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September 26, 2024 39 mins

The “Mormon Madoff” conned everyone, including his own wife.  If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod. 

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Pretty soon up over the hill, I saw a caravan
of dark vehicles with dark dinned windows. They're all in
FBI or US Marshall's jackets. They've got their sunglasses, they've
got their weapons, and they come to my house. They
rang the doorbell. I let them in.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. Andrea Merriman came from money, a lot of money.
As a kid. Her family had a huge house, a
vacation home in Hawaii, and even a private plane.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
We flew everywhere. We didn't do road trips. It was
so my family to in the plane at midnight and
fly to Arizona for the weekend to enjoy the sun,
and then be back when school started on Monday.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
But if you met Andrea, you wouldn't know that's how
she grew up. She's not flashy, She's hard working and honest.
Her parents raised her that way.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
We had jobs around the house. We didn't get allowance
for it, or if we did, it was a dollar
a week, because my parents wanted to teach us responsibility
and accountability.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Her family belonged to the church, of Jesus Christ of
Latter day Saints. Some people call it the Mormon Church,
but that's not the name she uses.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
That's a name given to church members who are not
of our faith. It's just a mouthful to say the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
From a young age, Andrea took her faith very seriously.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
When you're a child, they give you a ring and
it says ctr on it that stands for two the right.
So part of the culture was to be obedient to
good principles, doing well in whatever I attempted to.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Do, and in her religious community. She felt empowered as
a woman. The women around her were ambitious and well educated.
Many of them had both families and careers.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
My mom had a master's degree, and I remember going
to my dad asking for help with homework. My dad
would say, I can totally help you, but who really
could help you. The person who's the smartest in our
family as your mother. So I was raised that women
could do and be anything.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
She was a straight a student, a great athlete. She
played three instruments and excelled at piano.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Anything I did, I did to the best of my ability.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
When she got older, She took that determination to bring
them young university, where she immediately got to work on
building her future.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
My dad wanted me to be a lawyer, and that's
what I went to school thinking I would do.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Along the way, she found a dream of her own.
She wanted to start a career in advertising and public relations,
and her work ethic extended outside the classroom. She got
a job in her apartment complex. That's how she met Sean.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
He came into the office to pay his rent and
I processed that for him.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
She would see him around the building, but they'd never
really talked before.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
My roommates in my apartment were good friends with the
guys and his apartment people thought highly of him and
his roommates, and they did fund things and seemed to
be good people.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Soon after they met in the office, Sean asked her out,
and right away he impressed her. He knew she liked music,
so for their first date, he took her to the Symphony.
After that, they started going out together every weekend.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
He did not do the typical, cheap, low budget, crazy
college dates. He took me to the best restaurants, two concerts,
and then he'd take you out into his BMW. He
was always a very engaging, outgoing, charming person.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
On one date, she wore a pearl necklace. Sean complimented
her on it and she told him it was borrowed
from a friend. So a few days later, he.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Just showed up at my door unexpectedly with a jewelry box.
I opened it up and it was a pearl necklace,
and he said, any woman as beautiful as you should
not have to borrow pearls. I mean, that was what
it was like to date Sean Merriman. I remember thinking, Wow,
all the other boys I've dated, if they tried to

(05:00):
do these grand gestures or date this way, it would
seem really cheesy and corny. But it works for Sean,
and it was just like in the movies.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Even though he had expensive taste, Sean didn't come from money.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
His dad was a construction worker. They had moved all
around the country during his childhood, eleven times in seven
or eight years. There was a lot of alcoholism, divorce,
and he was one of the first members of his

(05:37):
family to go to college.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Getting into college wasn't easy for Sean. He didn't have
the grades, but he made up for it with his
trademark charm.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
He started sending flowers to the woman in charge of admissions,
and eventually he got admitted.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
He was proud of this story, and he always had
fabulous stories to entertain people with. He was interested in
things most college kids weren't.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
He was into photography, he was into cars, he was
into building things.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Still, Sean didn't let his interests take over their relationship.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
We did everything that I loved. He knew that I
loved the beach, he knew that I loved eighties music.
He knew that I loved travel, and I thought that
I was finding someone who believed the way I did
on everything.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
After a few months of dating, the two took a
trip to California, and there on the beach, he got
down on one knee.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Going through my head mostly was wait, I'm only twenty two.
I'm too young to do this.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Andrea was still in school. She'd always planned to graduate,
start a career, and then get married, but saying yes
to Sean just made sense.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
I don't know that I thought he was the one,
but I thought that he would be a great friend,
great partner, great companion, great provider, great father. And am
I going to find somebody just like him. Again, if
I pass this by, I saw enough of those good
qualities and the things that I wanted as part of

