S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?

True Story Media

Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse, and this content may be difficult for some listeners.

If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to munchhousensupport.com to connect with professionals who can help.

As medical child abuse cases play out in court, they often become fixated on a certain detail.

For example, in my sister's case, one of the damning pieces of evidence was video surveillance of her dumping her daughter's anticoagulant medication onto her hospital bedsheets.

This was an event that preceded the child being admitted to the pediatric ICU with a life-threatening blood clot.

This was not the only piece of evidence, not by a long shot.

There were 73,000 pages of medical records subpoenaed in this case, which were reviewed by a child abuse pediatrician who found extensive evidence of abuse.

And much like Sophie Hartman's daughter, after being separated from my sister and observed by the hospital, my niece's health improved drastically in a short period of time.

But from the documentation I've seen, her lawyer Adam Shapiro seems to have somehow really honed in on this video evidence.

arguing that Megan was actually using one type of syringe rather than a different type of syringe that the hospital said she was using, and therefore the hospital staff and police officers didn't see in that video what they thought they saw.

If this all sounds like it doesn't make much sense, it doesn't.

No criminal charges were ever filed against my sister.

Following the family court's return of her children during the active police investigation, detectives ultimately referred the case to the prosecuting attorney in April of 2020, and that prosecuting attorney declined to file charges.

And following that, Adam Shapiro took on another medical child abuse case, Sophie Hartman.

People believe their eyes.

That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something.

If we didn't, you could never make it through your day.

I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

If you just can't get enough of me in your ears, first of all, thank you.

I have a job because of you.

And secondly, did you know that I have a new audiobook out this year?

The Mother Next Door, which I co-authored with Detective Mike Weber, is available in all formats wherever books are sold.

It's a deep dive into three of Mike's most impactful Munchausen by proxy cases, and I think you'll love it.

Here's a sample.

When Susan logged in, what she discovered shocked her to the marrow of her bones.

Though the recent insurance records contained pages and pages of information about Sophia, There was nothing about Hope.

Susan dug deeper and looked back through years of records.

There wasn't a single entry about Hope's cancer treatment.

For eight years, the Butcher family had lived with a devastating fear that their beloved daughter and sister was battling terminal cancer.

For months, they'd been preparing for her death.

But in that moment, a new horror was dawning.

For nearly a decade, Hope had been lying.

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When I cover Munchausen by proxy cases, I approach them with a central question.

If this case is not Munchausen by proxy, then what is going on here?

Now, I did reach out to Sophie to ask her if she'd like to give us her side of the story.

We never got a response, but that's a standing invitation.

Sophie, if you're listening, we would be happy to hear you out.

But just as we did get plenty Sophie in her own words via her memoir about her travels to Zambia, we do hear Sophie's account of the time leading up to this investigation via her journals.

And if you are inclined to believe that Sophie Hartman is innocent, this is one of the hardest things to explain away.

When Sophie's children were placed in protective custody in March of 2021, the officers also served her with a residential search warrant.

In the search of her rent and home, the police picked up a number of journals, and Detective O'Rourke's investigative summary, which is in this case an incredibly detailed narrative, includes scans of about two dozen journal entries that the detective had found were especially relevant to the case.

These are harrowing to read, but also fascinating.

They are some of the most direct insights I've ever gotten into the mind of someone who engages in these behaviors.

Much of Sophie's writing in her journals is as florid and purple as her memoir.

Many entries are written directly to God, who sometimes writes back.

And many, though not all, of these entries are dated, which gives us insight into what Sophie is thinking and feeling during a particular medical event.

For example, when C is just under two years old, she visits the University of Washington Center for Adoption Medicine, where Sophie reports that she is having seizures and weakness on her right side.

An MRI reveals a slight static encephalopathy, and the doctors report that this could be indicative of mild cerebral palsy.

This is long before C's diagnosis of HC, at the beginning of this very long road.

A few days later, Sophie writes in her journal, quote, I trust you, Lord, I do.

I lay it all down.

The heartache, the unknown, static encephalopathy, global development delay, epilepsy, speech and vision impairments, cerebral palsy, drug exposure, all of it.

She then lists out a number of doctors' names and some other names as well, possibly people on her care team, though we don't know.

And Sophie writes, All of them.

I lay down.

I need a word.

God, or Sophie as God, then responds, Sophie, quietly persist.

I see it all.

Do not waver as her advocate.

Just keep moving forward.

In another entry, Sophie lays out a laundry list of symptoms and asks God to, quote, bring it into the light and to, quote, give the doctors wisdom to see beyond C's cuteness and charm.

God, bring forth all that she is to light.

All the damage done to her brain, all that isn't working properly in her body, all that is frustrating for her, all that is debilitating, all that is destructive.

Bring it all into the light.

She ends this entry with a lengthy list of diagnoses, which, with the exception of cerebral palsy and static encephalopathy, no doctor appears to have mentioned to her.

Many of Sophie's journal entries read like a kind of fever dream, but one entry in particular is utterly straightforward.

This entry was on a loose leaf page, which was undated, but from context clearly after Sophie had adopted her girls.

