July 11, 2024 • 51 mins
Almost 40% of relationships begin online and while there are plenty of success stories, there are also some horror stories. This is one of those stories. In 2019, Mia Freedman interviewed Stephanie Wood, the author of Fake, which is now a hit TV series starring Asher Keddie and David Wenham. This is the true story behind the show.
When Stephanie Wood decided to go on a date with a guy she met online she had no idea it would change the course of her life forever.
Because Stephanie quickly fell in love with a man she barely knew. And who, it turned out, was a massive conman.
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CREDITS:
Host: Mia Freedman
With thanks to special guest Stephanie Wood.
Buy her book Fake here: https://bit.ly/2m5rZmv
Producer: Elissa Ratliff
Audio edited by Daryl Missen
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mama Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on For MoMA Mia, this
is no filter. I'm mea Friedman and I wanted to
pop a little extra bonus episode into the feed this
(00:34):
week because a lot of people have been talking about
the new series called Fake that stars Asha Ketty, about
a woman who falls in love with a con man,
and today we wanted to bring you the true story
of the woman in that series in an interview that
I did with Stephanie Wood, who is played by Asher
(00:54):
in Fake. I did this interview a couple of years
ago with Stephanie. She's in her late forties or she
was when she decided to go on a date with
a guy she met online. And she'd been online dating
for a while and had found it pretty unsatisfying, as
many people do. So when she met this guy called Joe,
who is handsome and charming and seemingly different from the others,
(01:18):
she fell for him. She felt pretty hard and pretty fast,
and she had no idea that it would change the
course of her life forever now. Stephanie is an award
winning journalist and an author. She's smart, she's experienced, and
she does not stand for bullshit. But when she met Joe,
all of that sort of fell away, because, as we know,
(01:39):
love does funny things to the brain, and Joe turned
out to be well, as the name suggests, a total fake.
And fake also became the name of Stephanie's book, which
is now the name of this new series on Paramount Plus.
It stars Asha Ketty as Stephanie and David Wenham as Joe.
(01:59):
It's being hailed as a love and lies fueled thriller,
and this is the true story behind it from the
woman who lived it. Here's Stephanie Wood. Steph When you
met Joe, what was your first contact like with him?
Speaker 3 (02:14):
It was we met through online dating and we caught
up for a drink at a bar in the city
in Sydney. There were no sparks for me and I
don't thin for either of us really, although who knows
what he ever felt. I thought he was a little awkward.
I thought he was a bit short, which he proved
not to be. Must have been hunched and down in
that chair. He talked a lot about himself, and women
(02:36):
are pretty used to men talking a lot about themselves
and I sort of peppered the conversation with questions, which
as a journalist you learned to do to keep conversations going.
I think we were there for a couple of drinks
and said goodbye, and I didn't imagine i'd see him again.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
How long had you been online dating for and what's
it like as a woman.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah, I hadn't been doing it for a long time.
I've not done a lot of it because I find
it so awful.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Why is it awful?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Oh, I guess the caliber of men you're meeting. I'm
sorry to say, I find it hugely awkward. The sort
of walking into a space, a bar, a restaurant to
meet someone that you've never ever set eyes on before,
and you have no context for who they are. It's awkward.
They're usually incredibly disappointing. I think a friend pushed me
(03:27):
into it right back in about probably around two thousand
and five, when i'd broken up with the guy I
thought I was going to marry. I think maybe it
was just starting around then.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
So you're in your thirties then, late thirties, yeah, late thirties.
If you're a woman in your late thirties, what kind
of men are on the apps.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Well, of course, it's widely variable. I was looking for
intelligent guys, which I mean, is that okay? I mean,
you know, I suppose I wanted someone who seemed to
have a bit of wish about them and a bit
of humor. I've never sort of had a physical checklist
at all. If I were to be honest, I don't
want someone who's short. But apart from that, I'm fairly
(04:06):
open to, you know, physical imperfection.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Did you decide who to swipe left on and who
to see?
