Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents

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Speaker 3 Listen to all episodes of Baby Broker ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page.

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Speaker 3 The binge.

Speaker 3 Last October, I was in the recording studio studio with Mike and Teresa Mathini, the couple from Atlanta who adopted Stephanie's son. We were taking a break, drinking coffee, when Mike asked me,

Speaker 4 Did you ever see the documentary Don't Fuck With Cats?

Speaker 3 I have not seen it, no.

Speaker 4 Guy starts out herding animals online and ends up killing a human.

Speaker 4 It's like this group of normal people come together online where they're like putting together pieces of the puzzle like the wrapper from the cigarette and the picture on the wall in the hotel to track this guy down and they eventually give like Interpol what they need to find this guy.

Speaker 4 I feel like it's a good analogy for sort of our little Facebook group.

Speaker 4 The rule of the group was once you're admitted, you know, you have to sort of write out your, your family's story with how you connected with Tara. And there were so many lies.

Speaker 4 It's like you're almost able to piece things together in your story based on the information in other people's stories. Yeah.

Speaker 4 There was like someone that said that, you know, Tara collected eight, $10,015,000 or whatever, you know, on October 25th. And we're like, we were with her in the hospital that whole day.

Speaker 4 So it's like where she was clickety-clacking on her cell phone. It's like she was in there robbing people blind

Speaker 3 while our son was being poor.

Speaker 3 From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Baby Broker. I'm Peter McDonald, episode 6.

Speaker 3 Don't fuck with parents.

Speaker 3 It's okay not to be perfect with finances.

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Speaker 3 By September of 2018, the Facebook group Courtney Edmond helped start had evolved into a crowdsourcing juggernaut of Terra Lee's pissed-off former clients.

Speaker 3 By October, members of the Facebook group were telling their stories to FBI agent Matt Sluss.

Speaker 3 By November, Slus's investigation had swelled to include 150 couples, all of whom felt Tera Lee had misled, defrauded, or swindled them.

Speaker 3 Courtney's Facebook group was the seed from which the investigation grew. I want to zoom in on a moment in early October before the FBI got involved, when the seed took root.

Speaker 3 Julie Falkenberry, one of the three women who started the Facebook group, told Courtney that she wanted to cold call Talia Getting and Tanya Corrado.

Speaker 3 They were the two lawyers who represented many of the couples in Terra Lee's adoptions. Here's Courtney.

Speaker 3 She did.

Speaker 6 She called them, and after a couple hours of Julie talking to them, Julie called me back and she's like, I don't know if they're involved.

Speaker 6 Like, I don't know what's going on, but it doesn't seem like they are.

Speaker 3 I was like, girl, no.

Speaker 6 She's like, listen, I have another call with them later. I'm going to add you in, but you stay on mute.
You listen. So I just listened into the call.

Speaker 6 And they did sound pretty distraught. They did sound like they had no idea what was going on.
They were scared for their business. They were scared for the families.

Speaker 3 When I talked with Talia Getting, one of the lawyers, I asked her about this call with Julie. Talia said Julie yelled at them and accused them of fraud.

Speaker 3 But Talia swore she had no idea who Julie Falkenberry was.

Speaker 3 Talia told me it was only when Julie said her adoption with Terale had failed that she knew why she'd never heard of her.

Speaker 3 Tera Lee would send out all-inclusive adoption contracts with Talia and Tanya's names and fees on them without ever telling them. If an adoption failed, they often never knew.

Speaker 3 Tera Lee usually only called them when one succeeded, usually at the 11th hour. Talia told me she hated that Tera Lee did this and reprimanded her, but it did no good.

Speaker 3 When I shared all this with Rob Kirsch, he was appalled. He's an attorney who knows how adoptions are supposed to work.

Speaker 8 That was the problem with Tera Lee is that these poor adoptive parents trusted that she was doing it right and she was experienced and that I'm sure she talked a good game and made them feel comfortable that she was the expert at it and she took advantage of them.

Speaker 3 Her scheme worked in part because no one was looking for criminals, con artists, and fraudsters in the adoption industry.

Speaker 3 Because not only was preying on people involved in adoptions unconscionable, it was unimaginable. Even the feds, at first, needed a minute to wrap their heads around around what she'd done.

Speaker 3 Adoptions, by the way, are regulated at the state level. So, while there is oversight and there are rules, they differ.