In this wrenching entry, she seems to be confronting her demons head-on, laying out a series of events starting from childhood and up through her time in Zambia and as an adult.

She writes, How can I embrace my story if I don't understand it?

How can I do this?

I am bad.

She remembers this pattern going back to when she was four years old, writing, Something began telling me I was only worth being on the side.

I needed to have a real need to be cared for, that my needs weren't real needs.

To need is to be bad.

Later in that entry, she writes, to care is to be good.

She recalls faking a hand injury in high school, faking a knee injury, mono and meningitis in college.

She recalls a surgery she had on her ankle and remembers lying to friends about it becoming infected, and then lying about some gynecological issues around the time she went to Zambia.

In light of what came next, Sophie's lies about her own health feel a bit minor, but these details mirror my sister's story just almost beat for beat.

My sister had this knee surgery where they didn't find anything once they went in.

Sophie talks about faking a knee injury of her own, the gynecological complications, it all just really feels like a playbook.

And this journal entry from Sophie gave me such a window into what my sister's experience of this own part of her life might have been like.

Sophie writes, quote, When it comes to suffering, I am a compulsive liar/slash exaggerator.

To be cared for means to have significant need.

Have to have it the hardest for it to be worthy.

I am not deserving of love just as I am.

I push people away because I am so ashamed of who I am.

I truly believe I am a bad person.

Too bad for grace.

And this entry seems to draw a very clear line from lying about herself to what came next.

It ends in desperation.

She writes, quote, so angry with my children, abusive even, hitting and pinching and yelling, oh Lord, what have I become?

Who is this bad soul?

It's me, filth.

These entries were a lot to process.

So I brought in a heavy hitter to help me unpack them.

My name is Jim Hamilton and I have a PhD in clinical psychology.

and I worked for many years as a psychology professor.

As someone who has dedicated his career to studying this abuse, Jim had also never seen anything quite like these journals.

And we talked about Sophie's recounting of her own history with medical deception.

People who have engaged in medical child abuse, some significant percentage of perpetrators, have a fairly clear history in their own medical records of exaggeration, fabrication, exploitation of illness to meet their psychological needs.

As I looked over the snippets that you gave me to read, I was struck by exactly that thing, that she made some sort of comment about having to be needy in order to be needed.

You know, this is something we try to get courts to understand.

uh when we present cases of medical child abuse and this is the part that i think is hardest for them to understand and that she articulated it so beautifully.

I mean, I could just take the quote from the snippet you gave me and

read that in court the next time I have to because it's so exactly what we think is going on in these cases.

We always talk about once we find evidence that abusive behavior has occurred,

we want to think about, all right, we're not so much interested in diagnosing something like factitious disorder imposed on another or malingering by proxy or anything like that, but we do need to sort of articulate what the psychological need is that's being met by this behavior.

She speaks directly to the issue of need.

Jim and I work closely together.

We're colleagues on the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children's Munchausen by Proxy Committee and also at the nonprofit Munchausen Support, where we both serve on the board.

We spend no small amount of time in this group discussing the utility of the psychiatric diagnosis of factitious disorder imposed on another, which again is the official name for the disorder underpinning Munchausen by proxy.

The notion of this being primarily a mental illness often does more harm than good in court, where it tends to either create confusion about a perpetrator's culpability or just add one more complicated diagnosis to the mix for the two sides to fight over.

But as Jim says, it's really impossible to tell the story of what's happening in these cases, either in court or anywhere else, without explaining why someone would ever engage in this behavior that seems so ghastly to most people.

It establishes a motive.

One of the things I thought about as I was reading all this is that I was trying to make sense of the fact that all of that is laid out so clearly in a case of a problem, medical child abuse, where the perpetrators are usually very fastidious about controlling information.

keeping the deceptions up, keeping their secrets.

To commit this to writing, I'm I'm wondering what her thinking was in actually, you know, in actually doing that.

Did she think no one was ever going to see it?

Or did she have maybe a more complex plan in mind?

So, why write all this down?

Was she trying to soothe her own internal conflict?

Was she really asking God for help?

Did she really believe God was answering?

The idea that these folks try to deceive themselves,

that's true, then you wouldn't want to put it in writing

that

you sort of have yourself figured out for why you're doing the things that you are denying to others that you're doing, which is making up all of these

fabrications and exaggerations about your child's illness.

I don't know if you saw this.

I don't know if anybody but me saw this.

But in the snippets that you gave me to read,

at some point it said capital D, capital I, capital D,

which is an abbreviation for dissociative identity disorder.

And I noted that somebody mentioned that

these things were in different handwritings.

The notations that

she herself made

were in different handwriting depending on what the topic was, et cetera.

Two possibilities about that.

She didn't mean anything by writing DID.

That's one.

I guess there's three possibilities.

Another is that she has something like dissociative identity disorder.

And a third is that this is

the reason she's writing all this stuff down in this peculiar way is she's preparing kind of

a defense or an explanation for why she's done what she's done.

This is an interesting theory that the discovery of these diaries was part of some master plan on Sophie's part.

And frankly, I'm not going to put anything past her at this point.

But I've spent no small amount of time reading through and digesting these journals.

And they often sound like Sophie is writing herself a very grandiose and fanciful story about what she's doing.

