EP 11 - Andrea

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 4 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 2 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 7 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved, so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 9 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io/slash podcast.

Speaker 10 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 11 It starts like any other night.

Speaker 13 The glass of red, the cozy blanket, then the drop.

Speaker 14 The stains so dark, so stubborn, it might as well have been a crime scene.

Speaker 16 But this isn't your average couch.

Speaker 17 This is Anna Bay.

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Speaker 13 Right now, get up to 60% off in Black Friday savings because no one should have to live with a stain that won't quit.

Speaker 20 Anna Bay, the only mystery you won't be losing sleep over.

Speaker 22 Shop washable sofas.com today. That's washable sofas.com.

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Speaker 29 Pretty soon up over the hill, I saw a caravan of dark vehicles with dark tinted windows. They're all in FBI or U.S.
Marshals jackets. They've got their sunglasses.
They've got their weapons.

Speaker 29 And they come to my house. They rang the doorbell, I let them in.

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 Andrea Merriman came from money, a lot lot of money. As a kid, her family had a huge house, a vacation home in Hawaii, and even a private plane.

Speaker 29 We flew everywhere.

Speaker 5 We didn't do road trips.

Speaker 29 It was so my family to hop in the plane at midnight and fly to Arizona for the weekend to enjoy the sun and then be back when school started on Monday.

Speaker 1 But if you met Andrea, you wouldn't know that's how she grew up. She's not flashy.
She's hardworking and honest. Her parents raised her that way.

Speaker 29 We had jobs around the house. We didn't get an allowance for it, or if we did, it was a dollar a week.
Because my parents wanted to teach us responsibility and accountability.

Speaker 1 Her family belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some people call it the Mormon Church, but that's not the name she uses.

Speaker 29 That's a name given to church members who are not of our faith. It's just a mouthful to say the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Speaker 1 From a young age, Andrea took her faith very seriously.

Speaker 29 When you're a child, they give you a ring and it says CTR on it. That stands for choose the right.

Speaker 29 So part of the culture was to be obedient to good principles, doing

Speaker 29 well in whatever I attempted to do.

Speaker 1 And in her religious community, she felt empowered as a woman. The women around her were ambitious and well-educated.
Many of them had both families and careers.

Speaker 29 My mom had a master's degree, and I remember going to my dad asking for help with homework.

Speaker 29 My dad would say, I can totally help you, but who really could help you, the person who's the smartest in our family, is your mother.

Speaker 29 So I was raised that women could do and be anything.

Speaker 1 She was a straight A student, a great athlete. She played three instruments and excelled at piano.

Speaker 29 Anything I did, I did to the best of my ability.

Speaker 1 When she got older, she took that determination to Brigham Young University, where she immediately got to work on building her future.

Speaker 29 My dad wanted me to be a lawyer, and that's what I went to school thinking I would do.

Speaker 1 Along the way, she found a dream of her own. She wanted to start a career in advertising and public relations, and and her work ethic extended outside the classroom.

Speaker 1 She got a job in her apartment complex. That's how she met Sean.

Speaker 29 He came into the office to pay his rent, and I processed that for him.

Speaker 1 She would see him around the building, but they'd never really talked before.

Speaker 29 My roommates in my apartment were good friends with the guys in his apartment. People thought highly of him and his roommates, and they did fun things and seemed to be good people.

Speaker 1 Soon after they met in the office, Sean asked her out, and right away, he impressed her. He knew she liked music, so for their first date, he took her to the symphony.

Speaker 1 After that, they started going out together every weekend.

Speaker 29 He did not do the typical cheap, low-budget, crazy college dates. He took me to the best restaurants, to concerts, and then he'd take you out into his BMW.

Speaker 29 He was always a very engaging, outgoing, charming person.

Speaker 1 On one date, she wore a pearl necklace. Sean complimented her on it, and she told him it was borrowed from a friend.
So a few days later,

Speaker 29 he just showed up at my door unexpectedly with a jewelry box. I opened it up and it was a pearl necklace.