Speaker 3 In Michigan, Terra Lee knew what the rules were, and she flagrantly violated them. The state had even told her to stop doing adoptions, but she didn't.

Speaker 3 On the phone, Julie Falkenberry told Talia about the baby boy she was adopting through Always Hope. It was a closed adoption, meaning Julie had no contact with the birth mother.

Speaker 3 Tera Lee told her that the birth mother went into labor unexpectedly, and the baby had died minutes after birth. Julie deeply mourned the loss.
She now suspected, though, it was all a lie.

Speaker 3 That Tera Lee had made up the baby and the birth mother. That it was all for money.

Speaker 3 While Courtney listened in, Julie told Talia and Tanya about their Facebook group of Tera Lee's former clients and all their failed adoptions. A graveyard of failures.

Speaker 3 When they hung up, it was early evening in Detroit. Talia and Tanya had a million questions.
This was serious. This was potentially criminal.
It was also, Talia told me, personal.

Speaker 3 Talia had been adopted and she had an adopted daughter. She said Julie's accusations not only scared her, they upset her.

Speaker 3 That night, Talia remembered that Tera Lee had given her access to Always Hope's Hope's email account. She wasn't sure if the login would still work, but it did.

Speaker 3 Talia and Tanya began reading over 4,000 emails Terra Lee had sent and received from her clients. They created a spreadsheet of names, dates, and payments.

Speaker 3 Leaning against their office wall was another piece of evidence in a frame, Tara Lee's diploma for her master's in social work from Northwestern.

Speaker 3 Months earlier, Talia said she'd asked Terra Lee for proof of this degree. And after weeks of these requests, she said, Tera Lee presented them with the frame diploma for display.

Speaker 3 But the FBI would discover that the diploma and her degree were fake. Pure fiction.

Speaker 3 Talia and Tanya shared what they found with another attorney, Maria Penchenko, who represented the birth mothers in many of Tera Lee's adoptions.

Speaker 3 They took matters into their own hands and together reached out to the FBI's Detroit field office to report Tera Lee. Days later, they were sitting with Special Agent Matt Sluss and Assistant U.S.

Speaker 3 Attorney Sarah Woodward. And that's how the three prongs of the investigation, the Facebook group, the lawyers, and the Department of Justice, came together to stop Tara Lee.

Speaker 3 For three weeks in October, Agents Matt Sluss and Mark Krieg conducted as many interviews with adoptive parents and birth mothers as possible. The evidence piled up.

Speaker 3 Agent Sluss's butcher paper chart morphed into a huge digital spreadsheet.

Speaker 3 Cell by by cell, it documented the traumatic stories of more than 150 couples in 24 states and dozens of birth mothers from Detroit. Many of these couples kept good records.

Speaker 10 So they could give us contracts that could show us exactly how much and when they paid.

Speaker 3 By early November, Agent Sluss and the U.S. Attorney's Office had enough evidence for a search warrant.

Speaker 3 On November 9th, multiple FBI agents drove to a middle-class neighborhood in New New Haven, a semi-rural suburb north of Detroit, and parked their unmarked cars in front of Tera Lee's two-story house.

Speaker 3 Someone connected to the Facebook group, whose name remains private, had been tipped off about the raid. They parked out front too, their cell phone camera aimed at the door.
Three, two, one.

Speaker 3 The agents got out and went in.

Speaker 10 She was there.

Speaker 3 As the FBI went in, the person secretly recording the raid from her car began posting snippets of video to the Facebook group. Word traveled fast.

Speaker 3 Many of the couples Tera Lee had defrauded signed on to watch the raid in real time.

Speaker 6 And she's like, oh, oh, now they're bringing in more people.

Speaker 3 Or, oh, they're taking out boxes. And we would be like, hey, what are they doing now?

Speaker 3 Courtney Edmund watched from her kitchen in Colorado Springs. She'd been through two failed adoptions with Teralee and had slept in the house that was being raided.

Speaker 3 Teresa Matheny, who'd driven from Atlanta to Detroit in a panic to save her adoption, watched too.

Speaker 11 Everybody has speculations on what's going to happen, you know, a lot of emotions.

Speaker 6 It was a big moment for all of us.

Speaker 6 It was emotional. It was exciting.
It was, oh my God, we were actually right. She's really doing this stuff.

Speaker 3 While Courtney watched, she was holding a baby she'd just adopted from another agency.

Speaker 11 It was the best.

Speaker 6 It was the best.

