speaker 1 See the voices you've come to know in Betrayal, Under His Eye, streaming now on Hulu.

Speaker 14 It was just my daughter and me, the TV and the laundry, and I just remember being on the ground, totally hyperventilating, having the only panic attack I've ever had in my life.

Speaker 18 If this could be true and I could have

Speaker 4 no

Speaker 12 idea,

Speaker 4 How on earth would I ever know who the monsters were?

Speaker 1 I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything.

Speaker 1 Today we have a story about family, about what it means to love someone and to lose them, not to death, but to something much harder to talk about.

Speaker 21 In some ways it feels harder to grieve for a person who isn't dead.

Speaker 1 That's Dr. Jill Stoddard.
She's a clinical psychologist, a mother, a woman with a close-knit family, and what she always thought was a safe, ordinary childhood.

Speaker 16 So I grew up in a suburb of Boston, stereotypical middle-class WASPI kind of upbringing.

Speaker 11 Mom was always home when we got home from school, and even though dad worked hard, he was always home by six o'clock for dinner, so it felt like a very normal, intact family.

Speaker 1 Jill is the oldest. Then came her brother John, who was two years younger.
And then when Jill was seven, her youngest brother was born.

Speaker 25 When my little brother was born, my mom would always say, well, we can't very well name you Jill, John, and Bob.

Speaker 27 It just doesn't sound good.

Speaker 28 And so she named him Jim.

Speaker 15 And then all of our, you know, holiday cards, everything from that point on, whenever my parents signed it, it was their first names and the three J's.

Speaker 1 From the time he was a baby, Jimmy stood out in the best way.

Speaker 32 We were all very average-looking brunettes, brown hair, brown eyes.

Speaker 17 And he had this bright orange hair and bright blue eyes and freckles.

Speaker 33 And, you know, he was so just stunning-looking and adorable.

Speaker 36 I feel like he kind of always had a little bit of drool on his face for some reason when he was little.

Speaker 16 And people would stop us on the street.

Speaker 33 to comment on his hair and how cute he was.

Speaker 1 Jill adored her little brother. He wasn't just a cute baby.
He was a happy baby.

Speaker 4 He was just this like very lovable, goofy, funny little guy.

Speaker 16 And one of his favorite things that he would do on command is we would say, happy face, and he would make this like very big, bright, smiley happy face.

Speaker 12 And then we'd say, mad face, and then he'd make this very mad face.

Speaker 39 And it just

Speaker 4 cracked us up.

Speaker 1 As he got older, Jimmy clearly looked up to Jill and John. They would lovingly tease him and he played along too.

Speaker 41 We would yell the word servant, like servant, and then you would hear pitter patter, pitter, patter, pitter, patter, pitter, patter.

Speaker 44 And he would just come running and you'd say, go make me some chocolate milk.

Speaker 39 And he would like happily go run and make chocolate milk because he just, he was like, just happy to be included, you know?

Speaker 1 When the family got a camcorder, the kids filmed skits and commercials.

Speaker 16 One of the skits we would do was Mr.

Speaker 11 Rogers, and he would play Mr.

Speaker 16 McFeely and ring the doorbell and say, speedy delivery, speedy delivery, and was just like always up for

Speaker 28 anything.

Speaker 1 Having Jimmy in tow made everything more fun. Besides his red hair, Jimmy's most defining feature was his laugh.

Speaker 4 Not only

Speaker 37 was he hilarious,

Speaker 40 But he laughed really easily.

Speaker 20 And that just always felt so good that even if you're not a person that everyone thinks of as being really funny, when you were with him, you felt really funny.

Speaker 1 Despite their seven-year age difference, Jill loved his company.

Speaker 29 I don't ever remember there being a time where I was like, you're annoying.

Speaker 12 Get away from me.

Speaker 29 I think even as we both got older, he was still my baby brother.

Speaker 32 And we were very, very close.

Speaker 16 And he was always just

Speaker 23 sweet and fun and funny.

Speaker 4 And I'm sure that there were probably times that, you know, I closed my door and was like, get away from me.

Speaker 1 But those moments aren't the ones she remembers.

Speaker 1 When Jill thinks back on her childhood, there's Jimmy in the frame every time with his messy red hair and his huge smile.

Speaker 1 Because Jimmy was the baby, Jill says, he got away with a lot.