Speaker 29 And he said, any woman as beautiful as you should not have to borrow pearls. I mean, that was what it was like to date Sean Merriman.

Speaker 29 I remember thinking, wow, all the other boys I've dated, if they tried to do these grand gestures or date this way, it would seem really cheesy and corny, but it works for Sean.

Speaker 29 And it was just like in the movies.

Speaker 1 Even though he had expensive taste, Sean didn't come from money.

Speaker 29 His dad was a construction worker. They had moved all around the country during his childhood 11 times in seven or eight years.

Speaker 29 There was a lot of alcoholism, divorce,

Speaker 29 and he was one of the first members of his family to go to college.

Speaker 1 Getting into college wasn't easy for Sean. He didn't have the grades, but he made up for it with his trademark charm.

Speaker 29 He started sending flowers to the woman in charge of admissions,

Speaker 29 and eventually he got admitted.

Speaker 1 He was proud of this story, and he always had fabulous stories to entertain people with. He was interested in things most college kids weren't.

Speaker 29 He was into photography, he was into cars, he was into building things.

Speaker 1 Still, Sean didn't let his interests take over their relationship.

Speaker 29 We did everything that I loved. He knew that I loved the beach.
He knew that I loved 80s music. He knew that I loved travel.

Speaker 29 And I thought that I was finding someone who believed the way I did on everything.

Speaker 1 After a few months of dating, the two took a trip to California. And there, on the beach, he got down on one knee.

Speaker 29 Going through my head mostly was, wait, I'm only 22. I'm too young to do this.

Speaker 1 Andrea was still in school. She'd always planned to graduate, start a career, and then get married.
But saying yes to Sean just made sense.

Speaker 29 I don't know that I thought he was the one,

Speaker 29 but I thought that he would be a great friend, great partner. great companion, great provider, great father.

Speaker 29 And am I going to find somebody just like him again if I pass this by?

Speaker 29 I saw enough of those good qualities and the things that I wanted as part of my future. So when he proposed, I said yes.

Speaker 1 So they got married and graduated college in that order.

Speaker 29 We were on a good course together.

Speaker 29 We were equally yoked as a couple to move forward and create the life of our dreams.

Speaker 1 Sean had a vision of moving to DC. He even interviewed with the CIA.
He also considered getting an MBA at an Ivy League school.

Speaker 1 But ultimately, they decided to plant roots in her home state of Colorado.

Speaker 29 We chose to move to Denver for my career. I got a job working for a government agency doing public relations for them.

Speaker 1 Sean came to love Denver and he found a great job at an investment firm.

Speaker 29 He had immediate success.

Speaker 29 So then he actually started being a stockbroker that fall.

Speaker 1 When it came to investing, Sean had a mind as touch.

Speaker 29 And I will tell you from September to December that quarter, he made $50,000.

Speaker 29 And that was in 1990.

Speaker 1 That's a lot of money, especially right out of college. Sean was bringing home 200K a year, but that was the 90s.
In today's money, that's the equivalent of $480,000 a year.

Speaker 1 And the money just kept coming.

Speaker 29 Other firms would reach out to him and say, hey, come and work for us. We'll give you a signing bonus.
And so he would take a 50, 60, 70, $80,000 signing bonus and go work for a different firm.

Speaker 1 He hopped from firm to firm for a few years. And then soon after they had their first child in 1993, Sean came to Andrea with a business idea.

Speaker 29 He came home from work and told me that he had some very wealthy blue-blood old money clients in Kansas City that had been so impressed with the money management he had done for them that they had asked him to step back.

Speaker 29 from his career as a stockbroker and manage their money privately for them?

Speaker 1 She supported him 100%.

Speaker 1 So he made the leap and launched what became Market Street Advisors.

Speaker 1 It started with those Kansas City clients, but pretty soon he was investing for family, friends, and neighbors too.

Speaker 1 And even in the madness of starting his own firm and finding new clients, Sean made it a point to spend time with Andrea at the end of every day.

