The Ride | 4

Remember back in elementary school and some poor kid would come in with a broken arm and a cast? And during recess everybody took turns signing it in different colored markers? Now the hurt kid could rely on their friends or even the teacher for help writing, eating, and buttoning their jackets. Sometimes you might have wished that you were in their shoes, right? I mean, who wouldn't want the attention? Well, this story is about a man who couldn't let go of his aspiration to be the suffering kid.
A man who was so committed to being unwell and so damn good at it that he took an entire community, nearly an entire state, for a ride. I'm Steve Buscemi, and this is Big Time,

an Apple original podcast produced by Piece of Work Entertainment

and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Reporter Abby Ellen is here to tell us more.
Ben Addison never expected to fall in love as quickly as he did. But when he met John Looker in the early aughts, in an AOL chat room no less, they hit it off.
They lived within a three-mile radius outside Columbus, Ohio. He loved singing.
We were into similar movies. I remember it was 2001.
Moulin Rouge had just come out. He had the cassette.
He wanted me to cassette too, and we would sing, you know, Elephant Love Medley and all the other songs from Moulin Rouge. I think our first date was actually going to the movies to see that.
It's a love story set in Paris in 1899, but it's also a tragedy because Satine, the main character, is very sick. What made the whole thing feel kind of poetic for Ben and John was that John also had a fatal illness.
What kind of cancer was it, do you remember? Oh gosh, what didn't he have? At some point there was cancer everywhere,

and at one point they were going to cut his leg off

because he had bone cancer in his leg

and all this other stuff

and ended up with stage 4 terminal brain cancer.

But even though John was sick,

it never occurred to Ben not to continue the relationship.

He liked being with John.

After about a year of dating,

John moves into Ben's house. John had never had a lot of money.
Ben's place was a lovely, warm, suburban home. The sort of place where John could be comfortable in whatever time he had left.
And John wasn't afraid to talk about death. John said he wanted to be cremated.
We talked funeral plans and filled out all these things to what he wanted to do when he died, to have someone carry his ashes with them when they rode Pelotonia. Pelotonia.
That was one of the main things keeping John alive. It's a non-profit that raises millions of dollars for cancer research,

mainly through a huge annual bike race in Columbus every August.

It's sort of like the Relay for Life or the AIDS ride.

Thousands of people cycled hundreds of miles and even more donated money.

Essentially, it was a massive citywide festival.

This is not a race. It's a tour these bicyclists will ride together.
They all have one goal, to beat cancer once and for all. John got involved with Pelotonia in 2009, and it became his entire mission in life.
Pelotonia even asked him to be the face of a video in 2011. It was this motivational PSA inviting people to join the ride.
John sits on a couch in a dark room. He's bald, serious, and looks straight at the camera.
He has a message. If he can do the Pelotonia ride, so can you.
You can make excuses and say, I'm too tall. Too short.
I'm not athletic enough. I'd really love to, but I can't.
My mom said no. I don't have a bite.
Work is crazy right now. I'd get last place.
He wanted everyone to join in. Let me make this short and sweet.
I have stage four terminal brain cancer. I will write tomorrow.
And I won't be making any excuses. I vividly remember his opening monologue for Pelotonia, the video, and I thought it was raw, powerful, and no holds

barred, which I really liked and appreciated. And I just thought, wow, this is a guy who is going

through hell and he's not making any excuses and he's one tough son of a bitch. Michelle Merlino worked with John at a furniture supply company called Continental Office Environments.
John Looker was always doing something to raise money for Pelotonia. He held fundraisers in pubs, morning pancake breakfasts, and bake sales where he'd sell cookies he made himself.
He called them Lookies. Oh gosh, he was the captain of the ship, and he made himself basically the captain of Pelotonia.
For sure, 100%. He was poster boy for Pelotonia.
One year, Michelle was a bartender at one of these events. There were tons of people there.
The room was packed. They all came to buy drinks from John Lugger.
Beers, drinks were flowing like it was St. Patrick's Day.
You have to understand that the Pelotonia craze was just, it was over the top. It was like a rock star party.
I had friends in Columbus who rode in Pelotonia and knew exactly who John Looker was. It was like everyone in Columbus knew who he was.