Speaker 13 So we heard about this FBI raid and sent out a daily crew and got the video of the federal agents going in and out of this home. And that's literally all we knew.

Speaker 3 That's Heather Catallo, an investigative reporter for WXYZ Channel 7, a popular TV news station in Detroit. Heather didn't know who owned the house and why the FBI was there.

Speaker 3 She just knew that whoever lived there was being investigated for fraud. And she wanted to find out why.

Speaker 13 I think that when you've been bamboozled, you want to know what happened.

Speaker 3 I mean, I've covered horrible crimes.

Speaker 14 I've covered public corruption.

Speaker 3 I've covered a lot of awful things.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 15 this this is in its own category.

Speaker 3 The FBI hauled out box after box from Terra Lee's home, but they were most interested in one small item.

Speaker 3 A sophisticated criminal who needs to communicate with their victims or associates might use a burner phone, text and code, use a pseudonym, and delete everything.

Speaker 3 Tera Lee's fraud depended on communication, and she'd saved everything.

Speaker 3 Every text change she'd monitored, every sketchy or fictitious update she'd sent to anxious adoptive parents, every credit card payment she received on an app was visible on her iPhone.

Speaker 3 When Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Woodward read through it, she saw the individual strands in Tara Lee's web of fraud.

Speaker 16 She definitely wasn't cautious.

Speaker 16 I mean, she was constantly texting. And so you can see in chronological order what the user is doing.
So for a particular couple or a particular victim, I could see the beginning.

Speaker 16 I could see maybe the first failed match, the second failed match.

Speaker 3 She also saw how Terra Lee used her personality to bamboozle people.

Speaker 16 Her personality was sort of like, I'm a foul-mouthed, tattooed woman, but I'm doing adoptions and you wouldn't expect that.

Speaker 16 And I know how to relate to people and I can kind of give you the real talk that you're not getting other places.

Speaker 16 And I think that personality maybe helped people ignore some red flags that they might have otherwise seen.

Speaker 3 Terra Lee had invented a lot of stories, lies rather, to make her fraud work because her con took so long. Here's Matt Slas.

Speaker 10 In most fraud schemes, you've made the lie. You've taken the money.
The communications are often done.

Speaker 10 In this particular situation, you have a whole pregnancy now where you have somebody on the hook for fraud early on that you have to continue to lie, continue to make misrepresentations, and continue to make something very sensitive feel very real for months.

Speaker 3 One of the ways Terra Lee made fake pregnancies feel real was by sending out ultrasound images purported to be of the baby the couple was adopting.

Speaker 3 The ultrasound image she sent to Tammy and Nick Graneth of Sabrina's baby is an example. It wasn't actually an image of Sabrina's baby because Sabrina didn't exist.

Speaker 3 Tara Lee found these images online and she'd repurposed them for different families. Matt Sluss traced them to a website selling ultrasound images for pranks.

Speaker 3 But these images were the middle, not the end of her lie.

Speaker 10 At the end of those, you know, six to eight months, now Tara has a problem because there's no baby.

Speaker 10 And she has to lie to them again in order to end or fail that adoption match.

Speaker 3 Her most common lie was that the birth mother changed her mind and was going to keep the baby. It's believable because it happens.

Speaker 3 If it was a closed adoption, Tara Lee just told the lie, like she lied to the Granaths about Sabrina.

Speaker 3 But if it was an open adoption and the baby wasn't real, or if she diverted a baby to another family in a double or triple match, Tera Lee might impersonate the birth mother in fake texts, saying she was keeping the baby.

Speaker 3 Terale would send the devastated couple a screenshot of the fake texts as proof the match failed, and then she'd commiserate with them. In other situations, she'd say the birth mother miscarried.

Speaker 3 She even paid a woman to pretend to be pregnant.

Speaker 3 I think the real reason Teralee wanted to limit communication between the birth mothers and adoptive parents was that when it came time to lie, she had to control the narrative.

Speaker 3 All of Terra Lee's lies were egregious, but some were extreme.

Speaker 3 Remember when she told the Grannis that she couldn't come to Chicago to have dinner with them because a birth mother named Roshonda and her baby had been murdered in Detroit?

Speaker 3 Tera Lee matched Roshonda with a couple in Georgia, who paid her about $15,000. She also sent them details about Roshonda and photos.

Speaker 10 And then over the next months, as Tara typically would do, she would provide updates about the pregnancy, making the adoption situation feel as real as she could.