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Well, in those days it was a bit different. The
tinder didn't exist, and I've only ever used hinder once
in my life. It was just looking at what their
interests were mainly, and their political leanings was important to me,
I suppose, And how will they wrote?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, tell me about that, because I imagine as you.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Get more look at more and more profiles, you learn
some some red flags and some green flags.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
I wouldn't know about red and green flags. It's more
about what you like and what you don't like.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
I kind of more mean that like yeah, you go,
oh yeah, I'm someone.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Who speaks intelligent, writes intelligently, and well without spelling mistakes.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
High bar for a journalist.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Well, it is a high barb. But is that such
a high bar for someone I don't know? Isn't that
a fairly for an moderately intelligent person. Isn't that half
decent writing skills? Like I don't know. Maybe I am
too fussy about that.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
I doubt yourself.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
But you like what you like, you like what you like.
That was always important, And I guess I was looking
for compassion, someone who was thoughtful and compassionate and sincere.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Women in their.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Late thirties are notorious for scaring men because of the
whole biological clo of course situation. Did you find that
that was kind of a subtext in all the.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
No, And this is incredibly weird. I imagine for women
who are in their late thirties now to hear who
was still looking. And I wrote an article for Good
Weekend about this, probably in twenty sixteen. I think it
was about not having had children. There was so little
said back then about women's fertility. It really was. And
(05:51):
I've googled, I've gone back through the archives of newspaper
archives to see how much was written about women's fertility
and declining fertility, and very little was written. I think
I was probably little and I wanted to have kids,
but I was a little like I wasn't. I don't
think I ever had a surging biological clock, which I
know a lot of women do. I was concerned. I
(06:12):
did want to have them, but I don't I think
I thought I could still have them in my forties.
And as I said, there was just not a lot
written about it. So you weren't necessarily looking for the
father of you, you know. I don't which a lot
of pressure was. Although the guy that I broke up with,
who I had thought I might be with, he had
some medical issues that could have affected his fertility, and
we certainly had did talk to doctors about out what
(06:34):
our chances might be. So it was obviously on my mind,
but not in a panicked way, and I certainly would
never have raised it. I don't think that was ever
my thought. I don't think I ever went to any
of these dates, and there would have only been back
then about four or five six states, and I don't
think it was on my mind. I think on my
mind was is this guy nice? Is this guy decent?
Is he someone I could spend time with. There was
(06:57):
one really nice guy, but I don't think he was
very much into me, which is okay, devastating blow at
the time, but you know, you move on from these things.
Like there was one that I think probably ended that
period online dating for me. We met for coffee one afternoon.
He wanted to tell me he wasn't particularly good looking man,
and that was fine, but he wanted to tell me
(07:18):
about his recent holiday to India where he had visited
a tantric sex ashram. But it had to have STD
tests on the way in, And I just sat there
with my coffee in front of me, going in my head,
are you serious? You really really want to tell me
about this on our first date.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Well, at least did have the test?
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Well you sure, we never got to check that out. Really,
But the funniest thing about it was that he recommended
I'm not I don't dabble in the share market. But
at the end of that encounter he said, oh, I've
got this great share tip for you. When I got home,
I actually happened for a very rare moment, I had
some money in my bank account. I thought, bargot, I'm
(08:01):
just going to go and buy some of those shares
and then they actually gent me a bit of money,
which I've sold them since.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
But he's self alighting on that very bad.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
That was exactly exactly and I sort of was so
amused by it as well.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
What was it about Joe's dating profile that appealed to you?
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Again, He's writing, He could write, and he could express himself.
It was articulate. He seemed to have a love for
the environment and nature, the things that are important to me, politics,
the current affairs the world, and a curiosity and an
interest in the world. And that came through really strongly
on his dating profile.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
In that first date. Did he tell you he had kids?
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Yeah, so that the foundational story was that he'd been
through a fairly ugly divorce. At some point, possibly second
third date, he started to lead on that his ex
wife was completely psycho and why wouldn't I believe that,
You know, there are people out there who have mental
health problems. He was Now in hindsight, I can see
quite cruel about how he talked about her, but at
(09:02):
the time I took it on face value. He had
custody one week on, one week off with his ex
wife of two children and told me he lived in
a harbourside house, that he'd a modest harbourside house in
a well known suburb of Sydney that he'd built himself.
And what he told me he was an architect or
retired from architecture and had gone into private equity, and
(09:24):
that he had a small sheep farm south south of Sydney.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Was he your age?