John was a local celebrity, and thanks to him, Pelotonia was the celebrity charity cause. It still is a very big deal in the city, and it's reaching outside of the state, too.
I mean, I drive through Kentucky, and I see Pelotonia stickers on people's cars to this day. Lance Armstrong gave a speech at the first Pelotonia ride in 2009.
NFL player Chris Spielman, whose wife had died of cancer, spoke the second year. And John Looker took over in 2011.
You know, that's when he became the star. Ben says everyone wanted to be around John.
I jokingly said, you know, he was the queen and I was Prince Philip. I walked five feet behind him and carried the purse or the bag when he's shaking hands and autographing.
They were happy just to be together because they actually didn't get to see each other that much. Ben traveled during the week for work and John stayed back in Ohio, fundraising and training for Pelotonia.
It might sound strange that they were part so much, and Ben worried about John's health all the time. But John seemed to enjoy being a sort of house husband.
Ben liked basking in John's glow. Michelle Merlino felt the John Looker glow too.
I mean, was there chatter by the water cooler? Oh my God, John Looker's here. Oh my God, he's such a hero.
Oh my God. Yes, all of that.
All of that and more. So did their co-workers at Continental Office.
That's what people thought of him. He was just this absolute shining hero, Superman with the cape, going through this cancer from hell, ravaging his body, and he's going to be the captain of our Peloton, and we're going to ride, ride, ride, and we're going to cure cancer.
But there was one thing that made this a lot less impressive. John Looker did not have cancer.
Not now. Not ever.
For nearly a decade, no one seemed to have noticed. At Continental, he's motivating his co-workers to ride and donate to Pelotonia.
He's bringing fundraising cookies into the office and leading team training rides. And then, around 2013, Michelle Merlino starts to get suspicious.
It was my second year of riding with Continental, and it was halfway through that second year, I started to have my own personal doubts. His story just started to get even deeper and deeper, and his cancer was spreading everywhere and everywhere.
That's when I personally said, I'm going to stop writing, and I'm going to distance myself from this, because I feel very uncomfortable about what I'm seeing and what I'm feeling because what this guy is saying is not, it's just not adding up.

She starts thinking, John never looked sick like many cancer patients do.

He wasn't skinny or pale, and he had boundless energy like a puppy. But she didn't quite know what to do with these feelings she was having.
And then one night, John invites her and another colleague out for drinks. Just to tell us how much he appreciated our friendship and what we do for Pelotonia.
And I thought, okay, okay, fine. At one point, he pulled something out of his jacket pocket.
He said, I want to give both of you something because both of you mean so much to me and your friendship means so much to me. And I couldn't make it through this hell that I'm going through without you.
And so here is a bracelet, and I want you to wear this and remember me every time that you wear it. And how did you feel? At the moment, I felt really special, and I felt very honored, and I felt seen.
She felt bad for doubting him. Who paid for the drinks? You know what? I think I did.

I think I did.

Uh-huh.

He was very charismatic.

He would always seem to draw people in.

What's even more wild is that John didn't just dupe his co-workers. For years, nearly two decades, he had also convinced his longtime partner Ben Addison.
That sounds hard to believe, I know. But Ben swears he had no idea? Zero.
For one thing, their schedules worked in John's favor. They were together in Ohio on the weekends, but Ben traveled for work most weekdays, the days John was supposedly in treatment.
Still, they talk every day. Ben remembers a phone call he got when he was on that was supposed to break the brain barrier affects your vocal cords or something else.
So here I am sitting in a bar, you know, it's Sunday fun day in San Francisco, literally bawling my eyes out. People are coming over.
Are you okay? Did someone die? What's going on? It was really hard for Ben in these moments. And they came at pretty regular intervals.
Whenever I'd land somewhere, you know, he'd take me to the airport and I'd get on a plane and fly somewhere. I'd get off the plane and get to the hotel and call him and say, hey, I'm in so and so.
How are you? He's like, oh, when I was driving back from the airport, I had a nosebleed and a headache, and I went to the hospital, and they did a scan, and the cancer's back. Sure.
Ben had some basic logistical questions. Like, why weren't they getting any documents from the hospitals or an insurance company? John said those bills went directly to his former employer, Pizza Hut.
They pay for everything, so I don't get anything. Imagine that.
But John had answers for everything. They did not want him to take pain medication because in case he would stroke out or have something, they didn't want the pain meds to override any pain that he should have to know that he needs help.
So his story was they give him the pain meds through his IVs when he was down there. But at home, even when he seemed like to be in the most excruciating pain.