That this is an elaborate justification to herself about what she's putting her daughters through.

That Sophie actually is the hero of this story.

Well, laid bare in these diaries, the selfishness of it all.

This is not about

C.H.

This is about Ms.

Hartman.

In this case, in a lot of the documents that I've read, the mom seems to have this sense of entitlement.

Like

they have to treat me, they have to care for me, they have to do this, they have to do that, because that's what I want and that's what my child needs.

Very unself-conscious about how entitled and selfish she is.

And in those things in the diary,

I don't know that she was

as self-aware about the selfishness as she was in other parts where she was self-aware about her neediness.

But of course, they're related.

What we learn from these diary entries about

her dynamics with her children and in this section where she's being very honest and straightforward, she has this quote that, I'm so angry with my children, abusive even, hitting and pinching and yelling.

Lord, what have I become?

Who is this bad soul?

It's me, filth.

You know, and I want, it says like, I want to be abused.

I crave pain.

And obviously, this is just, you know, disturbing to read.

And I think

there's a through line here actually for,

you know, I think one of the things that I didn't realize about this abuse when I was going in, right?

Before I, when I, when I just had my end of one, that was my personal experience was,

and that we have learned is not the case from so many survivors, including, you know, Joe, who is, who we both know, who is on our fourth season,

is that this abuse is not confined to the medical arena.

There's this profound lack of empathy for the children.

And I think like that journal entry from Sophie really expresses that.

And then the other thing that really stuck out to me was these journal entries.

You know, there are some journal entries from her older daughter, Em, that were just really, really heartbreaking.

The investigative summary includes many journal entries from Sophie, but also some from Sophie's older daughter M, as well as letters that she wrote to her mom.

And these were so sad to read.

While M wasn't the main subject of this investigation, she was also obviously deeply affected by what was happening in the household.

And while there is less in here about M's medical history than C's, we do know that she'd been prescribed antidepressants and ADHD medications, and she writes in her journals about her brain feeling fuzzy and confused.

And heartbreakingly, her journals also also include reflections on her being a freak and Zambians being freaky people.

And to the extent that Em was, to borrow Jim's metaphor, a prop in Sophie's play, her role seems to have been gymnastic star.

You can see her straining for her mother's approval.

In one letter to Sophie, she writes about feeling like she's just a gymnast and that she has to be a perfect one.

A reflection we also heard about from the moms at the gym and Sophie's neighbor.

Em writes that she only wants to make her mom happy, but she feels like if she makes a mistake, her mom will be angry and yell, and she clearly blames herself for her mom's anger.

The report also includes one of Sophie's responses, where she writes, quote, I'm sorry I put all my anger on you when you make a mistake.

I'm sorry for screaming.

I'm sorry for saying that you were being a shit show.

Comments she makes about being emotionally abusive to her kids and being cruel to them.

I've seen that in other cases as well.

I had a case down south when I lived there.

The babysitter was available as a collateral informant.

And the babysitter commented on how inattentive, unrealistically demanding of like the child, when the child was too young to be expected to do this or that or the other thing, the mom was expecting it,

quick to anger, not warm.

you know, not loving.

And the contrast between the gushy, wonderful mom, loving, caring mom would do anything for their kid would make you think that when you saw them at home and they weren't being watched by anybody, you'd see the same amount of gushing over the child.

But

it really, you know,

it's all a play.

And you and I recently had the opportunity to speak to some forensic psychiatrists about this and I sort of previewed my

developing view that that this is much more like a kind of exploitation abuse than it is an event-related abuse.

And I talked about the idea that in this play, in this drama that these perpetrators

create, where they are both the director and the main character, the most important character, the child is not really even a character.

The child's a prop.

And so it's consistent with that formulation that, you know, at home,

the mother's selfish, and if it's between her needs and the kids' needs, it's going to be her needs.

I'm pretty sure Em

probably just felt

ignored by this.

She wasn't apparently used as a prop.

She wasn't getting any of this

attention that's associated with the circumstance that

Sophie created for C.

And

that's, you know, that's terribly sad.

But the most disturbing narrative in these pages is the one about C's death.

And these reflections are not isolated.

Sophie was telling many people C would die young, and the forensic examination of her devices revealed a number of chilling searches.

The fact that

the topic came up of songs associated with cancer.

I thought that was interesting.

That was among the search history terms that

were in the documents that you shared with me.

And

that made me wonder if she was thinking through season two,

or maybe it was season three at this point,

starting to put together the storyboard for the next chapter.

I forget the abbreviation for the illness that she claimed that CM had.

As that chapter was drawing to a close, what else was she going to do?

And the idea that that could include something like cancer, it could also include something like

expecting her death or who knows.

So yeah,

that was a bit chilling.

And it really sort of speaks to the idea that this, there might be self-deception involved, but this is often very, very planful.

In the spring of 2019, the day after Seattle Children's denies one of her requests to place a central line in her daughter and put her on TPN, which is intravenous nutrition, Sophie writes this.

How is it that doctors who had never heard of HC before they came to work today get to make decisions regarding her care?

I will absolutely fail C if I fight for the duration of her life rather than the quality of it.