Speaker 33 Our parents were a fair amount more permissive with him, which I think is pretty typical typical of third children.

Speaker 46 Maybe because you're tired by the time you have a third child coming along, you're older.

Speaker 4 Kind of like been there, done that.

Speaker 43 You're like less worried, less anxious.

Speaker 1 As Jimmy got older,

Speaker 35 he got in trouble more often than we did.

Speaker 4 And a lot of the things he got in trouble for were not things that my middle brother and I weren't also doing.

Speaker 12 He just got caught more frequently than we did.

Speaker 1 Their mom had a hypothesis about why Jimmy always seemed to get in trouble at school.

Speaker 39 The teacher's writing on the chalkboard, and all the little kids in class are chit-chatting, and she turns around to see who the culprit is, and you're looking at a sea of brown and blonde heads.

Speaker 11 You know, your eyes are naturally drawn to the bright orange-haired kid.

Speaker 1 There was some sense in it, but it didn't explain why Jimmy was falling behind in school.

Speaker 25 At some point, my mom told me that she had all three of us IQ tested.

Speaker 16 She never told us the results or the scores, but she did tell us that Jimmy had the highest IQ, which is not surprising.

Speaker 17 Like he was very naturally intelligent, but he probably did the worst in school, which I would guess is probably because he had untreated ADHD until he was in high school.

Speaker 41 And then by then,

Speaker 29 you know, I think when you have a history of like

Speaker 11 kind of always doing the wrong thing because you have untreated ADHD, you sort of stop trying to do the right thing.

Speaker 1 By high school, Jimmy developed a pattern of making excuses.

Speaker 1 It was hard to tell what was just Jimmy being Jimmy and what was cause for concern. But Jill was hardly around for those years because she left for college when Jimmy was 11.

Speaker 1 She studied psychology because she wanted to know how people tick. She called her parents every week and they would give her updates about Jimmy.

Speaker 1 She remembers one story in particular that gave her pause.

Speaker 11 He got in a fight with a classmate in high school.

Speaker 4 I don't remember why.

Speaker 38 And we like smashed a tennis racket.

Speaker 43 I think he might have physically assaulted the kid because I remember my dad saying that the family was threatening to sue.

Speaker 11 So it was more than just an angry outburst that ruined a tennis racket.

Speaker 38 And so that kind of thing was like the start of us seeing there's something going on with him.

Speaker 1 At the time, Jill was focused on getting her master's degree. And despite being a troublemaker in high school, Jimmy ended up getting accepted to the same college as his two older siblings.

Speaker 4 I think I thought of it at the time as like, I'm not his mom.

Speaker 38 I'm his sister.

Speaker 49 Like, it's not my job to figure out how to get him in line.

Speaker 1 When Jill was accepted into a PhD program, it meant she would need to move back to Boston. So she packed up to move across the country.

Speaker 1 On the way, she planned to stop at her parents' house for the night.

Speaker 29 I had driven cross-country with my boyfriend at the time, and we ended up arriving one day ahead of schedule.

Speaker 26 And we arrived at night to my parents' house, and my parents must have been out of town for some reason.

Speaker 16 And Jimmy was having a party. And I walked into the kitchen, and there was cocaine on the table.

Speaker 4 You know, there's a rolled-up dollar bill.

Speaker 1 She'd never seen cocaine in real life.

Speaker 4 Jimmy told her to relax.

Speaker 1 He was 20 at the time.

Speaker 25 It's not like he was a child, but to me, no matter how old we got, he was always my baby brother.

Speaker 32 And so it just felt very shocking.

Speaker 1 As Jill started her PhD program, Jimmy was in college.

Speaker 26 This was a time where

Speaker 43 I was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

Speaker 29 There was always some 35-page paper due.

Speaker 1 But as busy as she was, she wouldn't miss Jimmy's college graduation. When the time came, she bought a plane ticket and traveled a few states north.

Speaker 18 I have

Speaker 23 no time and no money.

Speaker 17 But this was a really big deal that he was graduating.

Speaker 11 And so my entire family flew out and got up early and were sitting in the auditorium waiting for him to cross the stage.

Speaker 16 They're reading the names alphabetically and they go right past where he should have been.

Speaker 16 And we waited and were very confused and he never walked across the stage.