Speaker 29 He came home at night, had dinner with me, had great stories about trades that he'd made that day.

Speaker 29 He had no shortage of stories he could tell, conversations he could share, ideas that he had.

Speaker 1 Life was good for the Merrymans. Sean's investment firm was taking off, and the two of them were living comfortably, more than comfortably even.
The house got bigger, cars got nicer.

Speaker 1 And for Andrea, there was only one thing missing. More kids.

Speaker 29 One of the things we talked about before we got married was that I wanted four to six children. He was like, oh, that's great.
That's what I've always wanted.

Speaker 1 They had another child, a baby girl, and Andrea was the happiest she'd ever been. When Sean got home after a long day at work, he didn't have the bandwidth to help with the babies.

Speaker 29 He was fine to play with the baby when he was home, etc. But he was not a hands-on,

Speaker 29 let me help bathe the baby, let me change diapers.

Speaker 1 And when she asked him about having a third kid, he was hesitant. She assured him she'd take on the responsibilities that he couldn't.

Speaker 29 And so I did everything,

Speaker 29 handled everything for the baby so that it wouldn't impact his life too much and I could have another child. And I continued to do everything and manage the kids so that it didn't impact his life.

Speaker 29 By the time we had our fourth kid, I could count the number of dirty diapers on one hand that he had changed. It really became he was busy.
He was working on his career.

Speaker 29 And I was the partner in the relationship who was focused on home and family.

Speaker 1 All in all, they had four kids together. She was the homemaker.
He was the provider. And he provided very well.
It was the life she always wanted.

Speaker 1 Over time, Sean started to be more open about the life he wanted.

Speaker 29 I found out he didn't like dancing, he didn't like beaches. Let's go on a trip to California.
No, I hate the beach.

Speaker 5 What?

Speaker 29 Yeah, I hate the feel of sand between my toes. I'm not doing that.

Speaker 1 He started developing expensive new hobbies, ones that required him to travel.

Speaker 29 He was a big African safari guy. He would go to Cameroon and Tanzania and South Africa and Zimbabwe, all over the world to hunt and go on safaris for animals.

Speaker 29 And coincidentally, very wealthy people are engaged in those hobbies. He sold it as, well, I'm actually doing this for work to get more clients to build my business.

Speaker 1 These trips could be dangerous. One time, when he returned from a safari in Ethiopia, Sean was acting strange.

Speaker 29 He was keeping his distance. And I said, why?

Speaker 29 And he said, I have got to go to the doctor.

Speaker 1 He was worried he could have contracted something. He told Andrea a wild story.

Speaker 29 We were climbing a mountain and one of the people in the party flipped and he was going to fall off a cliff. And so I reached down and I grabbed him and saved his life.

Speaker 29 But he and I both got caught up in the process. And I need to go and get tested to make sure I'm okay.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, Sean was negative. And even though the story was far-fetched, Andrea believed him.

Speaker 29 He had so many stories about saving people's lives or dramatic things. I used to tell him, If I didn't live with you and see that your life is true, I would never believe your

Speaker 29 What I didn't know was

Speaker 29 most of those stories were probably lies.

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Speaker 4 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 2 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 7 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 9 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 10 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 11 It starts like any other night.

Speaker 13 The glass of red, the cozy blanket, then the drop.

Speaker 14 The stains so dark, so stubborn, it might as well have been a crime scene.

Speaker 16 But this isn't your average couch.

Speaker 19 This is Anna Bay, fully washable, unspeakably comfortable, and ready for whatever your life, your kids, or your ex throws ahead of it and here's the kicker.

Speaker 13 Starting at just $6.99, you can make sure your sofa isn't part of the problem. Fully washable, stain-resistant, and built to hide even the darkest offenses.

Speaker 13 Right now, get up to 60% off in Black Friday savings because no one should have to live with a stain that won't quit.

Speaker 20 Anna Bay, the only mystery you won't be losing sleep over.

Speaker 22 Shop washable sofas.com today. That's washable sofas.com.

Speaker 30 Some moments in life stay with you forever.