Speaker 3 (09:29):
He was about three four years older.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Than me, and you were in your early forties by now.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
I was, no. I was in my late forties by
this stage. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Did he ask much about you on that first day?
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Not really.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Eventually.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
I was getting a bit frustrated by that, because to me,
that's a bit of a sign that someone's not particularly
interested or has very inefficient communication skills. I've been a
food and I'm not writing about food right now, but
in my background I was a food writer and a
restaurant critic. And he eventually asked me a little bit
about that, and he made a comment that was probably
(10:02):
the biggest red flag of that first date. He said,
you must be very well connected, well, not especially, and
it's not something I seek out. I'd run for a
mile from the opening of an envelope sort of thing,
you know, it's just not who I am, my world.
I find it tedious. I said, oh no, no, no,
not at all, not at all. He then did this
(10:22):
incredible backtrack and sort of reversal of position, which I
can now see he often would do when he had
said something that wasn't didn't meet with my approval. I
suppose he said, oh no, I wouldn't like it if
you're well connected, because I'm very private. Even when I
was an architect, I didn't like my work, our work,
the firm's work being published. And in hindsight, I've got
(10:43):
lots of architect friends and that's the holy grail, to
get their work published in architectural magazines, and it's how
you get business as well. So it was such a
dumb thing for him to say. But I don't know
that you're analyzing as much at that point. You sort
of your mind is so busy sizing them up, I
suppose physically, and trying to think of things to say
(11:05):
and trying to keep the conversation flowing without it becoming
awkward that I send something wasn't quite right, but I
moved on. You kind of have to to keep it
going in a way.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
How did that first unremarkable date turn into a second.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Well, i'd been single for quite a few years, and
when you've been single for quite a few years, you
start to hear things like, oh, you're too fussy. Women
shouldn't be so picky, and I've been bored, Like I
have a full, interesting life, but that's a fairly substantial
part of life, and when it's not there, it's like, oh,
here we go again, not another night. It would be
nice to be with someone. And so I wasn't expecting
(11:42):
to hear from him, but he did email me and
asked to help me out again, and I thought, oh, whatever,
I'll go. And I think maybe what happens is that
when someone starts to show interest in you, and it's
quite clear that it's interest, your head does do a
bit of a yes, three hundred and sixty degree degree turn,
and it was like, oh my god, he's interested in me. Okay,
(12:04):
let's have another look at this. And I remember going
to that second day and being quite beside myself with nerves,
which I hadn't been on the first one, Like I
was just a bit nervy on the first one, but
the second one I was like, oh my god, he's
interested in me, and it was like the moment he
registered interest in me, all of a sudden, the game
changed a bit, which is silly. It's so silly because
(12:25):
of something we do. It's something we do. We should
be sizing up constantly for a long time, whether they're appropriate, suitable, honest, decent.
But instead, I don't think it's uncommon. The moment someone's interested,
it often changes the way you view the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
That's such an important insight, isn't it. And I think
I think as women were conditioned, Oh if he likes me, yeah,
I better be not grateful.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
But oh yeah, no, no, yeah, gratitude, it's not that
might well be the emotion. And I was never like
the hottest girl at school or the one that had
boys following me, So it had always been a bit
exciting when a guy did express in me. And it
wasn't as if it was uncommon, But it wasn't. It
wasn't every minute of every day, as you know, in
(13:15):
my twenties and thirties, when I was in the height
of mind.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
And it had been a while since, and it had
been a.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
While, so yeah, after a lot of disappointing dates and disappointing.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Them a lot of time on my own. A lot
of guys that are not a lot of guys, but
there were certainly a couple of guys who turned out
to be really dishonest, And thankfully it never went beyond
a couple few days. But then what odd guys who?
One who proved it turned out to be married. I
got the sense that he was estranged from his wife.
Turns out they were still living together and, according to him,
had an open relationship.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
I wonder if she knew that.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I wonder if she knew it was an open relationship.
And then another one who turned out to be living
with a girlfriend and didn't tell me. Thankfully, they didn't
go very far, and I was pretty upset when I discovered.
But not it was not so I wasn't so embedded
in the relationship that it was devastating. It was that devastating.