Speaker 1 The family got in their rental car and drove to Jimmy's apartment, concerned.

Speaker 16 So we knocked on the door.

Speaker 32 He answered the door looking very sleepy.

Speaker 17 All the lights were off.

Speaker 38 And he started ranting about his stupid effing roommate who must have turned off his alarm.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 43 we were so upset.

Speaker 16 We spent all this time and money and effort to get out to this big event and like he couldn't even be responsible enough to show up to the graduation.

Speaker 20 You know, it turned into a fight and we decided to go home early.

Speaker 16 It just felt like it was an escalation of irresponsibility and unreliability.

Speaker 1 Their family wondered if Jimmy actually graduated at all. Her parents asked him directly.

Speaker 29 And he said, no, no, I definitely graduated.

Speaker 42 And they had no way of proving it.

Speaker 17 They're paying for his school, but they don't have access to his school records.

Speaker 29 So there was nothing they could really do to confirm whether this was the truth.

Speaker 31 And I think ultimately they just opted to believe him.

Speaker 1 But Jill still had her suspicions about what really happened that weekend.

Speaker 32 It was years later and we were.

Speaker 34 having fun and having drinks. And I asked him, I said, tell me the truth.

Speaker 4 Like, what was the real story?

Speaker 47 Did you graduate?

Speaker 23 And he was like, well, don't tell mom and dad, but no, I didn't graduate.

Speaker 29 So the whole thing was actually premeditated.

Speaker 15 And the lie about the alarm clock and his

Speaker 43 ire that how dare we leave him when this wasn't his fault, it was all an act.

Speaker 4 All along, he knew that he wasn't.

Speaker 48 graduating.

Speaker 1 The conversation made Jill see her brother a little differently. Before this moment, she knew he could be irresponsible, but she didn't know he had the capacity to lie like this.

Speaker 29 I had a pretty complicated emotional reaction to that.

Speaker 32 I was really angry.

Speaker 47 It was sort of like, how dare you?

Speaker 17 Like, how can you do this to us?

Speaker 4 You know, I think the anger was the thing that was covering the harder emotion, which was like fear.

Speaker 1 Fear of who her brother really was and what he was capable of.

Speaker 18 So after his fake graduation from college, I remember him kind of like job jumping a fair amount because he always had a terrible boss, you know, that kind of thing.

Speaker 15 And that was kind of the extent that my middle brother and I knew.

Speaker 1 Jimmy became an arborist, a tree expert, and he started his own landscaping business.

Speaker 20 He ended up moving back to New England and lived in the same town as my middle brother and his family.

Speaker 43 And so they started to see more of him and to see some behaviors that were concerning.

Speaker 16 He was going to go out and get his truck washed and he'd be gone for hours.

Speaker 38 And then he would come back and his truck wouldn't be washed, but he would never explain where he was or what he was doing.

Speaker 1 Every year, there'd be one good visit with Jimmy and one visit where Jimmy was clearly up to something.

Speaker 17 Despite the irresponsibility and the frustration, I still adored him and we were still very close. Like I was frustrated by his behavior, but pretty quick to forgive him.

Speaker 16 And partly that's because he's my baby brother and he wasn't always like that.

Speaker 4 And that cute little sweet and enthusiastic and happy little boy, like he was still that in so many ways.

Speaker 29 I even remember while I was in graduate school having a conversation with one of my friends, that classic question of like, if you were going to be stranded on a desert island with five people who would be on your island, and he was at the top of my list.

Speaker 1 Jimmy was there when Jill got married in Vegas. It was an intimate wedding, a house party.

Speaker 38 But the next morning, Jimmy was taking someone to the airport and he disappeared for hours.

Speaker 20 And when he finally came back, he was like sweaty and anxious and claimed it was because he was lost.

Speaker 4 I just remember my brother, my sister-in-law, my husband, and I all being like, something is going on here.

Speaker 17 No idea what it is, but it's got to be drugs, right?

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Speaker 1 After years of Jimmy's strange behavior, Jill and her other brother John assumed that he must be secretly using drugs. It was the only logical explanation.

Speaker 1 By 2013, Jill had achieved some big life milestones.

Speaker 11 I was working as a professor in a graduate school for psychology. My daughter had just turned one, and I was working on my very first book.