Speaker 30 In a special segment of On Purpose brought to you by eBay, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the same exact edition on eBay.

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Speaker 1 As Andrea and Sean built a family together, Sean started to change. He was around less and less working at his investment firm.

Speaker 1 And when he wasn't working, he was taking extravagant hunting trips on his his own. It became Sean's world, and sometimes that bothered her.
But she was committed to him, no matter what.

Speaker 29 For a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you marry forever and you make your choice and then you love your choice and you figure out how to make it work.

Speaker 29 I was taught that Pretty much the only reason you would ever divorce is if in the case of like physical abuse or something. Beyond that,

Speaker 29 you marry forever.

Speaker 1 His behavior was a challenge, but not marriage ending.

Speaker 29 It wasn't anything that I would have divorced over. It was more, oh, I guess I'll make this work.

Speaker 1 And she really did want to make it work. There was still so much good in what they had together.

Speaker 29 I felt like we were very connected. We went on dates every weekend together.
He would call me when he had downtimes at work, once every morning and once or twice in the afternoon.

Speaker 29 He'd just call me to check in, see what I was doing, see how I was.

Speaker 1 And when he did have the time, she could see he was really trying, especially as the kids got older, he became more involved. He led 50-mile hikes for their son's Boy Scout troop.

Speaker 1 He drove their daughter around on errands. He joked with them, talked with them.
And above all, he made sure his kids had everything they could ask for. All the things he didn't have growing up.

Speaker 29 My son played baseball and they won the championship of their league. So he bought a batting cage and pitching machine that he put in our backyard.

Speaker 29 We put in a pool, we put in a sport court so that our kids would have a great fun place to bring their friends to.

Speaker 1 Sean wanted their kids to be cultured. He took took them to museums around the world and he even started their own private art collection.

Speaker 29 We ended up with a collection of Rembrandts that was worth quite a bit of money and sculptures by Frederick Hart, all kinds of things like that to make things beautiful and to help educate our children.

Speaker 1 The batting cages, the private courts, the Rembrandts. Sure, it was a lot, but they could afford it.
In Sean's hands, Andrea had watched watched their money multiply.

Speaker 29 I had watched our accounts slowly grow up to a million. And then I watched our accounts slowly grow to 3 million.

Speaker 29 And then I watched my statement grow to total about $10 million.

Speaker 1 In the early 2000s, that was closer to 18 million. Andrea also invested her own inheritance with Sean's firm, everything she had saved, and everything she got from her parents.

Speaker 29 I had my own money. My parents had passed away at this point.
And like all of his investment clients, I was getting, you know, monthly financial statements.

Speaker 1 Still, she wanted to make sure that they were being smart with their spending.

Speaker 29 I am very conservative financially.

Speaker 29 So my first goal was, I want our home paid off. And so I remember, I think it was my 40th birthday.
He gave me the deed to our house and our house was paid off.

Speaker 1 And Sean kept making the house better and better.

Speaker 29 He ended up building a building behind our home that he called his shop. It was actually bigger than our home.
His work office was in the top level and then the bottom was just cars and trophies.

Speaker 29 He had an Aston Martin. He had several Porsches, a Ferrari, Mercedes sedans, BMWs, you name it.

Speaker 1 Sean spent pretty much all his time in his shop, working on business or taking care of his cars.

Speaker 29 He would go out to his office from probably 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., come in, have dinner, and then he'd be like, oh, I'm going to go out to my shop and do this.
And then he'd come in at 10 at night.

Speaker 1 Andrea knew all that hard work was funding their lifestyle, but she missed him. She wanted him around more.

Speaker 29 After 17 or so years of marriage, I'd said, we don't need more money. We have plenty for our needs and our wants and things we've never dreamed of.

Speaker 29 But we need you.

Speaker 29 And he just said, I can't. I've got to build my business.

Speaker 1 He'd spent 20 years prioritizing his work above everything else. He didn't know how to shift gears.
And maybe he didn't want to.

Speaker 1 So Andrea made peace with the fact that her husband would be around when he could be.