Speaker 10 In this particular situation,

Speaker 10 Tara

Speaker 10 failed the match by telling the adoptive parents that Roshonda, the birth mother, had been shot and killed, and the baby died in utero.

Speaker 3 And Tara Lee Lee took it a step further.

Speaker 10 Tara then even solicited funds from Yadata parents to help cover funeral costs.

Speaker 3 Agents Les tracked down the real person in Terra Lee's photo. Her name wasn't Rashonda.
She wasn't pregnant. She had never been shot.
Teral Lee just found her photo online and invented the rest.

Speaker 10 This opportunity was completely fake.

Speaker 3 If a match failed, Tera Lee often tried to roll the couple into another one. I think she developed a sense of how much money each client had, how far she could push them.

Speaker 3 She knew where they lived, the kind of house they had, the way they reacted when she matched them and asked them for $14,000. She profiled them.

Speaker 3 While the FBI was figuring out what Terra Lee did, who she did it to, and how, the question of why she did it permeated everything.

Speaker 3 The answer is complicated and in a way, unknowable.

Speaker 3 But inside the drawers of Terra Lee's house and on her credit card statements, the FBI found many ways Tera Lee had benefited.

Speaker 3 While some of her birth mothers lived in squalid conditions with their children, keeping food in the snow, sleeping on the floor, Tera Lee spent $30,000 to renovate her kitchen. She leased a boat.

Speaker 3 She flew first class. She bought a Rolex.
She had countless velvet baggies of David Yerman jewelry. She had sunglasses and reading glasses from Prada, Valentino, and Tiffany's.

Speaker 3 She had more jewelry than anyone could find occasions to wear. Some were unopened, the tags still on them.

Speaker 3 The FBI took photos of all of it.

Speaker 3 After the raid, the cat was out of the bag. But the FBI hadn't made anything public.
So, reporters like Heather Catallo were scrambling to figure out what Terra Lee was being accused of.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, couples in the Facebook group were anxiously waiting for Tera Lee to be charged.

Speaker 3 But there was one Detroit couple Terra Lee had worked with, Adam and Kyle Bells-Thomas, who refused to join the Facebook group because they were convinced that Tera Lee was completely innocent.

Speaker 17 Oh, we were 100% side Tara.

Speaker 3 They felt this way even after Courtney and the Facebook group tried to get them to see the truth.

Speaker 3 Even after the FBI raided Terra Lee's house, even after Heather Catallo's news reports alleging Tera Lee was a fraudster, and even after they'd been through three failed adoptions with Tera Lee, because every night they put their adopted son to bed was a reminder of what Tera Lee had done for them in the beginning.

Speaker 3 Their gratitude for that successful adoption blinded them to her manipulations.

Speaker 3 Adam and Kyle lived just 30 minutes away from Tera Lee and had become very close friends.

Speaker 3 As other couples bonded over the shared trauma of being defrauded by Tera Lee, Adam and Kyle bonded with Tera Lee over her trauma of being investigated.

Speaker 17 If a news report came out that Heather Catala was doing, as soon as it aired,

Speaker 17 she would call us and be like, this is crazy. This is the person that's going after me.
This is the person that's feeding it.

Speaker 17 Courtney's name was brought up. Julie Falkenberry's name was brought up.
All of these people

Speaker 3 were the enemy.

Speaker 3 It would take a lot of time for them to see past what what they wanted to believe.

Speaker 3 It would take reading her indictment to realize they weren't all that different from the other couples she'd defrauded. The couples they thought were the enemy.
To realize they'd been duped.

Speaker 17 She can tell a wicked story.

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Speaker 3 The dupe began in 2017.

Speaker 3 Adam and Kyle had just gotten married. Kyle had gone to middle school with Tara Lee and heard she facilitated adoptions.
They hadn't talked in years, but he reached out to her.

Speaker 3 Weeks later, Tera Lee matched them with a 22-year-old birth mother who was pregnant with a boy. She was homeless, staying on people's couches and living out of her car.

Speaker 3 They helped her move into a rental house. They got her furniture, and they sent Tera Lee $14,000.
That was a lot of money for them. Kyle works in IT.
Adam had a job at a local bank.

Speaker 3 They put some of it on their credit cards. And it worked out.
Adam and Kyle were in the delivery room when their son was born, and they had a close relationship with their birth mother.

Speaker 17 Absolutely amazing feeling to have this little tiny human in your arms.

Speaker 17 I got to change his first diaper and got peed on.