The best decisions that have been made for C in the past have been big ones that I suggested far before any member of her team was ready to do it.

Stalling those decisions only let doctors check off their boxes while her suffering was prolonged.

Is this what it will always be like?

Or are there doctors willing to take risks for the sake of her quality of life?

In another entry that is undated, but presumably from around this same time, Sophie writes this: I know, Lord, I know this fear in ever-increasing measure.

I do not want to live in fear, but fear over C's life grips me at times.

I wonder how would I ever go on if you brought her home?

Later in this entry, God, or again, Sophie as God, responds, saying, Give C to me, Sophie.

She had been starting to talk, even in this journal entries and elsewhere, about quality of life over length of life,

and had sent messages to friends saying, Oh, well, when, you know, I was just thinking if C dies, I'll call Cassie and make her come lie in bed with me while I cry.

I mean, it just really, it seems like she was that's a good example of this idea that she's storyboarding.

I sort of wanted to run that theory by you.

You know, not, we can only speculate in this case or in any given case, but I sort of wonder if there is some point where the death of the child actually becomes more useful to the perpetrator.

I think it's all a matter of the specific tastes of the perpetrator.

what kind of sympathy they're after.

I think you referred to, and I think we were more more and more in this conversation, referring to this idea of a narrative, that this kind of abuse, again, is a prolonged abuse.

It's a storytelling abuse.

And

this particular feature that you're talking about of the death of the child, in some way,

it fixes the story.

Like the story can't have a surprise ending where the kid goes on the Dr.

Phil show in five years or 10 years and says, I had this mom who did all these terrible things to me.

I realized more than she knew, and I knew that I was being medically abused.

Nothing could happen to the story if

the child dies.

So there's a

sense of narrative control.

It's very poignant, as you say.

It opens up,

you know, I use

the analogy of planning for season two or season three.

it opens up a whole new season, a whole new sort of chapter of Sophie's story or the perpetrator's story, whoever it might be.

Sophie, as narrator in this particular case, is especially compelling because she is literally narrating this imaginary world that she's building for herself.

And as a writer, you can see in some of these entries that she's actively planning out her next book.

You can also see in her writing how she is tying this all in to the grandest narrative of all, the notion that Sophie is on a divine mission.

She frequently refers to C as her, quote, harvest, which is biblically loaded language that speaks to this idea that C and her suffering, and of course Sophie's suffering as her mother, will bring souls to God, that there is a higher purpose for C's pain.

Sophie talks about how suffering is holy and elsewhere asks God how he could bear to sacrifice his only son.

Sophie is heroine and martyr all at once.

The sacrifice of her daughter is positioned as divine.

And in a very real way, when you look at the search terms from the forensic examination of Sophie's devices, you can see her storyboarding her next season.

In the first year of the pandemic, Sophie starts weaving a new plot for C.

Now, in addition to the age C diagnosis, she adds in the precocious puberty storyline.

So to ground us, here is what happened in reality.

Sophie brings C to an endocrinologist at Seattle Children's in July of 2020, reporting a bunch of symptoms that she says have her concerned for precocious puberty.

In this exam, there are modest clinical findings, but these are discordant with lab results and a bone scan that shows no signs of precocious puberty.

C also has an MRI to rule out any brain mass that might be causing the symptoms Sophie is reporting, and this comes back clear, and a follow-up examination of C shows her to be completely normal.

Sophie then continues to push for a surgical hormone implant against doctors' recommendations, insisting that these quote cycles that C is experiencing are exacerbating her AHC episodes.

And during this time, she also tells friends and providers that C is in full-blown puberty and that the likely cause is a brain mass.

So what do we know about what Sophie was up to on her devices during this time?

Her search history shows numerous telling entries, including precocious puberty, pituitary tumor symptoms, and pituitary adenoma surgery.

She also searches Supra catheter, which is a surgically placed catheter for people who cannot urinate on their own, which is one of the symptoms that Sophie was reporting to the endocrinologist.

Sophie also looks up a foundation that is dedicated to children with endocrine disorders.

So it's not just the next diagnosis she's pursuing.

She's also looking for the worst possible reason for this diagnosis, a brain tumor, which she reported to C's doctors and teachers, as well as a possible surgery for that tumor to pursue and additional surgical interventions for the symptoms she's reporting.

And she's looking for the next foundation to support all of these efforts.

It's honestly diabolical.

There are also, as Jim mentions, a few searches around cancer as well as searches related to leukemia.

At first, I assumed this had to do with another possible storyline for C.

But then, I saw that one of the searches was Down syndrome and leukemia.

And I remembered that during the investigation, Sophie was actively attempting to adopt a child from China with Down syndrome.

She also looked up Infusion Center Valley Medical.

Now, infusion care can be used for a number of things, but it's best known for chemotherapy treatments.

So again, this looks like part of a plan.

And Valley Medical, by the way, this is a brand new hospital in the area that she can try out after ostensibly having worn out her welcome at mary bridge and seattle children's sure seems like she has her sights set on a whole new spin-off series

and while her daughters are the primary victims in all of this they are far from the only people who got hurt the terrible thing about all of this really is that people who have genuinely ill children and who are genuinely

you know, grieving and in need of support and

coalescing with others around that experience are harmed by this.