(07:24):
my future. So when he proposed, I said yes.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
So they got married and graduated college in that order.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
We were on a good course together. We were equally
yoked as a couple to move forward and create the
life of our dreams.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Sean had a vision of moving to DC. He even
interviewed with the CIA. He also considered getting an MBA
and an Ivy League school. Timately, they decided to plant
roots in our home state of Colorado.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
We chose to move to Denver for my career. I
got a job working for a government agency doing public
relations for them.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Sean came to love Denver and he found a great
job at an investment firm.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
He had immediate success, so then he actually started being
a stockbroker that fall.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
When it came to investing, Sean had a minus touch.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
And I will tell you from September to December that
quarter he made fifty thousand dollars, and that was in
nineteen ninety.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
That's a lot of money, especially right out of college.
Sean was bringing home two hundred k a year, but
that was the nineties. In today's money, that's the equivalent
of four hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, and
the money just kept coming.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Other firms would reach out to him and say, hey,
come and work for us. We'll give you a signing bonus,
and so he would take a fifty sixty seventy eighty
thousand dollars signing bonus and go work for a different firm.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
He hopped from firm to firm for a few years,
and then soon after they had their first child in
nineteen ninety three, Sean came to Andrea with a business idea.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
He came home from work and told me that he
had some very wealthy, blue blood old money clients in
Kansas City that had been so impressed with the money
management he had done for them that they had asked
him to step back from his career as a stockbroker

(09:43):
and manage their money privately for them.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
She supported him.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
One hundred percent, so he made the leap and launched
what became Market Street Advisors. It started with those Kansas
City clients, but pretty soon he was investing for fai family,
friends and neighbors too, and even in the madness of
starting his own firm and finding new clients. Sean made
it a point to spend time with Andrea at the

(10:10):
end of every day.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
He came home at night, had dinner with me, had
great stories about trades that he'd made that day. He
had no shortage of stories. He could tell, conversations, he
could share ideas that he had.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
Life was good for the Merryman's. Sean's investment firm was
taking off, and the two of them were living comfortably,
more than comfortably. Even the house got bigger, cars got nicer,
and for Andrea there was only one thing missing more kids.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
One of the things we talked about before we got
married was that I wanted four to six children. He
was like, Oh, that's great, That's what I've always wanted.

Speaker 2 (10:59):
They had another, a baby girl, and Andrea was the
happiest she'd ever been. When Sean got home after a
long day at work, he didn't have the bandwidth to
help with the babies.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
He was fine to play with the baby when he
was home, et cetera, but he was not a hands
on let me help bathe the baby, let me change diapers.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
And when she asked him about having a third kid,
he was hesitant, she assured him she'd take on the
responsibilities that he couldn't.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
And so I did everything, handled everything for the baby
so that it wouldn't impact his life too much. And
I could have another child. And I continued to do
everything and manage the kids so that it didn't impact
his life. By the time we had our fourth kid,
I could count the number of dirty diapers on one

(11:54):
hand that he had changed. It really became. He was busy,
he was working on his career, and I was the
partner in the relationship who was focused on home and family.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
All in all, they had four kids together. She was
the homemaker, he was the provider, and she provided very well.
It was the life she always wanted. Over time, Sean
started to be more open about the life he wanted.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
I found out he didn't like dancing. He didn't like beaches.
Let's go on a trip to California. No, I hate
the beach. What yeah, I hate the feel of sand
between my toes. I'm not doing that.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
He started developing expensive new hobbies, ones that required him
to travel.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
He was a big African safari guy. He would go
to Cameroon and Tanzania and South Africa and Zimbabwe all
over the world to hunt and go on safaris for
animals and Quinci. Evently, very wealthy people are engaged in
those hobbies. He sold it as well, I'm actually doing