What about losing weight or losing hair? He told me that he would find lumps of hair on his pillow. At the time, a lot of this, because of him having cancer, getting up and whatever, we had separate rooms just so that he would not interrupt my sleep.
There were other places, you know, like eyebrows, eyelashes, pubic hair, other places that people are like,

well, normally it affects every hair, not just the hair in your head. But, you know, that was getting into all these new medications.
And part of it was Pelotonia. I mean, Pelotonia's goal in life is to raise funds to find cures for cancer.
And part of what he was telling us is that they found this new drug that will not make you lose all your hair, which made sense, but not really. Ben's, but not really, is pretty significant.
It's hard to hear all this and not think, there must have been so many things that didn't add up. But their life worked for him.
Ben traveled, and John took care of the home and their social life. Ben didn't want to rock the boat.
So he didn't. But someone else finally did.
Erica Decker was a friend of Michelle Merlino's.

Erica's daughter, Lily, had been diagnosed with brain cancer when she was four.

In 2014, Lily was 10 years old and still undergoing treatment.

So Erica knew cancer.

Years later, her husband would get sick with multiple myeloma.

As I tell everyone, everyone in my house is actively trying to die. Erica didn't know John Looker personally.
But like everyone else in Columbus, she knew his story and saw him at a Pelotonia event one year. There was a guy on stage and one of my friends said, oh, this guy's amazing.
He's beaten cancer like three times.

Not only was he beating the odds, he was thriving. To the mother of a seriously ill child, he was an inspiration.
I think when I first learned of him, I mean, that's all you listen for.

When you're a parent or a family member or loved one of someone with cancer,

that's all you need for when you're a parent or a family member or loved one of someone with cancer. That's all you need to hear is someone made it.
And if this guy could beat cancer and ride 180 miles on his bike, I thought, OK, all right. One day, Erica was on Facebook and a message popped up.
It was from John Looker. He'd read about Lily in the Columbus Dispatch and was moved to write.
I never responded to that first message. A month later, Erica received a second message.
He would love to come and meet us and visit with Lily. And I thought, well, who, what? She's thrown off.
So while she's spending the night in the hospital with Lily, she stays up reading John's Facebook page. I read all of his posts back to the very beginning, and he'd been posting for years at that point.
But it moved around a lot. The cancer and his tumors and his different treatments and biopsies and all the things he was having done.
And it was astonishing. Here's a taste from a post in 2014.
Although still far from the main path that will lead this arduous journey out of the denseness of this forest of... And then there was this, addressed to his supporters.
Your words, your actions and deeds serve as a balm for wounds so deep they never see the light of... What really threw Erica off was the complete lack of medical knowledge in these posts.
After you're in the world of cancer for five years, you understand the mechanics of diagnoses and biopsies and lab work and treatment and how the appointments go and the different specialists that are and the terminology, and everything. You could teach a course on it after five years.
They made absolutely no sense. She noticed something else about his Facebook behavior.
He would change his profile picture to photos of sick patients he knew. Erica feared he wanted to use Lily for a photo op.
That's a fundraising technique. I mean, I'm no fool.
Those St. Jude commercials work for a reason.
So she messaged John some simple questions. I reached out to him and asked about his doctor.
And he said he wouldn't give her name out because so many people in the Pelotonia community had reached out to her, want her to do more to help him because they just wanted

him to be okay and they wanted him to be saved. He kept pushing Erica off without any real answers.

She couldn't let it go. And then he said he was going under an alias at the hospital because it was just too much for the hospital to handle, the notoriety that he was, you know, getting.
And the whole thing was just so crazy. But it was obvious to me at that point that it was all a lie.
She had no idea why John would lie about this. But Erica had enough information.
She was certain John Looker did not have cancer. He picked the wrong mom because I was not satisfied.
And I have never been one to shy away from controversy. By this point, John stopped responding to her messages.
Erica had all the proof she needed. Meanwhile, Michelle Merlino's doubts about John had also returned.
The years had gone on, and the guy was still kicking. He didn't stop.
He's still fundraising like crazy. he's still fundraising like crazy he's still baking his fucking cookies every weekend i'm talking dozens upon dozens upon dozens of cookies that he sells to people and he's training on weekends and doing you know 10 20 mile rides and I'm looking at him thinking, how do you have brain cancer that is now metastasizing throughout your entire body, but yet you haven't lost any weight? And these posts that you're putting on social media that read like a bad Harlequin romance novel were every night, but you were deathly ill, sleeping in your bathtub because you were vomiting all night.
But something is wrong here. And I kept thinking to myself, am I a bad person for thinking this way? Oh my gosh, Michelle, I cannot believe that you are thinking that this guy who is all over the city and people basically fall to his feet when they see him and he has thousands of followers.
It was almost like he was Jesus. But then Michelle runs into Erica Decker at a dinner party.
something was said about john looker, and I think she and I just looked at each other, and I thought, she knows. She knows what I know.
Afterwards, Michelle sends Erica an email. I said, Erica, I've got to bring this up to Pelotonia and tell them, you know, their poster child and their voice to the city, I think, is lying.
What are we going to do? How do we do this? There was a lot of F-bombs, a lot of cussing. Then we just devised a plan, and we were not going to let Pelotonia dismiss us.
John was Pelotonia's golden goose. If he was exposed as a fraud, that could seriously hurt the organization's reputation and its fundraising.
Michelle consulted with her then-wife about her plan to expose John. She was not on board with it at first.
I think it scared her for a minute, but I was able to talk to her about it and say, you know, something's wrong here and people's lives are being manipulated by this guy emotionally and financially, and I know it, and I cannot sit back and watch this happen. I just can't let this happen.
I have to tell these people something is not adding up here. She emailed the organization that she suspected someone in Pelotonia's community didn't have cancer.
She wasn't yet naming names. I received a response back within that same day.
They thanked me for the information and said that they take my concern very seriously. They asked her if she wanted to meet with Kelly Griezmer, then Pelotonia's chief operations officer.
I drove from Louisville to Columbus, Ohio to meet with Kelly. And I will tell you that I've never been so nervous in my entire life.
Erica, on the other hand, she's like,