Rare disease groups, rare disease advocacy groups, researchers, and parents and such are really harmed by when a situation where somebody sort of co-opts this rare disease,

perhaps spoiling research data, perhaps,

as I said, casting suspicion upon everybody else who says they have it.

It's awful.

It's the depth of the thoughtlessness and selfishness really expressed, I think, in some of its most depressing ways.

Groups dedicated to HC didn't just support Sophie emotionally.

They supported her financially, helping Pei to send her and C out to Duke to see Dr.

Makati.

And as for the research, Sophie was reporting things way outside the norm for HC, like severe gastrointestinal issues and 32-day-long episodes.

It's easy to see how a case like this in such a small sample set of real cases could really throw off the data.

So far from Sophie's efforts with C, quote, helping the cause, as Sophie wrote about, or quote, leading to a scientific breakthrough, they're messing with that progress and taking resources that should be going to children who desperately need them.

Back in the spring of 2021, C and M are living with Sophie's sister Sam and her mother Ann.

Sophie is charged in May of 2021, but her parents quickly secure a bond to bail her out.

She is granted supervised visitation with the girls, and while Sophie at first claims she is staying with a friend quite a ways away in Mercer Island, it comes out later that she is in fact staying very close to the house where the girls are.

This whole thing is an epic fail, just an absolute disaster from a protocol standpoint.

As we outline in our American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children guidelines for these investigations, it is crucial that children are not placed with a family member who does not believe the abuse is happening.

The guidelines also recommend against visitation because of the intense psychological manipulation involved in this abuse.

And certainly, allowing a suspected perpetrator to bring the children food and drink, as Sophie did, should never be allowed.

No one doubts that separating a child from their parent is very hard on everyone.

But when the safety of the child is in question, we have to take that seriously.

Detective Lee explains why it's necessary to be vigilant around custody placements in any abuse case.

The fundamental aspect of that that we really have to consider is in a case like this one, where the only other family members that maybe could take them just happen to be people that you can reasonably expect are going to align with the perpetrator and her narrative.

And they're like, well, we need to put the child somewhere else.

Well, they're going to start asking the family again, right?

And then maybe they go and they ask dad's mom.

Like, hey, so this is paternal grandmother.

This is the mother of the accused individual.

Hey, can you watch watch her so that we can keep this separation during this time?

Sure, I can do it.

She passes the home test.

Everything's good to go.

The child goes over there.

During the entire time she's there,

she's being told, how could you ever say something like that about your father?

He has done all these things for you.

You know what?

Santa Claus doesn't come around and give presents to little kids that tell lies like that.

You know, Jesus is watching.

He's not happy with you either.

X, Y, and Z.

So they get told all of these things, and it creates this an additional barrier for them.

This manipulation is being applied across all forms of abuse, but especially in these areas where like mom and aunt are going to have a vested interest in controlling this narrative.

And if it's not in manipulating the child to do something, it is absolutely,

it tracks that they would say, okay, we're still going to take her to the hospital.

We still believe that she has all these conditions.

We still think Seattle Children's is the devil because mom said that they are.

Sophie's family has never given any indication now or then that they believe anything other than that Sophie is a wrongly accused mother, meaning they cannot be counted on to protect the girls from her.

Dr.

Makati himself, who both Sophie and her attorneys insisted was the one who really understood C's health, told the police that C needed to be with an objective observer and that if grandmother is going to be a bias observer, that is going to be a big, big

problem.

Throughout the investigation, Anne and Sam consistently reported behavioral issues in C, which again, they appear to be interpreting as evidence of her having HC episodes.

And they also report one very strange detail, that C is trying to eat grass and paper.

The only other place a mention of such behavior shows up is in a report that Sophie made to a representative from the Developmental Disabilities Administration.

Now, there are several possibilities here.

The least likely being that C, out of nowhere, started trying to eat grass.

The other two options are that Sam and Ann knowingly lied to the police, or that Sophie's influence on them during this time was so strong that they believed the behavioral issues they were witnessing in C were really symptoms.

Even then, this particular detail about her eating paper and grass is tough to get past.

Oh yes, and by the way, the supervision of Sophie with the girls, this was provided by a private company.

Sophie was also allowed to bring food and drinks for the girls to these visits, and this whole situation just sounds incredibly lax.

But these are the kinds of accommodations that money can buy you, and that's not all it can do.

In April of 2022, a family court judge returned CNM to Sophie's care, and the criminal charges were dismissed the following summer.

A local headline read, Renton mother cleared in medical child abuse case.

September is here, and you you know what that means.

Sowetaweather is coming.

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So, in the summer of 2022, the criminal case against Sophie is dismissed.

And because this all took place in family court rather than criminal, we were not able to obtain records to tell us what happened during the dependency trial, which is the DCF side of the equation.

To try to make sense of these events, we spoke to Olivia Lavois, the journalist who originally broke the story of this case.

A case like this, particularly when there is so much media attention, you know,

when the case is dismissed, it sends the message of,

okay, well, I guess the person didn't do it.