(13:08):
this for work, to get more clients to build my business.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
These trips could be dangerous. One time, when he returned
from a safari in Ethiopia, Sean was acting strange.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
He was keeping his distance and I said why, and
he said, I have got to go to the doctor.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
He was worried he could have contracted something. He told
Andrea a wild story.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
We were climbing a mountain and one of the people
in the party flipped and he was going to fall
off a cliff, and so I reached down and I
grabbed him and saved his life. But he and I
both got cut up in the process, and I need
to go and get tested to make sure I'm okay.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Thankfully, Sean was negative, and even though the story was
far fetched, Andrea believed him.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
He had so many stories about saving people's lives or
dramatic things. I used to tell him, if I didn't
live with you and see that your life is true,
I would never believe your life. What I didn't know was.
Most of those stories were probably lies.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
As Andrea and Sean built a family together, Sean started
to change. He was around less and less working at
his investment firm, and when he wasn't working, he was
taking extravagant hunting trips on his own. It became Sean's world,
and sometimes that bothered her, but she was committed to
him no matter what.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
For a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter day Saints, you marry forever, and you make your choice,
and then you love your choice and you figure out
how to make it work. I was taught that pretty
much the only reason you had ever divorced is if
in the case of physical abuse or something beyond that,

(15:24):
you marry forever.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
His behavior was a challenge, but not marriage ending.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
It wasn't anything that I would have divorced over. It
was more, oh, I guess I'll make this work.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
And she really did want to make it work. There
was still so much good in what they had together.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
I felt like we were very connected. We went on
dates every weekend together. He would call me when he
had downtimes at work, once every morning, and once or
twice in the afternoon. He'd just called me to check in,
see what I was doing, see how I was.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
And when he did have the time, she could see
he was really trying. Especially as the kids got older,
he became more involved. He led fifty mile hikes for
their son's boy Scout troup. He drove their daughter around
on errands. He joked with them, talked with them, and
above all, he made sure his kids had everything they
could ask for, all the things he didn't have. Growing up.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
My son played baseball and they won the championship of
their league. So he bought a batting cage and pitching
machine that he put in our backyard. We put in
a pool, We put in a sport court so that
our kids would have a great fun place to bring
their friends to.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Sean wanted their kids to be cultured. He took them
to museums around the world, and he even started their
own private art collection.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
We ended up with a collection of Rembrands that was
worth quite a bit of money, and sculptures by Frederick Hart,
all kinds of things like that to make things beautiful
and to help educate our children.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
The batting cages, the private courts, the rembrands. Sure it
was a lot, but they could afford it in Sean's hands.
Andrea had watched their money multiply.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
I had watched our account slowly grow up to a million,
and then I watched our account slowly grow to three million,
and then I watched my statement grow to total about
ten million dollars.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
In the early two thousands, that was closer to eighteen million.
Andrea also invested her own inheritance with Sean's firm, everything
she had saved and everything she got from her parents.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
I had my own money. My parents had passed away
at this point, and like all of his investment clients,
I was getting monthly financial statements.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Still, she wanted to make sure that they were being
smart with their spending.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
I am very conservative financially. So my first goal was
I want our home paid off. And so I remember
I think it was my fortieth birthday. He gave me
the deed to our house, and our house was paid off.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
And Sean kept making the house better and better.

Speaker 1 (18:35):
He ended up building a building behind our home that
he called his shop. It was actually bigger than our home.
His work office was in the top level, and then
the bottom was just cars and trophies. He had an
aston Martin. He had several Porsches, a Ferrari, Mercedes, Sedans, BMW's,
you name it.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
Sean spent pretty much all his time in his shop,
working on business or taking care of his cars.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
He would go out to his office from probably seven
am to five pm, come in, have dinner, and then
he'd be like, oh, I'm going to go out to
my shop and do this, and then he'd come in
at ten at night.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Andrea knew all that hard work was funding their lifestyle,
but she missed him. She wanted him around more.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
After seventeen or so years of marriage. I've said, we
don't need more money. We have plenty for our needs
and our wants and things we've never dreamed of, but
we need you, and he just said I can't. I've
got to build my business.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
He'd spend twenty years prioritizing his work above everything else.
He didn't know how to shift gears. Maybe he didn't
want to, so Andrea made peace with the fact that
her husband would be around when he could be.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
I was kind of raised, if you look for the
good in others, you will find it. If you're looking
for bad things and looking to tear people down and
to hate them you'll find reasons for that too. He
was gone a lot of the time, but when he
was home, he would be there for dinner and do
other things with us. Now, I don't think any life

(20:20):
is completely perfect, but it was a good life.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
March seventeenth, two thousand and nine, was a really good day.
It was Saint Patti's Day.