Speaker 29 I was kind of raised: if you look for the good in others, you will find it. If you're looking for bad things and looking to tear people down and to hate them, you'll find reasons for that too.

Speaker 29 He was gone a lot of the time, but when he was home, he would be there for dinner and do other things with us. Now, I don't think any life is completely perfect, but it was a good life.

Speaker 1 March 17th, 2009 was a really good day. It was St.
Patty's Day.

Speaker 29 There is a little Irish in the Merriman side of the family, so I always tried to make it a fun day. I had gold coins and I made green pancakes and green milk for breakfast.

Speaker 29 As I sent my kids off to school, I took fun photos of them dressed in in their St. Patrick's Day attire.

Speaker 29 What I didn't know at the time was

Speaker 29 those were the last Merriman family photos that I would ever take.

Speaker 29 The next day, March 18th, unexpectedly, I was headed out on some errands. I dropped my youngest child off at daycare to have a babysitter while I quickly got some things done.

Speaker 29 And Sean called me as I was driving down the highway and he's like, what are you doing?

Speaker 29 And I said, why? Do you need something? He said, well, actually,

Speaker 29 I was hoping to spend some time with you this morning. And I said, oh, well, I can turn around and I'll come and get you and you can do my errands with me.

Speaker 29 And he said, no, I need you to come home.

Speaker 1 So she turned the car around and went back to the house. He was waiting for her in the kitchen.

Speaker 29 And he said,

Speaker 29 I've been running Market Street Advisors for the past 16 years,

Speaker 29 but I need you to know that every day when I got up and left and went to work and was gone all day,

Speaker 29 I was actually running a Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 4 Are your AI agents helping users or just creating more work?

Speaker 2 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, how do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 7 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 9 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 10 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 11 It starts like any other night.

Speaker 13 The glass of red, the cozy blanket, then the drop.

Speaker 14 The stains so dark, so stubborn, it might as well have been a crime scene.

Speaker 16 But this isn't your average couch.

Speaker 19 This is Anna Bay, fully washable, unspeakably comfortable, and ready for whatever your life, your kids, or your ex throws at it.

Speaker 20 And here's the kicker.

Speaker 13 Starting at just $6.99, you can make sure your sofa isn't part of the problem. Fully washable, stain-resistant, and built to hide even the darkest offenses.

Speaker 13 Right now, get up to 60% off in Black Friday savings because no one should have to live with a stain that won't quit.

Speaker 20 Annabe, the only mystery you won't be losing sleep over.

Speaker 22 Shop washable sofas.com today. That's washablesofas.com.

Speaker 30 Some moments in life stay with you forever.

Speaker 30 In a special segment of On Purpose brought to you by eBay, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the same exact edition on eBay.

Speaker 30 It was more than just a purchase. It was a reconnection with a memory that shaped my purpose.

Speaker 30 there are certain books that don't just give you information they shift the way you see the world i remember reading one when i was younger that completely changed me years later i found myself thinking about that book again i wanted the same edition back not a reprint that exact one so i started searching and that's when i found it on ebay that's what i love about ebay where you can rediscover the pieces of your past that still inspire your present.

Speaker 30 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story. eBay, things people love.

Speaker 30 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Speaker 1 Andrea thought that her husband Sean had dedicated his career to running his own investment firm. But then, Sean confessed that it was all a lie.
Their life of luxury was funded on stolen money.

Speaker 1 For the past 16 years, he had been running a Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 29 I didn't even know what a Ponzi scheme was. I had heard of Bernie Madoff.
I didn't pay too much attention to those types of things.

Speaker 29 I knew he'd done something wrong, but that's pretty much all I knew about it.

Speaker 1 Sean explained that when he first started, his firm was legitimate. But in his first year, one of his investments went south and he panicked.

Speaker 29 So he omitted the $5,000 loss from his statement. And I'm sure he thought that he could make that up with another trade.
And then he he never did.

Speaker 1 So he kept fudging the books, selling people on his big wins and using money from new investors to pay old ones. There were no million-dollar trades or miracle investments.