To the general person, right?

If you're hearing that the case is dismissed, the average person is going to say, oh, well, there obviously wasn't evidence then.

So, you know, knowing...

all that was in that search warrant, I was really interested in trying to understand

what had happened in the last two years to then get to that point.

Yeah, and were you able to discover anything about why that got dismissed?

What I found was that initially the case was dropped down from felony court to

misdemeanor court.

So just thinking about it being dropped from a felony to a misdemeanor, that in itself was really surprising.

I never was able to understand

why that happened.

Prosecutor, no one from the prosecutor's office was ever able to say,

I mean, of course they had their reasons, but they just didn't feel like sharing.

Didn't feel like sharing, I guess.

But the implication is,

well, obviously new information must have came up that made the case not as strong or, you know, something, right?

I mean, to think of it going from a felony

smoking gun appeared sort of type thing.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it makes it means that the crime is less serious in the eyes of the law.

So what happened to make

this crime less serious legally?

And so yeah, I never was really able to get a clear understanding on that, which was frustrating.

But what I thought was really interesting about the case being dismissed was it was a conditional thing.

It was like, okay,

both sides and the judge were all agreeing to these conditions and if these conditions are met, then the case will be dismissed.

Here are those conditions.

CH shall enroll in in-person education slash school and will notify the state of the school slash school district upon enrollment prior to September of 2022.

The defendant shall have CH continue to participate with the same care medical team and her primary pediatrician, Dr.

Nauert.

The defendant will comply with the care team's recommendations.

Specifically, the defendant shall comply with the care medical team's recommendations related to CH's ingestion of food and water and use of her sakostomy tube.

The defendant shall not have CH use a wheelchair unless recommended by the care team.

The defendant shall not make any medical decisions for CH.

Ann Hartman or Samantha Ferris will have medical decision-making authority for CH.

The defendant may attend CH's medical appointments.

And interestingly, this last one.

The defendant shall comply with an order to surrender weapons.

Because the relevant back and forth happened in family court, we can't say for sure why Sophie's children were returned or why exactly the charges got dropped.

But I can offer some insight.

This is the exact path my sister's case went down, and unfortunately, the way many of them play out.

For the most part, family court judges just don't understand what this abuse is or how to handle it, as evidenced by their truly bananas placement and supervision decisions in this case.

If family court gives the kids back, it means that DCF has failed to establish dependency, for which you only need a preponderance of evidence, not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

Now, it's not impossible to prevail in criminal court in such a scenario.

The Danita Tuck case in Texas is one example, but it's definitely an uphill battle, and it's not a chance that many prosecutors want to take.

Prosecutors are not going to file charges if they don't think they have a really strong case.

That was something that I keep in mind always, but particularly with a case like this, they knew that this case was going to be a big media story and they also knew that this case was complicated and not something that their prosecutors, I think, had a ton of experience in.

So

it's a big deal to file charges.

Like you're not going to do that if you don't think that case is really strong.

But on the other hand, I also feel that with the case that has gotten media attention, that people care about, they, you know, they know about, to dismiss that case is also a really, really big deal.

And if I'm prosecutors, I'm not going to dismiss that case unless I really think the case sucks and has no shot.

And, you know,

did they dismiss it because they thought, well, at least we could get her to agree to these conditions?

I don't know.

It's a pretty crazy situation.

And I think it's also a really unpleasant scenario for anyone to think about any case in general.

We know this happens, but it's unpleasant to think of a case where prosecutors dismiss it, even though they believe

that the person is guilty of the allegations, but they just can't prove it.

So this case did get media attention, but this happened in the summer of 2021.

There was a lot going on.

So I don't know if there was much outrage left in folks for this case getting dismissed.

I mean, I certainly found some despair, but you know, that's me.

And I think Olivia is right that most people see a headline that says mom cleared and assume, okay, these accusations must have been wrong.

And Sophie's well-off parents appear to have circled the wagons.

They reportedly spent millions of dollars on her defense.

And this didn't even go to criminal trial.

So what did they spend that money on?

Well, for one thing, hiring experts such as Dr.

Eli Neuberger, whose name you may recognize as he pops up in just about every high-profile Munchausen by proxy case, including the Maya Kowalski case, where he was paid $160,000 for his deposition on behalf of the Kowalskis.

Dr.

Eli Neuberger, who passed away this year, was himself a fascinating character, and I will certainly devote an episode to him at some point.

But needless to say, I was not surprised that he showed up in this case.

They also likely spent a good portion of this money on their top shelf lawyers.

Their lead attorney, Adam Shapiro, I happened to know, is very expensive because he also represented my sister Megan in both of her investigations.

And Sophie didn't just have Megan's lawyers, she had Megan herself, who actually worked on this case and reportedly became quite close with the Hartmans.

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The evidence that I've seen in this case seems overwhelming.

And even though the case was dismissed, the court appears to know that something was wrong.

Otherwise, why tell Sophie that she needs to put her daughter in school, comply with the doctor's feeding recommendations, and, you know, not put her in a wheelchair.

And with all of this, why would her parents continue to support her?

What were they thinking?