nope, I'm fucking pissed. Michelle and Erica thanked Kelly for meeting with them.
And then Michelle went for it. I was honest and said, this is not easy for me.
It's nerve wracking. And this is going to be a hard conversation.
But Kelly's response surprised her. So we started talking and I could tell instantly she knew exactly who we were talking about, and that I felt that she had the exact same concerns that we did.
She did. Kelly Griezmer declined to talk to us.
But after Kelly's meeting with Michelle and Erica, Pelotonia quietly removed John's PSA video from its website. But that was pretty much it.
Erica says nothing really happened after that conversation. No follow-up.
She was super pissed. It just completely changed my view of the entire organization.
Years go on. John continues to fundraise with Pelotonia and on his own.
He holds a garage sale, keeps selling those John Looker cookies, the Lookies. But then a few years later, in 2018, a couple of John's closest friends had their own doubts.
These were members of John's inner circle. So they went directly to someone even closer to John to sound the alarm.
His boyfriend of 18 years, Ben Addison. In 2018, John was turning 50.
The inner circle arranged to meet Ben at a Panera Bread. So I'm thinking, okay, we're going to do a surprise birthday party for John for his 50th and all these other things.

Well, I go in, I'm like, hey guys, I said, yeah, I'm excited.

We're going to, you know, let's plan John's 50th birthday party.

They're like, what are you talking about?

They told Ben straight out.

We believe John does not have cancer.

I'm like, oh, I've been kind of waiting for five years for someone to come and tell me this, or at least to confirm my suspicions. So they decided to confront John directly.
These friends declined to talk to us, but one of them corroborated this next part of the story. They picked this one Saturday.
It was like at four o'clock and they're like, we're coming over. You know, it was like a full intervention type of thing.
The inner circle arrived at Ben and John's house around six. Ben tells John, look who's here, our friends.
We're all sitting in the living room. And I'm actually sitting in the dining room in a chair kind of looking in.
I'm like, I don't know if I really want to be full part of this. And they just started asking questions.
And literally, you know, what's the name of your doctors? He would never even tell me the name of his doctors or anything. He gave them a name and they Googled it and there was no such person.
The person just did not exist. They asked, can we see medical bottles, pill bottles, receipts? You know, you go to the doctors just for a checkup and they give you a 10-page, you know, printed copy of all your vitals and your history and everything.

And then they're like, okay, well, then go down to the hospital and get it.

Well, I can't get it without my doctor.

I was like, what are you talking about?

Well, you said you just had chemo.

Show me the scar.

Show me the hole.

Show me the whatever.

And there was nothing. And it went on for, like I said, about an hour.
He kept denying it. No, no, no, I have it.
And then at one point he just said, I can't do this anymore. That's when Ben knew for real.
For real, for real. It was true.
He'd been duped all these years. John went outside on the back patio.
Ben could see him through the window. I'm like, is he going to run? Is he going to do something? And he came in just, you know, deflated.
And I'm like, you got to go.

We are done. You cannot be here anymore.
And I think the words that he said was, I know. So it wasn't like, I'm sorry, or anything like that.
my mind just went crazy.

Part of me was like, yes, finally the out that I have.

But then it turned into the, oh shit, what have I done for the last 18, 17 years?

John left the house soon after.

And then the inner circle friends took their concerns directly to Pelotonia.