Speaker 17 We got to do the first feedings. We got to do everything.

Speaker 17 We spent the next 48 hours or in the hospital. sharing a room with the baby.

Speaker 17 Lord him in the back seat, I sat in the back seat while Kyle drove about 20 miles per hour up the highways out of Detroit to get us back home. He was a nervous wreck.
I kind of was a nervous wreck.

Speaker 17 Introduced him to our dogs and started our family. It was wonderful and we're eight months after we got married and we expected this to take years.

Speaker 3 Adam lives in the semi-rural plains north of Detroit. I met him at a recording studio above a Walgreens near his house.
He drove there in an old pickup truck after dropping his son off at school.

Speaker 3 Adam's a visual artist, like his mom. He's around 40, kind, and outgoing.
He had a coffee from Tim Hortons, the Canadian Starbucks.

Speaker 3 Adam explained to me how, after their successful adoption, he and Kyle became close with Tara Lee. They broke bread with her husband and children.
Her oldest daughter babysat for them.

Speaker 3 Her husband fixed their HVAC. And they talked and texted with her almost every day, the way you do with your closest friends.

Speaker 3 Then, in early 2018, Tera Lee told Adam and Kyle that their son's birth mother was pregnant again.

Speaker 17 And that she wanted us to adopt this baby as well.

Speaker 17 And we weren't sure that we financially could do it.

Speaker 3 But Tera Lee didn't like that answer. She flashed a side of herself that they hadn't seen before.
and questioned their love for their son.

Speaker 17 And what are you going to tell him down the road when he finds out that you could have adopted his sibling, but you chose to pay your bills instead and pay off your credit cards?

Speaker 17 So we decided to jump on board again.

Speaker 3 They looked the other way and put it on credit and got excited again. And they broke the great news to their family.

Speaker 3 It was all going well until the delivery, when, to their surprise, Terra Lee said the birth mother had changed her mind.

Speaker 17 A decision's made and she's no longer yours.

Speaker 17 And it hit both Kyle and I extremely hard.

Speaker 17 And she right away said, listen, I understand this is really hard. This isn't over.

Speaker 17 I have birth moms and different opportunities coming all the time. We need to keep going forward with this.
We can get you another baby.

Speaker 3 She matched them again. They put $9,000 more on their credit card to cover the woman's living expenses.

Speaker 3 But when they found evidence that the birth mother was using drugs during her pregnancy, they backed out of the match. Tera Lee said any money left over would be rolled over to the next match.

Speaker 3 They recommitted. The next match happened fast.
The birth mother had been through an adoption before. She knew the steps, and she was due soon.
Adam and Kyle felt good about it.

Speaker 3 A few weeks later, though, Terra Lee told them that the woman had stopped returning her calls. So Kyle, the IT whiz and armchair sleuth, got on Facebook.

Speaker 3 And he found a profile of the family who'd adopted the woman's previous baby. And their posts showed them celebrating the adoption of her next baby.
The birth mom had even liked the posts.

Speaker 3 Kyle sent the family a message. Hey, not sure if you know what's going on, but we were under the impression that we were adopting this baby.
He got a response from the birth mother's boyfriend.

Speaker 3 Back off. This baby's not yours.
I don't know who you are or what you're doing.

Speaker 3 When Adam and Kyle told Tara Lee this, she expressed shock and outrage. But the match failed.
Adam and Kyle were emotionally and financially exhausted. Days later, the FBI raided Tera Lee's house.

Speaker 3 When Adam and Kyle found out about it, they called her. And despite all the trauma they'd been through with three failed matches in a row, they were still onside Tara.

Speaker 3 And they listened as Terra Lee explained to them what, in her mind, was really going on.

Speaker 17 It was these crazy women who had failed adoptions who were out to get her.

Speaker 3 She said the lawyers, Talia and Tanya, were out to get her too.

Speaker 17 And they wanted to steal her business and everybody was making up all of this stuff about her.

Speaker 3 Terale asked Adam to write her a letter of support. He did.
And he focused entirely on their successful adoption, leaving out the three successive failures.

Speaker 3 He wrote, Tara was upfront, honest, and trustworthy with every penny that she spent to help our birth mother.

Speaker 13 Seven investigator Heather Catallo is here now with how authorities are closing in on this Macomb County mother.

Speaker 3 Heather?

Speaker 13 Families across the country are reeling after learning the woman who promised them babies isn't licensed by the state to do adoption work.