We did reach out to the Hartmans, as well as Sophie's sister Sam Ferris, but we never heard back from any of them about doing an interview.

So I did the next best thing.

I asked my own dad, Mike Dunlop, why he hired Adam Shapiro.

I'm Andrea Dunlop's father.

Been her father for a long time, in fact, ever since she was born.

And so that's who I am.

I walked my dad through all of the many parallels with this case and the one in our family.

And now my parents never thought Megan was innocent, as Sophie's parents appear to.

But they did make the very same phone call to Adam Shapiro that the Hartmans did.

Well, what I told the attorney, I told Shapiro, this is what I want.

You know, I want Megan to get treatment.

There's no doubt in my mind she's seriously ill.

And his job is to make sure that she gets treatment and unfortunately he went completely against my wishes and he sort of claimed that he's representing Megan even though I was paying the bills right and I think I think they have to do that I mean I don't think you can

but he should have I suppose I mean he If he gave you the impression in your first conversations with him that he could do that, that he could like, because you were paying the bills, sort of act on your behalf, I mean, I don't think that would be legal or ethical.

it's not it wasn't it was what i wanted him to create as an outcome and to first you know this was an incident that we could utilize to help me

and that was right sort of things have come to a head now

and uh you know she needs legal representation because you know it's in the hands of the state and um he one of the things i've compartmentalized is uh the horror that this man, in my opinion, could

not only not represent her best interests, in my opinion, but actually

defend her against something that she did

and

then has now tried to make a career out of it.

If it sounds like we were woefully naive about all of this, we were.

We had never had any interactions with DCF before the first investigation into my sister 14 years ago.

And though I disagreed with my dad's decision to hire attorneys for Megan and her husband Andy in the beginning, all these years later, now that I'm a parent myself, I understand.

He wanted to protect his child and his grandchild.

He thought he could influence the outcome.

And when he realized he couldn't, he stopped paying Adam Shapiro's bills.

But Shapiro has stuck around, and he's done a lot of work on my sister's behalf.

He also defended her in the second investigation over my niece, and he sent me various seasoned assist letters over the years.

I suspect it's it's likely that some of this work has been pro bono, and he and Megan obviously became close, which could explain how she got hired on the Hartman case, despite having, to my knowledge, no legal training.

I can understand Sophie's family being in shock when this all came up, and for doing what people with means usually do in a legal crisis, lawyering up.

It's really difficult to accept that someone you love could be capable of this, and I understand parents wanting to protect their daughter.

So I can forgive them for not knowing what to do right away, just as I can forgive my brother-in-law and his parents for not seeing what we saw right from the beginning.

What I can't forgive is staying in denial and letting the children suffer while you're presented with more and more evidence that something is wrong.

The first investigation into Megan, prompted by her push for the G-tube surgery, came to, well, not much.

After an eight-month investigation, DCF declined to file dependency, meaning that Megan would regain full custody of her son.

There was no criminal investigation this first time, though there should have been.

Whether it would have made a difference is another question altogether.

My parents and I had been thoroughly iced out by the end of the first investigation.

We were the enemy who'd accused Megan of abuse.

But from what the social worker was able to share with us, it sounds like the court essentially told Megan that she needed some therapy.

Megan frames this first investigation as going nowhere because DCF found no evidence of abuse.

But a great many DCF investigations end this way, with a parenting plan and nothing further.

And given how prevalent the idea of medical child abuse being a matter of a mom's mental health is, I can't say I'm surprised with this outcome.

My parents and I were bereft when DCF didn't file for dependency.

They'd revealed to Megan and her husband early on that my mom had told the doctors about her concerns, and this revelation had blown up my family.

And then they hadn't done anything to protect the kids.

But then,

Not long after this all happened, my father got a message from my sister's husband, Andy.

He'd been on his own journey of revelation with Megan, completely separate from the abuse investigation.

Megan's crippling debt, much of this from unpaid medical bills, had come to light and there were threats, Andy told my dad, to garnish his wages.

This was bizarre because my dad had asked Megan many times to send him all of her remaining bills and he'd pay them.

But of course, then he'd see them, so maybe not such a mystery why she didn't share.

And it wasn't just the money.

In a detail that I thought was a bizarre outlier to Megan's story, until I heard it from multiple other fathers who'd been married to perpetrators, Andy had discovered evidence of numerous affairs.

We were honestly relieved when this all came out, because Megan couldn't blame any of this on us.

And now that Andy had seen how deceptive she could be with his own eyes, he'd come around, right?

In a lengthy series of emails between him and my father, Andy tells him that he wants to help us reconcile with Megan.

He said he knows Megan needs help, but he continues to insist that she'd never lie about her child's health, that their son really does have all of these issues.

In that case, my dad writes to him, please send us his medical records so we can see for ourselves and put our concerns to rest.

He refuses, telling my dad that it's, quote, not appropriate to share them with him, which is pretty rich coming from someone who is hitting up his estranged father-in-law for money.

The The back and forth continues until Andy arranges a meeting with him, my father, and Megan.

Their whole motivation was, how can we sue the hospital?

Yeah.

I mean, were you

surprised at the gall of that?

I mean, it's like, they were in a...