I mean, it's I think they leave their little marks
(14:05):
on you.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
So Joe was clearly single and that was important.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Well, yes, on the face of it, Well, yes, as
we thought at that time.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Now did things accelerate quite quickly?
Speaker 3 (14:16):
No, we still did it around a bit. The third
date nearly didn't happen because he made another strange comment that,
in hindsight, I should have taken us another red flag.
We were discussing which restaurant we should go to, and
I said, do you want me to book and he said, yeah,
that'd be good. You know, it'll be interesting to see
how the waiters react to you if they recognize you.
And again it was because I was a food critic,
(14:39):
but I'd mostly been a food critic when I lived
in Melbourne. I hadn't done so much in Sydney, so
I wasn't that well known here and that suited me. Fine.
If you've ever been recognized by my waiter or a
chef and a restaurant who thinks they're going to get
a good review or they can get some benefit out
of it, it's awful.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
It's awkward.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, it's horrible, and I don't like that. And I
got really crossed with him and I just slammed. We
were emailing at that stage. We hadn't got to the
point of having comfortable phone calls. Of course, email opens
up all sorts of ways of both disemb and manipulating
the conversation, and if we'd been talking on the phone,
I might have perhaps picked up things better, but I
(15:18):
just flung an angry response at him and said, you know,
you've misunderstood me. That's not who I am at all.
And then he somehow in another email a few days later,
I said, so, I suppose we're not going out Saturday
night then, and I said, no, I'm going away actually now,
and he said, I really stuffed up. That wasn't what
I meant at all. And now, damn it, I can't
find an email he sent me because I've kept most
of them, but it was like, damn, I wanted to
(15:39):
remember what he'd said, but he convinced me yet again
that I'd misunderstood what his intentions were about that now
or his interest in the waiters recognition. And so we
eventually had a third date, and I think again it
was the fact he was interested in me was making
my bells ring.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
How soon did you go away for the weekend?
Speaker 3 (15:59):
That was after our fourth date. So we had fourth
date where we kissed, and then he said, you know
it takes message that night, I'd like to go away
with you for the weekend.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
To seal the deal.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, to seal the deal as it is as it was.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I don't want to cry about that, but I do
want to ask was the sex great?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Oh God, no one's asking me that yet, And it's like,
I don't want to talk about this. It was great
because I hadn't had it for so long. I don't
think guys get this that women just don't go on
single Women aren't out there every night having casual sex,
certainly not the ones I know. He was warm and
loving in hindsight, very selfish. I won't say more than that,
(16:37):
but at the time I was loving it.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
And I ask that not just because I'm voyeuristic and strange,
but because when the sex is good in a relationship
or that hadn't been sex for a while, that can
be confusing as well for a woman. Yeah, that hard
experience where that can change my brain chemistry and think,
oh I.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Really like you, And it's like, yeah, no, that was
just good sex. It's doesn't mean you're a good.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Person, or doesn't mean it was good enough that I
think it was turning my head and altering my chemistry.
And in fact, as I write in Fake, our brain
chemistry when we're in completely changes.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
You use a norweg is it a noruig model?
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Skept and I don't pronounce that properly, I know, but
it's the heady period of love where you're completely tied
in knots with love and besides yourself and can't think straight.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Quite bonkers, quite nuts.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
And there are scientific it's just almost a pop culture
words as I understand it in Norway, there are scientific
reasons for it. The ancient part of our brain, the
limits system, is surging with neurotransmitters and hormones because this
is fundamental to our biology. Isn't it to mate and
to reproduce. It's so fundamental. And also it's fundamental to
(17:48):
want to attach to somebody because that's how we survive
in the wild, you know, in primitive primal, it's very primal.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
How much time did you spend together in those early times.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I would see in probably two or three days or
every fortnight, which of course is not much. But I
was under the impression you had the children on the
other week. I felt as if I was in the
very delicate situation that he'd talked about the children being
very fragile and him being very fragile as a result
of the divorce, And I thought, you know, I can't
go in like a bullet at gate here. I can't
(18:20):
demand to meet the children. That's not right. You know,
I've got to be sympathetic to this situation. And if
I do get demanding and so I must meet your
children and I must see your house, I could just
ruin everything.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Had you dated a guy with kids before?