Speaker 3 For weeks, WXYZ Channel 7 aired Heather Catallo's investigative reports about Tara Lee, including this one about a birth mother named Mariah.

Speaker 13 Mariah Mariah says as soon as she found out she was pregnant, she turned to her longtime friend Lee because she believed Lee was a social worker.

Speaker 12 She had me signing papers at five or six weeks pregnant.

Speaker 13 Adoption experts say legitimate agencies never match birth moms with adoptive parents until at least 12 weeks due to miscarriage concerns.

Speaker 13 Mariah says Lee told her to lie to the adoptive parents about her due date.

Speaker 15 Why do you think she wanted you to lie about how far along you were?

Speaker 12 Because the moment I met, she could start charging people for money.

Speaker 3 Every time one of Heather Catalo's news reports came out, Adam said, Tera Lee would call them and rant.

Speaker 3 And then, one night in December, they got home from work and found a note from Heather Catalo taped to their door. It terrified them.
Heather was the enemy, and they did not want to talk to the enemy.

Speaker 3 They circled the wagons. And then, A few nights before Christmas 2018, Terra Lee called them and sounded excited.

Speaker 17 My in-laws were over for dinner, so I answer it, because again, we're in the middle of all of this. And it is Tara FaceTiming us sobbing in her car,

Speaker 17 thrilled because she just got a call from her lawyer and the case was being dropped.

Speaker 17 That they had proven that she was not guilty of any of it, that she was clear.

Speaker 3 Was that story a lie?

Speaker 17 100%.

Speaker 3 After New Year's, Tara Lee called them with the opposite message.

Speaker 17 And she tells us that she's got to go to court tomorrow. And this is absolute bullshit.
And I can't believe this is happening to me.

Speaker 3 By the way, I interviewed Adam in two different places on two different mics. Sorry.
You'll notice it.

Speaker 3 The day of the court hearing, Adam texted Tara Lee.

Speaker 9 Good luck today.

Speaker 3 We are here for you.

Speaker 9 Her response was, I didn't do anything, Adam. I am so sorry I let all of you down.
I never meant for any of this.

Speaker 9 My response was, you haven't let us down. You just have to keep dealing with the bullshit and these bitches.
Karma will turn just a matter of time.

Speaker 20 We trust and believe you.

Speaker 9 We are in your corner. Stay strong.

Speaker 9 Be the tatted, foul-mouthed woman we love.

Speaker 3 Adam sent the text and went to work.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, at the FBI's Detroit field office, Agent Matt Sluss clicked save on the 31-page criminal complaint he'd written. He'd distilled all the evidence into one monstrous story of probable cause.

Speaker 10 She's taking adoptive parents to the point that they're remodeling their houses to create nurseries. And people are raising money through church fundraisers.

Speaker 10 They're cashing out their retirement funds. You have

Speaker 10 birth mothers that are being coerced, pressured into giving up their babies or dealing with the loss of their children.

Speaker 10 You have adoptive parents that do have kids, and these kids are expecting to be a big brother or a big sister. And now you have to explain to them, you know, why that's not going to happen.

Speaker 10 You know, Tara would bring people to the point of traveling across the country to Detroit, Michigan, to complete my family, and then that doesn't happen.

Speaker 3 Here's Sarah Woodward.

Speaker 16 They were a sophisticated, well-educated group of people that were adept at navigating navigating the world and successful in life. And

Speaker 16 that's what made it so heartbreaking because she knew that they would do anything for the hope of having a child.

Speaker 3 On January 11th, 2019, Sarah Woodward and the FBI made their evidence public.

Speaker 14 Tara Lee turned herself into the FBI this morning, and this 31-page criminal complaint against her was just unsealed. The allegations in here are shocking.

Speaker 3 And the FBI took Tara Lee to court the same day.

Speaker 22 Court calls case number 19, 30015, United States of America versus Tara Lee. Erdie.

Speaker 22 Good afternoon, Your Honor. Sarah Woodward on behalf of the United States.
Good afternoon. Will the defendant please state her name to the court? Tara Lynn Lee.
All right.

Speaker 22 Let me make it very clear that you will not be leaving the country. You will not be going to Ghana and you will not be using your passport or your visa.
No. for any purposes.

Speaker 22 Miss Lee, you are here this afternoon making your initial appearance on a federal criminal complaint. You are charged in the federal criminal complaint with wire fraud.