Speaker 1 One day, she was home alone with her infant daughter.

Speaker 43 I was in my my family room, TV on, daughters playing on the floor, and I was folding laundry.

Speaker 16 And I got a text message from John that said he was on his way to go bail Jimmy out of jail.

Speaker 15 And of course, we're speculating back and forth.

Speaker 16 What do you think this is?

Speaker 20 It's got to be drugs because this was on the heels of some of this bizarre suspicious behavior.

Speaker 49 So we thought, okay, this is our confirmation.

Speaker 16 He's using drugs.

Speaker 17 I was like, all right, just keep me posted.

Speaker 16 And so he started texting me with updates as he got them.

Speaker 23 I don't remember what all the texts said, but I do remember the one that came through that said, it's a class C felony.

Speaker 15 A felony,

Speaker 16 either he has like a large amount or he was distributing or selling.

Speaker 1 But then Jill got the text that changed her life. The police had confiscated Jimmy's computer.

Speaker 1 And they'd found photos of underage girls.

Speaker 20 What made it a felony was that the children in the images were clearly under the age of 12.

Speaker 4 They were prepubescent.

Speaker 4 And I remember

Speaker 4 like falling to the ground.

Speaker 15 having the only panic attack I've ever had in my life.

Speaker 20 My husband wasn't home, and it was just my daughter and me, the TV and the laundry.

Speaker 13 And I just remember being on the ground, totally hyperventilating.

Speaker 4 Oh,

Speaker 16 this to this day, so it's been 12 years.

Speaker 38 I just remember feeling so panicked

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 14 if this could be true about my brother, and I could have

Speaker 4 no

Speaker 12 idea,

Speaker 16 how on earth was I ever going to keep my daughter safe?

Speaker 4 How on earth would I ever know

Speaker 19 who the monsters were?

Speaker 1 Jimmy insisted that he'd been framed.

Speaker 14 Just like he told us he graduated and his alarm didn't go off, we didn't believe anything he was saying.

Speaker 1 Jill formed an alliance with her sister-in-law, John's wife.

Speaker 11 And so she and I, we would get on the phone for hours and hours and hours and talk about all of this ad nauseum because we were on the same page and we were both new moms.

Speaker 29 All we cared about was making sure that our kids were safe.

Speaker 30 Nothing else mattered.

Speaker 49 So my sister-in-law ended up actually going to the courthouse to get access to whatever records were public.

Speaker 16 And so she was able to see what the arrest was for.

Speaker 11 It listed the file names of the content that they found on his computer.

Speaker 1 It wasn't a lot of information, but it was enough. These were photos of girls as young as six.
Jimmy had photoshopped himself into some of the images.

Speaker 1 But when it came to his sentencing, the consequences were not significant.

Speaker 16 I think he maybe spent a couple weeks incarcerated. And then he was on the sex offender registry.

Speaker 1 To Jill, it seemed like a slap on the wrist. but the interpersonal cost was immeasurable because after Jimmy's arrest,

Speaker 38 our family kind of fell apart.

Speaker 1 A stark divide formed in the family. Jill, her husband, and her sister-in-law wanted to cut Jimmy out of their lives.

Speaker 1 But her parents weren't on the same page.

Speaker 30 And I remember them saying things like, well, I mean, isn't it not as bad because it's only pictures?

Speaker 16 They wanted to find a way to explain it a way that wasn't as horrific as what the reality was.

Speaker 30 A lot of just mental gymnastics and denial and what resulted from that,

Speaker 16 I think it was pretty clear to Jimmy that he could fairly successfully manipulate my parents.

Speaker 30 He told them that his addiction to Adderall is what caused him to do this.

Speaker 24 And I had several conversations with them, you know, as a clinical psychologist, saying

Speaker 16 being high on Adderall very likely led him to feel disinhibited so that he was more likely to engage in these behaviors.

Speaker 24 But the drug itself did not cause him to be attracted to little girls.

Speaker 1 Jill and her sister-in-law drew a firm boundary that they would not interact with Jimmy. They both had young daughters to protect.
And in response, Jimmy lashed out.

Speaker 30 And so he sent me and my sister-in-law very nasty messages.

Speaker 16 He told me I should go kill myself.

Speaker 15 Cruel, lashing out emails, the likes of which we had never seen.

Speaker 30 We had not seen this side of him.