Speaker 1 The conversations he told her about and all the financial documents she'd seen were fake. He was a total fraud.
His clients had lost millions of dollars. Some of them lost everything they had.

Speaker 1 Not only did he lose other people's money, all of their own money was gone too. The money she'd inherited from her parents and their kids' college funds, it was gone.

Speaker 29 Then he said,

Speaker 29 Yesterday, I,

Speaker 29 in the company of my attorney, turned myself in to the U.S. Marshals, to representatives of the federal government,

Speaker 29 and I will be going to prison.

Speaker 29 And when he said the word prison,

Speaker 29 I about died.

Speaker 29 My mind was just swirling when he said that. I thought, this cannot be real.

Speaker 1 She thought back to all the outlandish stories he told over the years, like the one about saving someone's life on a safari. Was any of it real?

Speaker 1 As the reality set in, she tried to cling to anything she could.

Speaker 29 I was trying to find the positive like I'd been raised to do. And I said, at least the house has paid off.
And he said, no, you don't understand. The house is gone.
The cars are gone.

Speaker 29 Everything's gone.

Speaker 29 I just kind of felt like I was witnessing the apocalypse. I remember apologizing saying, I'm so sorry, but I have to get out of here.

Speaker 29 And I got up and I ran out and I got in my car and I took off up my driveway and started driving out of my neighborhood.

Speaker 29 Uncontrollably, tears were just streaming out of my eyes.

Speaker 1 Andrea pulled over just minutes after leaving her home. She couldn't see, much less drive.
And as she sat there alone in her car, the weight of it all finally hit her.

Speaker 29 I felt like everything had been destroyed. Everything was a humiliation to me, as well as a shock, as well as deeply sad and devastating.

Speaker 29 My biggest wish and desire would have been to just walk to the edge of the horizon and drop off the face of the earth.

Speaker 29 But I couldn't because I had four kids relying on me. I was their only resource.

Speaker 1 She had to keep going, so she made a plan.

Speaker 29 When I went back to the house, I told him that he was going to be the one to tell the kids. So that night we gathered our family together.
He was in a chair in the corner of the room.

Speaker 29 I was on the couch across the room from him. And he told the kids, I have

Speaker 29 done something wrong. I've made a little mistake.
And from across the side of the room, I am just furious, shaking my head, going,

Speaker 29 you've committed a crime. You've made huge mistakes mistakes over and over every day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
That is not one little mistake.

Speaker 1 Andrea was angry. The kids, they were terrified.

Speaker 29 I was standing there with four kids, ages three to 16, tears streaming down their face looking at me for answers and strength.

Speaker 29 Before I could even say anything, my little third grader said,

Speaker 29 Does this mean you're going to divorce dad?

Speaker 1 She knew in that moment that the answer was yes.

Speaker 1 It wasn't an easy answer, though.

Speaker 29 I was so humiliated, humiliated to be married to a criminal, humiliated at what he'd done, humiliated to know that I would be getting divorced. I was raised that divorce is not what you do.

Speaker 29 Knowing that I had been married in a temple forever added a layer of difficulty, a layer of guilt, a layer of regret.

Speaker 1 But she was done. She couldn't be with a man who had spent decades cheating so many others out of millions of dollars.

Speaker 1 She would walk away while making the transition as easy as she could for her kids.

Speaker 29 I felt like my kids had been in such shock that they probably needed things to be as normal as possible in whatever ways they could be.

Speaker 29 So I fed them that night.

Speaker 29 Sean stayed in the home with us.

Speaker 1 And he continued to stay in the home and come to family dinner, just as he had for the last 20 years. Even though Sean had turned himself in, the Fed still needed time to build a case against him.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 they waited.

Speaker 29 I even remember cooking dinner for my kids saying, would you like to call your dad and let him know dinner's ready? I am appalled that I am doing this for this man who's done this.