Speaker 1 (20:33):
There is a little Irish in the Merriman's side of
the family, so I always tried to make it a
fun day. I had gold coins and I made green
pancakes and green milk for breakfast. As I sent my
kids off to school, I took fun photos of them
dressed in their Saint Patrick's Day attire. What I didn't

(20:57):
know at the time was those were the last merrim
And family photos that I would ever take. The next day,
March eighteenth, unexpectedly, I was headed out on some errands.
I dropped my youngest child off at daycare to have

(21:18):
a babysitter while I quickly got some things done. And
Sean called me as I was driving down the highway
and he's like, what are you doing? And I said,
why do you need something? He said, well, actually I
was hoping to spend some time with you this morning.
And I said, oh, well, I can turn around and

(21:40):
I'll come and get you and you can do my
errands with me. And he said, no, I need you
to come home.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
So she turned the car around and went back to
the house. He was waiting for her in the kitchen.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
And he said, I've been running Market Street Advisors for
the past sixteen years, but I need you to know
that every day when I got up and left and
went to work and was gone all day, I was
actually running a Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
Andrea thought that her husband John had dedicated his career
to running his own investment firm, but then Sean confessed
that it was all a lie. Their life of luxury
was funded and stolen money. For the past sixteen years.
He had been running a Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
I didn't even know what a Ponzi scheme was. I
had heard a Bernie made off. I didn't pay too
much attention to those types of things. I knew he'd
done something wrong, but that's pretty much all I knew
about it.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Sean explained that when he first started his firm was legitimate,
but in his first year, one of his investments went
south and he panicked.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
So he omitted the five thousand dollars loss from his statement.
And I'm sure he thought that he could make that
up with another trade, and then he never did.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
So he kept fudging the books, selling people on his
big wins, and using money from new investors to pay
old ones. There were no million dollar trades or miracle investments.
The conversations he told her about and all the financial
documents she'd seen were fake. He was a total fraud.
His clients had lost millions of dollars, some of them

(23:42):
lost everything they had. Not only did he lose other
people's money, all of their own money was gone too.
The money she'd inherited from her parents and their kids'
college funds, it was gone.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
Then he said, yesterday, in the company of my attorney,
turned myself into the US Marshals, to representatives of the
federal government, and I will be going to prison. And
when he said the word prison, I about died. My

(24:22):
mind was just swirling. When he said that, I thought
this cannot be real.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
She thought back to all the Outlandis stories he told
over the years, like the one about saving someone's life
on a safari. Was any of it real? As the
reality set in. She tried to cling to anything she could.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
I was trying to find the positive, like I'd been
raised to do. And I said, at least the house
is paid off. And he said, no, you don't understand.
The house is gone, the cars are gone, everything's gone.
I just kind of felt like I was witnessing the apocalypse.

(25:07):
I remember apologizing, saying, I'm so sorry, but I have
to get out of here. And I got up and
I ran out, and I got in my car and
I took off up my driveway and started driving out
of my neighborhood. Uncontrollably, tears were just streaming out of

(25:28):
my eyes.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
Andrea pulled over just minutes after leaving her home. She
couldn't see much less drive, and as she sat there
alone in her car, the weight of it all finally
hit her.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
I felt like everything had been destroyed. Everything was a
humiliation to me as well as a shock, as well
as deeply sad and devastating. My biggest wish and desire
would have been to just walk to the edge of
the horizon and drop off the face of the earth,
but I couldn't because I had four kids relying on me.

(26:08):
I was their only resource.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
She had to keep going, so she made a plan.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
When I went back to the house, I told him
that he was going to be the one to tell
the kids. So that night we gathered our family together.
He was in a chair in the corner of the room.
I was on the couch across the room from him,
and he told the kids, I have done something wrong.

(26:36):
I've made a little mistake. And from across the side
of the room, I am just furious, shaking my head, going,
you've committed a crime. You've made huge mistakes over and
over every day, twenty four hours a day, three hundred
and sixty five days a year. That is not one

(26:57):
little mistake.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Andrea was angry. The kids, they were terrified.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
I was standing there with four kids ages three to sixteen,
tears streaming down their face, looking at me for answers
and strength. Before I could even say anything, my little
third grader said, does this mean you're going to divorce Dad?