Speaker 1 That year, Their parents invited Jimmy to the family reunion.

Speaker 4 And we were like, what? No, there are going to be children there. He can't be there.

Speaker 52 And I remember saying, finally, like, I will tell everyone.

Speaker 14 I am not allowing him to be around children without the parents knowing.

Speaker 11 My parents didn't want anyone to know.

Speaker 39 They wanted to keep this a secret.

Speaker 31 So I think they ultimately just told him he couldn't come.

Speaker 47 Jill didn't talk to her little brother for four years.

Speaker 1 That was until their mom got sick. When it became clear that she was near the end of her life,

Speaker 17 of course, my little brother also wanted to say goodbye to his dying mother, and we were all there together.

Speaker 16 And so, my dad asked our permission, basically, to let him come.

Speaker 43 Honestly, it was a hard decision, but it wasn't.

Speaker 17 You know, it was like, of course, he has the right to see his mom and say goodbye to his mom.

Speaker 24 And there were no children present for any of that.

Speaker 16 So we let him come.

Speaker 30 And this was the first time we saw him.

Speaker 1 When Jimmy walked in the door, he looked like his old self. He seemed clear-eyed and genuine.

Speaker 17 He assured us that he was clean.

Speaker 16 His behavior was quite different.

Speaker 16 He apologized for the mean emails that he sent to my sister-in-law and me.

Speaker 47 He apologized for the terrible way that he had treated all of us.

Speaker 16 He was very sincere, and we believed him. We believed that even if he still had this sexual proclivity, he wasn't acting on it.

Speaker 1 After that, Jill and Jimmy were on speaking terms again.

Speaker 47 We agreed to try to

Speaker 16 repair the rupture in our relationship, but of course, with like gigantic boundaries, that he would not be ever unsupervised around kids or anything like that.

Speaker 38 And that lasted for a year, exactly one year.

Speaker 1 It was their grandmother's 99th birthday party.

Speaker 20 He was there, and it became instantly obvious that something was wrong.

Speaker 21 He's acting super cagey.

Speaker 16 He's being weird.

Speaker 29 He's sleeping a lot.

Speaker 4 He's being very aggressive and hostile.

Speaker 24 He got in a fight with someone in a bar.

Speaker 40 I mean, just kind of back to a lot of the old stuff.

Speaker 30 And I remember leaving the weekend and my sister-in-law and I talking and just saying, like, the other shoe's going to drop.

Speaker 16 We're just waiting for the call.

Speaker 31 The call's going to come.

Speaker 27 And then, sure enough, shortly after that,

Speaker 53 we

Speaker 4 got the call.

Speaker 1 A few months earlier, the police had received another tip about Jimmy.

Speaker 16 They executed a search warrant at his house.

Speaker 17 They confiscated his computers.

Speaker 20 They also found several thumb drives in various pockets of his clothing.

Speaker 1 He wasn't home during the search. His roommate called to tell him that the police were looking for him, but Jimmy was nowhere to be found.

Speaker 1 So the police tracked his cell phone to try and make the arrest. When they finally found him,

Speaker 29 he had climbed up a very high tree.

Speaker 16 He was a tree guy, an arborist, so he had equipment to climb trees.

Speaker 4 And the police all came and he was demanding a letter that he would not be held responsible for what they found.

Speaker 20 And if they didn't give him that letter, that he was going to jump and kill himself.

Speaker 13 They ultimately talk him down out of the tree and they arrest him.

Speaker 1 This time, the FBI was involved. Jimmy insisted again that he had been framed.
Jill knew it was a lie, but she didn't have the FBI report. She didn't know exactly what he'd done.

Speaker 1 And she was determined to find out.

Speaker 32 We had a close family friend that was friends with my middle brother since like third grade, and he's a private investigator, actually.

Speaker 49 This family friend was able to get access to this very detailed FBI report.

Speaker 27 He emailed it to me, and my husband begged me not to read it.

Speaker 52 He begged me.

Speaker 1 What was in this report would determine the future of her family. The four years that she'd been estranged from Jimmy tore her family apart.
They'd just gone back to speaking terms.

Speaker 1 If Jill was going to put her father through that again, she needed to see it with her own eyes. So she opened the FBI report.

Speaker 44 And I knew I shouldn't.