Speaker 29 But it was for my kids. I was trying to be kind,

Speaker 29 set an example of

Speaker 29 divorce and not changing who you are just because you've been betrayed. You choose the right.
You are kind. You are good to people no matter what.

Speaker 1 The destruction of her life didn't happen all at once. She watched it being taken apart piece by piece.

Speaker 1 After a few weeks of this purgatory, she got a call from the U.S. Marshals.
They set a date to come to her house and seize the family assets.

Speaker 29 Pretty soon up over the hill, I saw a caravan of dark vehicles with dark tinted windows. They all pull up in front of my house.
Everybody starts getting out of the cars. They're all in FBI or U.S.

Speaker 29 Marshals jackets. They've got their sunglasses, they've got their weapons, and they come to my house.
I think the only difference is I knew they were coming and they didn't break my door down.

Speaker 29 They rang the doorbell. I let them in.

Speaker 1 The authorities took everything of value. Sean's computer, his cars, his art collection, and most of what Andrea owned too.

Speaker 29 I had the thought, you should hide some of your jewelry. And I thought, what?

Speaker 29 No, that would be stealing. No, you don't know where you're going to live, how you're going to keep your kids alive.
You don't have a job. Your parents are dead.

Speaker 29 If you could just end up with something,

Speaker 29 then you'd have something to sell, to start a life with.

Speaker 29 And I went back and forth in my mind a couple of times. And then I thought, nope, I am not going to abandon my integrity just because the person I'm married to has.
And I left it.

Speaker 29 I left it all in my jewelry box because I am not compromising my ethics.

Speaker 1 She watched all their belongings get carted away and she wasn't the only one.

Speaker 29 Several of my neighbors at the house next door up on the deck drinking, barbecuing, having a great time, rejoicing in the downfall of my family and the asset seizure.

Speaker 1 Sean had scammed so many people, neighbors, friends, and family alike. She couldn't blame anyone for wanting him to pay.
And yet people wanted her to pay too, even though she had done nothing wrong.

Speaker 1 She'd been married to the Mormon Madoff, as the media soon dubbed him. Even neighbors and friends assumed that she must have known something.

Speaker 29 One time I was out front with my three-year-old. He was just playing, you know, around the trees or the bushes.
And I could hear, kachink, ka-chink, ka-chink.

Speaker 29 And I turn around and one of my neighbors is over the fence with a lens photographing. every move I make.

Speaker 1 For the short time she had remaining in their house, she was paranoid for the safety of her family and for good reason.

Speaker 29 One of the victims, who was also a neighbor in the neighborhood and who had lost probably all of his money, came all the way up my steps to my front porch, to my front door with his loaded gun ready to blow Sean Merriman away and who knows who else before he came to his senses and he turned around and went home without hurting anyone.

Speaker 1 Andrea wanted nothing more than to take her kids and get out of that house, especially since Sean continued to live there, waiting to be taken to prison.

Speaker 1 It took time, 90 days, for the divorce to be processed, but then finally,

Speaker 29 on July 13th, I drove to the courthouse with him to finalize the divorce. We came home.
I packed my car with my two dogs and my kids, and I moved that day. And I didn't say goodbye to anything.

Speaker 29 I did not look back. I drove away and I didn't look in the rearview mirror the whole way out of Denver.

Speaker 1 While Sean went away to prison, Andrea went to Utah. Thankfully, she was able to leave her old life behind without her husband's debt hanging over her head.

Speaker 29 I had to write my own divorce because I couldn't afford an attorney. I made sure that I wrote that he was responsible for his debts and I was responsible for mine.

Speaker 29 Now, credit card companies don't apparently have to abide by that,

Speaker 29 but I think they saw that I was penniless, so they didn't actually come after me.

Speaker 1 She and her kids moved in with her brother and a friend connected her with a job in marketing so that she could rebuild. But she was starting from nothing.

Speaker 1 For the first time in her life, she was worried about having the money to eat.

Speaker 29 For years, I would just have a knot in my stomach every time I drove to the grocery store, thinking, oh my gosh, I have to buy this food, but it's so much, I don't have money.