They filed a complaint with the Columbus Police Department. And then the story broke in Columbus.
Tonight, an NBC4 investigation. Did a local man fake cancer and pocket cash donations that were meant for Pelotonia? One day a few weeks later, John's parents come to Ben's house to pick up John's belongings.
As they're hauling

cartons of clothes away, John's father hands Ben a letter. So I open it up and I'm looking at it and everyone's just looking at me like, my face goes pure white and they're like, what's wrong? Ben figured this must be John's apology.
It wasn't. It literally was a room by room

Invene It wasn't.

It literally was a room-by-room inventory of what he wanted from the house.

Ben never talked to John again, and he's been single ever since.

I stopped trusting people.

Now if someone says they have cancer, I want to see the port, I want to see the IV,

I want to see, you know, forget John right now, what would you like to say to him, if anything? Why? It's something everyone I talked to wanted to know. Why would someone do this? It was so hurtful.
I mean, that's a very short question, but I think it would have to be that open-ended. Someone's like, did he abuse you? I'm like, not physically, but mentally, he tore the shit out of me.
Here's what's tricky in the John Looker story. Even though he was faking cancer, he also genuinely helped people, raising money for Pelotonia in spades.
Erica Decker acknowledges that John raised thousands of dollars for cancer research, but the lie? Unforgivable. I mean, just to pick such an evil disease that picks on kids and the frail and then think, oh, I know.

It's just it was unfathomable at that point.

The one thing we know John Looker got from all this was attention, a lot of it.

But it's such a huge cost, which makes all this pretty thorny.

Because John didn't just dwell in his own pretend illness.

He raised his hand. lot of it.
But it's such a huge cost, which makes all this pretty thorny. Because John didn't just

dwell in his own pretend illness. He raised money for cancer research.
I thought about this with Michelle Merlino. What about the good he did? Should all that be discounted? I feel like there's a great philosophical question here, which is exactly that.

If I am doing good, but the means to do – no, I mean this.

I wonder about this.

But the means to doing good, the way I'm doing good is through bad.

I'm lying about shit, but the outcome is good for this cause.

It's so screwed up.

It is so screwed up.

It's like this perfect little soup of fucked upness. So John did do bad for good, in a way.
But there was probably some bad for bad, too. We found another clue about John's motivations in his financial records.

In 2016, John filed for bankruptcy. Ben Addison says he helped John out with bills, but it was never enough.
John was in serious debt. Ben says collection agencies are still sending him bills addressed to John, even today.
The Inner Circle Friends alleged John pocketed at least $1,300 in donations from a charity garage sale he held back in 2016, the same year he filed for bankruptcy. The Ohio Attorney General's Office investigated the claims.
Under the terms of the settlement with the state, John had to pay a $2,000 civil fine and $1,800 in restitution. A detective with the Columbus police told us John was given a misdemeanor charge.

Essentially, a slap on the wrist. He was also forbidden from fundraising or holding a position in a non-profit.
That was it. A full year after the inner circle confronted Pelotonia and filed their complaints in 2018,

Pelotonia issued a statement on its website.

Pelotonia said it was bewildered by the idea that John had lied about his cancer diagnosis.

But they hadn't wanted to confront John prior to his own confession.

Pelotonia declined an interview with us. They said they were deeply hurt by John's dishonesty and want to keep their focus on fundraising.
He fooled so many people, you know, doctors who afterwards then questioned themselves. It's like, I'm an MD.
How did I fall for this guy? But he was just, it was Jim Jones. We all drank the Kool-Aid, and he was very convincing.
It's really just a perfect storm of lies and deceit and deception. You know, he created a masterpiece of a story.
He really did. A few years ago, Ben says his sister thought she saw John in a restaurant near Cleveland.
Spooked, she ran away. Nobody we talked to seemed to know where John is now.
We called and emailed him. He didn't reply.
His mother also declined to talk. But we learned one more thing.
You know those homemade cookies John sold? The Lookies? Ben Addison told us John sometimes bought sugar cookies at the grocery store,

frosted them at home, and then sold them as his own.

For charity, of course.

Next week on Big Time, how to get arrested in the safest country in the world.

This has been Big Time, an Apple Original Podcast produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. It's hosted by me, Steve Buscemi.
This episode was reported and produced by Abby Ellen and senior producer Amy Padula. Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.
Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer. Our production team includes Rajiv Gola, Morgan Jaffe, and associate producer Danya Abdelhamid.
Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviram.
Our theme was written by Nicholas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations.

Production help from Matt Rand.

Campside Media's executive producers

are Josh Dean, Vanessa

Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff,

and Matt Scher.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for