Speaker 4 I knew.

Speaker 21 I knew it was the worst idea, and I couldn't not

Speaker 42 read it.

Speaker 31 I mean, we had just been sitting in so much uncertainty

Speaker 4 and bewilderment that it felt intolerable.

Speaker 39 I was just compelled, like, I just had to know.

Speaker 32 And of course, he was right.

Speaker 21 It was the worst thing I could have done.

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Speaker 1 Jill was in the car with her husband when she received a copy of the FBI report on Jimmy. And despite her husband's pleas, she read it.

Speaker 1 The report started by describing not pictures, but videos and objects found in Jimmy's house.

Speaker 43 It was sickening.

Speaker 21 The detail in this report will be burned on my brain forever.

Speaker 29 There were things happening in these videos that I couldn't have even imagined in my worst nightmare.

Speaker 1 Jimmy had clearly escalated.

Speaker 38 He was not only downloading material, he was also uploading material.

Speaker 1 In his home, the police seized a child-sized sex doll and multiple pairs of children's underwear.

Speaker 11 That was really the moment.

Speaker 18 I was like, oh my God,

Speaker 38 he's a monster.

Speaker 1 Jill spoke to him one last time. And on that phone call, he wasn't remorseful.
He was defiant.

Speaker 23 He said to me, well, at least I'm not part of a ring or anything.

Speaker 1 She's often wondered if he was telling on himself in that moment.

Speaker 52 And it was like what a little kid would do, you know?

Speaker 49 It's got chocolate all over the face. Did you eat a cookie?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 1 It's important to note that in crimes like this, where perpetrators are seeking to consume CSAM, there's often a limit to how much someone can download before they're required to create and upload their own content.

Speaker 42 Knowing the depths of what these perpetrators are capable of doing really sent me into a spiral as a mom.

Speaker 1 A switch flipped in Jill's reality.

Speaker 47 After the first arrest, I could still

Speaker 1 see

Speaker 16 both sides of him.

Speaker 21 Like he was still my little baby brother who I always loved and was very close to, who had this

Speaker 49 sickness, this horrible proclivity.

Speaker 17 I even had some compassion for him because I recognized that he wouldn't want this or wouldn't choose this.

Speaker 16 But I think after the second time, my capacity for compassion largely disappeared once I read that report.

Speaker 4 All I could think about

Speaker 4 was what happened to those little girls.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 44 when he got caught the second time,

Speaker 36 the girls in those images were the exact same age as my daughter.

Speaker 36 And that's all I could think about.

Speaker 49 That's all I could think about. Was like if he had had access to her.

Speaker 4 That was really the point of no return for me.

Speaker 1 This time, it wasn't a slap on the wrist for Jimmy. Because he'd been trading videos and the FBI got involved, he was charged with a federal crime.

Speaker 43 Because they have these federal minimums, the penalty for this is 10 years.

Speaker 20 So he was ultimately sentenced to 10 years in a federal correctional facility.

Speaker 1 She'd seen the darkest parts of humanity in her own brother.

Speaker 4 And so after this happened, all of us were just, how,

Speaker 1 why,

Speaker 17 what possibly could have caused this?

Speaker 23 How could the same family, you know, raise my middle brother and me to be who we are, but also

Speaker 17 have this person

Speaker 4 be a pedophile?

Speaker 39 It just did not make any sense.

Speaker 1 She began obsessively researching and studying perpetrators like her brother.

Speaker 17 If I could just

Speaker 16 understand this enough, then I would have the tools to protect my children.

Speaker 4 As an anxiety expert, what I know about what fuels anxiety is uncertainty, a lack of perceived control, and a high sense of responsibility.

Speaker 54 And those three things were so present for me as a mom.

Speaker 38 when this happened.

Speaker 1 She learned how perpetrators often groom the parents first and how they select their targets.

Speaker 47 Perpetrators groom children by connecting with little kids over things that they like.

Speaker 38 They test them by sharing secret, you know, saying to a kid, telling them or doing something that their parents wouldn't approve of and saying, this will be our secret, to then see, did the kid tell the parents it was a secret?

Speaker 23 And if not, that might make them a good victim.

Speaker 4 But no matter how much she learned, the anxiety didn't go away.

Speaker 1 All the research in the world didn't give her an answer about how or why her own little brother became this person.