Speaker 29 I mean, we just had to adjust.

Speaker 1 Part of that adjustment meant facing her own self-blame.

Speaker 29 I was ridden with guilt that I had enjoyed a nice life at the expense of others. I remember Sean said to me before we parted ways, well, at least you got a lot of good trips out of it.

Speaker 29 And I just looked at him and went, I hate every trip I went on. I hate every photo.
I hate every memory. There was all kinds of guilt.

Speaker 29 Guilt that I'd brought him into the lives of my friends and family that got shafted by him. Guilt that I had chosen him to be the father of my children.

Speaker 1 She turned to the church for support and started meeting regularly with a church leader.

Speaker 29 And he said,

Speaker 29 how are you doing? And I said, honestly, I am trying to figure out how this happened.

Speaker 29 I've tried to do everything right in my life. I've tried to be a good wife, a good mother, a good citizen, a good person.
How did I get here?

Speaker 29 And he goes, well, in all of that, you forgot one thing, the agency of the other person.

Speaker 29 The other person's opportunity to choose. This is not on you.

Speaker 5 He did this.

Speaker 29 There's nothing you could have done.

Speaker 29 What I had to do was recognize and forgive myself for the fact that I made the best decision I could with the facts I had at hand.

Speaker 1 But she also knew that she wanted to forgive Sean. That was the only path forward.

Speaker 29 I had a couple of friends who'd gotten divorced and who had not gotten past it. They were very, very hateful toward their former spouse.

Speaker 29 And I saw how it was impacting their kids and destroying their family. And so the one thing I knew was we are going to forgive, not for him, but for us,

Speaker 29 so that our hatred

Speaker 29 doesn't destroy us.

Speaker 1 Sean was ordered to pay $20 million to his victims. On top of that, he was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison.
During that time, Andrea was a single mom.

Speaker 1 She raised her kids with honesty, kindness, and forgiveness, just like her parents raised her.

Speaker 29 And my kids have turned out to be everything I could have hoped for. Hardworking, educated.
They all help others. They all have skills.
They're kind, good people, and couldn't ask for anything more.

Speaker 1 Andrea's been able to rebuild her own life, too.

Speaker 29 I can honestly say I am super happy today. I am a homeowner.
I have a great career that's been so memorable.

Speaker 29 I've gotten to travel. I have done many things that I've dreamed of.
I've actually even remarried, if you can believe it or not.

Speaker 1 She ended up married to another man in finance.

Speaker 29 Someone who is everything I thought I was getting but didn't get the first time and more. He's even tall and handsome.

Speaker 1 And here's the kicker. After they got married, her new husband started a second career as a fraud investigator, busting Ponzi schemes.

Speaker 1 We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question. Why did you choose to tell your story?

Speaker 29 Life can be good. That's what we're all here to have and to be.
I believe in being happy. So, yeah, maybe I chose to be optimistic more than I should have.

Speaker 29 And I did smile when the smiles were totally fake.

Speaker 29 And I remember having my heart so broken it literally ached in my chest.

Speaker 29 But I've plodded one foot in front of the other for a decade when I wasn't sure if it was making any difference.

Speaker 29 But when you lift your eyes up and you see you're on the top of a mountain, that's a view worth all the persevering for

Speaker 1 on the next episode of Betrayal.

Speaker 29 The minute I did that, I had this deep shame flood over me

Speaker 34 like you've made a really grave error here you've divulged something super private and you'll now never know why this person's in a relationship with you because is it for the money or is it for you

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 1 That's betrayal p-od at gmail.com we're grateful for your support 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 a big thank you to all of our listeners betrayal is a production of glass podcasts a division of glass entertainment group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.

Speaker 1 The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison. Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning.

Speaker 1 Written and produced by Caitlin Golden, with additional production by Monique Laborde and Ben Vetterman. Our associate producer is Kristen Melcuri.

Speaker 1 Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreinchak.

Speaker 1 Audio editing and mixing by Matt Delvecchio. Additional editing support from Nico Aruka and 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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