It's not surprising in the context of Megan and her behavior, but like,

it's a

sort of a shocking move in some ways, you know?

Andy saw it as a ticket out of their financial problems.

So they wanted you to fund their legal pursuit of suing children's hospital for falsely accusing her.

And what did you have to say to that?

I said, no, I believe that what they said is correct.

And

I have no intention of doing that.

And I think that is...

That's extortion.

That's not just that's suing.

That's extortion.

You're trying to get money out of them when you have no rationale for it whatsoever i believe but i mean was that your last conversation with megan yep i said goodbye and i to be honest i didn't expect to see her again

any family member who finds themself in this situation faces a horrible choice Do the right thing to protect the children and risk your relationship with the perpetrator, or look the other way and become an enabler of the abuse.

And if the state doesn't do anything, or if they're not successful in court, you lose both your family member and their children forever.

And as the children's aunt and grandparents, we don't have any rights.

So speak up or don't.

It's a hard choice, but to me, it's a clear choice.

You don't ignore it when children are being harmed.

Megan's husband and his parents chose denial, and I will never forgive them.

But Sophie's parents were in a different position than mine.

For one thing, there was no partner and no in-laws who could provide support if they didn't.

And they were paying Sophie's legal bills.

Otherwise, she wouldn't have been able to afford Shapiro or Megan to come in and bend the system to her will.

So while I can afford them their initial shock, they were sitting in these hearings.

They've seen everything I've presented to you in this series and likely much more, because nothing from the actual dependency proceedings is in the public record.

And when you keep supporting someone long past when you should have known better, as I discussed with my mom, Karen, you're no longer just enabling abuse.

You're participating in it.

You've been presented with so much evidence about the abuse, so much evidence about

her deception, and you have chosen to disregard all of that and give her the ability to keep doing this.

I mean, somebody, it's like, that's the thing is like, and you know, it's come down to the same thing with Sophie.

Somebody has to keep paying the bills.

Like eventually,

if you run out of people who are supporting you, if you get to the end of the line, so it's like the people who are like

the people who are doing that, like you are

supporting an abuser.

You're giving them, you might as well be handing them the weapon.

You know, it's sort of like that is the weapon.

I have mixed feelings about Andy's parents frequently.

Sometimes I feel really sorry for them.

because oh my gosh, what did they get into?

On the other hand, I'm really angry because they were and are in a position to protect the kids and they wouldn't step up.

So, but I think for like grandparents and aunts, like even, you know, if they're listening, like I hope that they are telling those kids that they have attributes other than being sick, that they are capable, that they are whole people who deserve love and recognition, and they've failed them in so many ways, ways but I hope that they are still because we didn't get that chance.

We didn't get that chance to like love them and care for them and like I

we were so villainized and like

really watching for me watching you and dad be villainized when like I know what good parents you were and grew up in the same house and like I know how much we would have loved.

to be in those kids lives.

Oh, we would have.

And they missed out on so much.

Yeah, I feel like we had so much love to give and didn't have the opportunity so and I think about how much we love your kids now and how much we enjoy spending time with them and it's such a special relationship

and you know and it's it's just a shame that Megan's children have missed out on that and we've missed out on that.

The son is a teenager.

He has access to the internet.

Like he could be listening and figuring things out and like

what would you want to tell them now?

And then what do you hope for them in the future?

I hope for good health, mental and physical.

I think they have to be so traumatized.

And I hope they are able to see the situation at some point for what it really is and was.

Maybe they'll listen to your podcast and realize that

people did see, people did care,

and we did all we could do.

I hope that someday they realize that.

At the heart of this work that has become so central to my life, it has always been this, a message to my niece and nephew, a way back if they should ever be looking for it, and a message to those who are still in their lives to keep eyes on them.

and to reinforce that they are whole people, not just the story their mother wrote for them.

I felt a bit conflicted about covering this season's story because I don't have the cooperation of the family, but I ended up feeling that it was all the more important because I believe the Hartmans have turned their back on these children.

Anne and Sam eventually went back to Michigan.

The conditions we explained earlier in this episode stayed in place for some period of time, but were ultimately lifted and the case was officially dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can't be brought back to court in November of 2023.

The children are back with Sophie, more isolated now than they were before.

And Sophie didn't just follow my sister's footsteps in her battle to get her children back.

She kept on with the Megan Carter playbook.

Next step, sue everyone.

Next time.

So her attorneys are definitely going to, and they did in their documentation.

They use very inflammatory language.

They make it seem like it's a conspiracy that on an absolute lack of evidence.

Nobody Should Believe Me is written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Andrea Dumlop.

Our senior producer is Mariah Gossett.

Story editing by Nicole Hill.

Research and fact-checking by Erin Ajayi.

And our associate producer is Greta Stromquist.

Mixing and Engineering by Robin Edgar.

Administrative support from Nola Carmouche.

Special thanks to my APSAC committee colleagues, Dr.

Jim Hamilton Hamilton and Detective Michael Lee.

Thank you also to Olivia Lavois and to my mom and dad.

It was very special to be able to sit down with them for the show, and we will be releasing those full conversations in a future episode.

If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to munchhausensupport.com to connect with professionals who can help.

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