Speaker 1 She's had to accept that her brother's actions have fundamentally changed her.

Speaker 44 I think it's made me hard.

Speaker 29 And I was not that way before this.

Speaker 36 Ooh, that just got me choked up.

Speaker 31 It was just the most painful experience of letting yourself

Speaker 4 love

Speaker 21 someone so deeply

Speaker 34 and

Speaker 4 to have that backfire.

Speaker 1 What hurts the most is thinking back to the happy little boy she loved so much.

Speaker 21 It feels impossible that those people are the same person.

Speaker 43 It just feels impossible.

Speaker 42 That human body is still walking around on the earth, but I lost my brother

Speaker 21 that I knew years, years ago.

Speaker 1 There's a word for this kind of experience. It's called disenfranchised grief.

Speaker 20 And so I feel like I have never really been able to properly grieve any of this because I don't feel like I'm allowed to feel grief for someone who's a pedophile.

Speaker 1 Jimmy's now out of prison. Jill isn't in touch with him and doesn't plan to be.
Just knowing he's out there brings all these emotions to the surface once again.

Speaker 1 But Jill is committed to finding meaning in the wreckage. Today, she writes and speaks publicly about her story, including the darkest parts.

Speaker 1 Jill co-hosts a podcast of her own, Psychologist Off the Clock. It's a place where clinicians talk about real life, grief, shame, and what actually helps.

Speaker 19 In psychology, there's a concept of post-traumatic growth.

Speaker 16 Some people experience trauma and they kind of rebound back to baseline.

Speaker 38 Some never really rebound and some actually end up doing better than they were at baseline.

Speaker 16 I don't know exactly where I fall on that spectrum, but I do think there has been sort of examples of growth or good or purpose.

Speaker 4 through this.

Speaker 1 We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question.

Speaker 1 Why do you want to share your story?

Speaker 16 I think, as much as this feels scary and uncomfortable, we have to be willing to say the hard thing.

Speaker 16 Treating this like a dirty little secret, like this is not

Speaker 4 my

Speaker 4 crime.

Speaker 38 This is not my family's crime.

Speaker 39 Like, none of us did anything wrong.

Speaker 28 He, Jimmy, is the only one who did anything wrong.

Speaker 39 And keeping it a secret is just protecting him.

Speaker 44 And he doesn't deserve protection. Kids deserve protection.

Speaker 19 And so I just feel compelled to start having more of these honest conversations even if they're not popular.

Speaker 43 Like sunlight is the best disinfectant and I have to be part of the sunlight.

Speaker 1 On the next episode of Betrayal Weekly,

Speaker 54 I get a call and it's a detective. He said, Jacqueline,

Speaker 54 we got an anonymous call from a gentleman stating that you were being scammed and they felt sorry for you.

Speaker 54 My head exploded thinking, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

Speaker 1 Before we end the episode, I have some exciting news. Betrayal will be doing our first ever live show as part of the Virgin Voyages true Crime Cruise.

Speaker 1 We'll be answering listener questions and discussing them live on stage with Stacey and Tyler from Betrayal Season 3, as well as Caroline from season 4.

Speaker 1 So if you have a question for us, please email us at betrayalpod at gmail.com with the subject line listener question.

Speaker 1 And if you want to join us on the Caribbean cruise, there are still spots available. Search virginvoyages.com/slash truecrime.

Speaker 1 If you would like to reach out to the betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at betrayalpod at gmail.com.

Speaker 16 That's betrayal p-od at gmail.com.

Speaker 1 Or follow us on Instagram at betrayalpod. You can also connect with me on Instagram at it'sandrea Gunning.

Speaker 1 To access our newsletter, view additional content, and connect with the betrayal community, join our substack at betrayal.substack.com. We're grateful for your support.

Speaker 1 One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review Betrayal.
Five-star reviews go a long way.

Speaker 42 A big thank you to all of our listeners.

Speaker 1 Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison.

Speaker 1 Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Monique Laborde.
Also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Caitlin Golden, Olivia Hewitt, and Kristen Mel Curie.

Speaker 1 Casting support from Curry Richmond. Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreincheck.

Speaker 1 Audio editing and mixing by Matt Delvecchio. Additional audio editing by Tanner Robbins.
Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by MIBE Music.

Speaker 1 And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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