Speaker 22 Have you seen a copy of the complaint? I did, Your Honor. And have you read it? I did, Your Honor.

Speaker 3 Miles to the north, Adam Bells Thomas was at his desk at work. But all he could think about was that the criminal complaint against his friend Tara Lee was about to be publicly released.

Speaker 3 When it was, Adam printed it out and asked his boss if he could take a short break.

Speaker 17 And I drove to a parking lot near my office

Speaker 17 and I read every word and

Speaker 3 felt my life fall apart because everything,

Speaker 17 everything that she had done in this document is all stuff that had happened to us over the last year.

Speaker 17 And everything

Speaker 3 had been a lie.

Speaker 3 All of it.

Speaker 3 I called Kyle.

Speaker 17 He was at work, and I said, Kyle,

Speaker 3 she did this.

Speaker 3 She did all of this.

Speaker 17 You have to stop talking to her. And he's like, I've already talked to her.

Speaker 17 She's already called me today.

Speaker 3 Kyle,

Speaker 17 every bit of this is what she's done to us. This is our life.

Speaker 17 for the last year in a document issued by the government.

Speaker 17 He had a really hard time believing me.

Speaker 3 But we were so manipulated

Speaker 17 and we were so brainwashed.

Speaker 3 And she had us.

Speaker 17 I couldn't drive away from that parking lot

Speaker 17 for two hours because I sat there and cried.

Speaker 17 Because how does someone do that to someone else?

Speaker 3 And not fucking care.

Speaker 3 That night, after they put their son to bed, Tara Lee called.

Speaker 3 Reluctantly, Kyle picked up. Tera Lee ranted.
They listened. And then they hung up forever.

Speaker 3 And we called the FBI.

Speaker 8 The Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Speaker 3 We were ready to take her down.

Speaker 10 Please listen carefully.

Speaker 3 Adam told me that in their conversations with the FBI and the two lawyers, Talia Getting and Tanya Corrado, they learned their matches didn't fail for the reasons they originally thought.

Speaker 3 The birth mother in their second failed adoption wasn't even pregnant.

Speaker 9 Images, doctors, notes, ultrasounds, everything was stuff that she was reusing from

Speaker 9 the first pregnancy a couple years prior.

Speaker 3 And in the last failure, the birth mother said she told Tera Lee that she was not going to give her baby to Adam and Kyle. But Tera Lee never gave them the message.

Speaker 3 Pretty rough weekend, to say the least.

Speaker 3 In federal court, Tera Lee was charged with 18 counts of wire fraud and freed on a $10,000 bond. She was forbidden from doing any adoption work and from contacting birth mothers and adoptive parents.

Speaker 3 But then, an unforeseen consequence of Terra Lee's alleged crimes surfaced. Talia Getting, the lawyer, called Tammy and Nick Graneth in Chicago.

Speaker 3 Tammy was sitting at her kitchen island, holding her infant daughter May when she answered.

Speaker 11 And she said to me,

Speaker 11 I have to tell you that you and a few other families may not be able to keep your babies.

Speaker 3 Next time on Baby Broker.

Speaker 11 There's no way they're coming and taking my child from me.

Speaker 3 Tammy and Nick and other couples fight to keep their babies, and Tara Lee goes to court.

Speaker 23 This is federal court.

Speaker 23 Yes, sir. We don't play games in this court.

Speaker 23 I agree with Ms. Woodward.
This was a

Speaker 23 flagrant violation, an egregious violation.

Speaker 6 One of Tara's favorite sayings was, I can't make this shit up. She would say this all the time, when actually she was making.

Speaker 6 everything up.

Speaker 4 Nick was in the back of the courtroom and heard us read our impact statement and he was the one that made the connection that,

Speaker 4 oh my gosh, this is the family that was matched with Stephanie.

Speaker 20 Unlock all episodes of Baby Broker ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge podcast channel.

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Speaker 3 Baby Broker is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. It was hosted and reported by me, Peter McDonnell.
I'm the executive producer along with Catherine St.

Speaker 3 Louis and Jonathan Hirsch of Sony Music Entertainment. Steven George recorded the narration at the Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.

Speaker 3 We used music from Audio Network and a few tracks from Epidemic Sound. News clips are courtesy of WXYZ7 in Detroit, Michigan.
Our production managers are Tamika Balance-Kalasny and Sammy Allison.

Speaker 3 Our lawyers are Allison Sherry and Kathleen Farley. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasick, and Jamie Myers.