Speaker 2 (27:26):
She knew in that moment that the answer was yes.
It wasn't an easy answer, though.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
I was so humiliated, humiliated to be married to a criminal,
humiliated at what he'd done, humiliated to know that I
would be getting divorced I was raised that divorce is
not what you do. Knowing that I had been married
in a temple forever added a layer of difficulty, a

(27:56):
layer of guilt, a layer of regret.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
But she was done. She couldn't be with a man
who had spent decades cheating so many others out of
millions of dollars. She would walk away, while making the
transition as easy as she could for her kids.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
I felt like my kids had been in such shock
that they probably needed things to be as normal as
possible in whatever ways they could be, So I fed
them that night. Sean stayed in the home with us, and.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
He continued to stay in the home and come to
family dinner, just as he had for the last twenty years.
Even though Sean had turned himself in, the FED still
needed time to build a case against him, so they waited.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
I even remember cooking dinner for my kids, saying, would
you like to call your dad and let him know
dinner's ready. I am appalled that I am doing this
for this man who's done this, but it was for
my kids. I was trying to be kind, set an
example of divorce and not changing who you are just

(29:10):
because you've been betrayed. You choose the right. You are kind,
you are good to people, no matter what.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
The destruction of her life didn't happen all at once.
She watched it being taken apart, piece by piece. After
a few weeks of this purgatory, she got a call
from the US Marshals. They set a date to come
to her house and seize the family assets.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Pretty soon, up over the hill, I saw a caravan
of dark vehicles with dark dinted windows. They all pull
up in front of my house. Everybody starts getting out
of the cars. They're all in FBI or US Marshals jackets,
They've got their sunglasses, they've got their weapons, and they
come to my house. I think the only difference is

(29:57):
I knew they were coming, and they didn't break my
door down the doorbell. I let him in.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
The authorities took everything of value, Sean's computer, his cars,
his art collection, and most of what Andrea owned too.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
I had the thought you should hide some of your jewelry,
and I thought what, No, that would be stealing. No,
you don't know where you're going to live, how you're
going to keep your kids alive. You don't have a job,
your parents are dead. If you could just end up
with something, then you'd have something to sell to start

(30:29):
a life with. And I went back and forth in
my mind a couple of times, and then I thought, Nope,
I am not going to abandon my integrity just because
the person I'm married to has and I left it.
I left it all in my jewelry box because I
am not compromising my ethics.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
She watched all their belongings get carted away, and she
wasn't the only one.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Several of my neighbors at the house next door up
on the deck drinking bar arbicuing having a great time,
rejoicing in the downfall of my family and the asset seizer.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Sean had scammed so many people, neighbors, friends, and family alike.
She couldn't blame anyone for wanting him to pay, And
yet people wanted her to pay too, even though she
had done nothing wrong. She had been married to the
Mormon made off as the media soon dubbed him. Even
neighbors and friends assumed that she must have known something.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
One time, I was out front with my three year old.
He was just playing, you know, around the trees or
the bushes, and I could hear kitchink kitchink, kitchenk and
I turn around and one of my neighbors is over
the fence with a lens, photographing every move I make.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
For the short time she had remaining in their house,
she was paranoid for the safety of her family, and
for good reason.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
One of the victims, who was also a neighbor in
the neighborhood and who had lost probably all of his money,
came all the way up my steps, to my front porch,
to my front door with his loaded gun, ready to
blow Sean Merriman away and who knows who else before
he came to his senses, and he turned around and
went home without hurting anyone.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
Andrea wanted nothing more than to take her kids and
get out of that house, especially since Sean continued to
live there waiting to be taken to prison. It took
time ninety days for the divorce to be processed, but
then finally.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
On July thirteenth, I drove to the courthouse with him
to finalize the divorce. We came home, I packed my
car with my two dogs and my kids, and I
moved that day. And I didn't say goodbye to anything.
I did not look back I drove away, and I
didn't look in the rearview mirror the whole way out

(32:55):
of Denver.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
While Sean went away to prison, Andrea went to Utah. Thankfully,
she was able to leave her old life behind without
her husband's debt hanging over her head.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
I had to write my own divorce because I couldn't
afford an attorney. I made sure that I wrote that
he was responsible for his debts and I was responsible
for mine. Now, credit card companies don't apparently have to
abide by that, but I think they saw that I
was penniless, so they didn't actually come after me.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
She and her kids moved in with her brother, and
a friend connected her with a job in marketing so
that she could rebuild. But she was starting from nothing
for the first time in her life. She was worried
about having the money to eat.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
For years. I would just have a knot in my
stomach every time I drove to the grocery store, thinking,
oh my gosh, I have to buy this food, but
it's so much. I don't have money. I mean, we
just had to adjust.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Part of that adjustment meant facing her own self blame.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
I was ridden with guilt that I had enjoyed a
nice life at the expense of others. I remember Sean
said to me before we parted ways, well, at least
she got a lot of good trips out of it.
And I just looked at him and went, I hate
every trip I went on, I hate every photo, I
hate every memory. There was all kinds of guilt, Guilt

(34:27):
that I'd brought him into the lives of my friends
and family that got shafted by him, Guilt that I
had chosen him to be the father of my children.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
She turned to the church for support and started meeting
regularly with a church leader.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
And he said, how are you doing? And I said, honestly,
I am trying to figure out how this happened. I've
tried to do everything right in my life. I've tried
to be a good wife, a good mother again, good citizen,
a good person. How did I get here? And he goes, well,

(35:05):
in all of that, you forgot one thing, the agency
of the other person, the other person's opportunity to choose.
This is not on you. He did this. There's nothing
you could have done. What I had to do was
recognize and forgive myself for the fact that I made

(35:26):
the best decision I could with the facts I had
at hand.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
But she also knew that she wanted to forgive Sean.
That was the only path forward.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
I had a couple of friends who'd gotten divorced and
who had not gotten past it. They were very, very
hateful towards their former spouse, and I saw how it
was impacting their kids and destroying their family. And so
the one thing I knew was, we are going to forgive,
not for him, but for us, so that our hate

(36:01):
doesn't destroy us.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Sean was ordered to pay twenty million dollars to his victims.
On top of that, he was sentenced to twelve and
a half years in prison. During that time, Andrea was
a single mom. She raised her kids with honesty, kindness,
and forgiveness, just like her parents raised her.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
And my kids have turned out to be everything I
could have hoped for. Hard working, educated, they all help others,
they all have skills, They're kind, good people, and couldn't
ask for anything more.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Andrea has been able to rebuild her own life too.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
I can honestly say I am super happy today. I
am a homeowner, I have a great career that's been
so memorable. I've gotten to travel. I have done many
things that I've dreamed on. I've actually even remarried, if
you can believe it or not.

Speaker 2 (36:59):
She ended up married to another man in finance.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
Someone who is everything I thought I was getting but
didn't get the first time, and more. He's even tall
and handsome.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
And here's the kicker. After they got married, her new
husband started a second career.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
As a fraud investigator, busting Ponzi schemes.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why did you choose to tell your story?

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Life can be good, That's what we're all here to
have and to be. I believe in being happy, So yeah,
maybe I chose to be optimistic more than I should have.
And I did smile when the smiles were totally fake,
and I remember having my heart so broken it literally

(37:49):
ached in my chest. But I've plotted one foot in
front of the other for a decade when I wasn't
sure if it was making any difference. But when you
lift your eyes up and you see you're on the
top of a mountain, that's a view worth all the
persevering for.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
On the next episode of Betrayal.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
And minute I did that, I had this deep shame
flood over me, like you've made a really grave error here.
You've divulged something super private, and you'll now never know
why this person's in a relationship with you, because is
it for the money or is it for you?

Speaker 2 (38:41):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal
team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email
us at Betrayal pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal
Pod at gmail dot com. We're grateful for your support.
One way to show support is by subscribing to our
show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and
review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way. A

(39:02):
big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is
a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group,
in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced
by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by
me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Caitlin Golden, with
additional production by Monique Leboard and Ben Vetterman. Our associate

(39:25):
producer is Kristin Melcurie. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry
and Jessica Krincheck. Audio editing and mixing by Matt del Vecchio,
additional editing support from Nico Ruka and Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's
theme composed by Oliver Bains. Music library provided by Mob
Music and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app,

(39:47):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
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Host

Andrea Gunning

Andrea Gunning

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