Speaker 3 (18:34):
No? Never, never. I mean my instinct was go gently,
go very very gently.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
So you didn't meet his kids at first? Did you
meet each other's friends?
Speaker 3 (18:45):
He met a few of my friends, but not for
a while. A couple of times he stood me out
when there were events. I was going to a Christmas
party at a journalist friend's home and he was meant
to join me. Funny thing he didn't come. He didn't
there was an excuse. And this pattern started very early,
the cancelations early, probably within oh three months. I mean
(19:10):
there was a period there where I actually went to
the States for five weeks for work, and so it
was all a bit truncated and remote distance relationship for
a little while while I was away. But we sort
of started to go out seriously, probably end of August
twenty fourteen. But by November he was starting to cancel
on me.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
What sort of reasons would he get, Oh, the.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Most insane reasons. He'd been poisoned by sheep drench. He
was in his loo, his duney on a hill on
the farm where he just had a shack, which is
apparently why I never got to see it, vomiting, he
was terribly ill. He had a tooth infection. These are
all not in chronological order. These are the sort of
excuses that unfolded over the sort of fifteen month period
(19:52):
we were together. A truck carrying his sheep had tipped
over and there was chaos and carnage. His dog had
been bitten by snake. His son had been running around
a friend's pool and fallen over and been concussed. His
daughter had asked me his daughter had fallen out of
a tree and damage to collar.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Bo.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Yeah, a lot of bad luck.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
He had a lot of bad luck. I mean, I
started to get incredibly at my suffer anxiety, as so
many people do. This made me so anxious it was
hard to separate whether there was instinct about something not
being right or it was just my anxiety. You know,
people say, oh, you should follow your instinct, but when
you're anxious, so true, what's instinct? What's anxiety. I couldn't tell.
(20:32):
I was so keen to try and make it work.
At some point in the relationship, maybe six months, and
he'd said it sold the little farm with the shack,
and he was now looking to invest in a much
much larger property, and he started to talk about this
specific property. I think what happens in relationships is it's
not just the person that you're in love with, it's
the idea of the future that you're going to have
(20:53):
together that you fall in love with. A love affair
is about not just the person that you're in love with,
but about the future that you've fallen in love with,
or the idea of this future you might have together.
And so he was looking at investing in this big property.
It was such a spread, such a pile that it
was on sotherby is real estate website. So it existed. Oh,
it totally valid, absolute existed. I mean the detail that
(21:16):
he talked about, the sale, the negotiations, the neighbors, the
people he was vying with to get it. He talked
about constantly going down there and having meetings with the
owner to discuss what would be included in the sale
and what wouldn't. There were council problems, and there were
water rights. The detail was immense, and eventually he took
me to see it. And it was not the sort
(21:38):
of place that you arrive at on a Saturday morning
and wander around and then leave, you know, without an invitation.
It was an appointment only style, large multi bedroom, multi
living area, a huge estate, and we went there and
met the owners and we walked around and the wife
took me on this tour and said, oh, I do
hope he gets it. I do hope Joe gets it.
(21:59):
I don't know what's going on, but I hope he
gets it.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
So is he wealthy?
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, that's what I had been. He'd led me to believe.
We never did anything lavish. But I also, I mean,
I'm not design a handbag kind of person. And so
he drove a beat up old land Rover Defender. He
didn't wear particularly special clothes, and I just took that
to be someone who had money but was understated and
didn't care about the trappings of wealth, which I really
(22:24):
liked that approach. He'd pay for meals, and with my
restaurant habit, we went out for dinner quite often, and
sometimes I'd pay, but I think probably he paid more
than I did. He tipped taxi drivers, we'd go it
for breakfast. He took me away three times to country cottages.
Again nothing lavish, but he paid. I'd say he spent
(22:46):
at least three, four or five thousand dollars through the
course of the relationship on me.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Did he ever ask you for money? Never?
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Never?
Speaker 3 (22:53):
And he gave me presents. He gave me pearls, He
gave me opals. I make jewelry, and he gave me
these opals. He gave me these little Victorian antique silver,
beautifully engraved trinkets. There were never signs of great wealth.
But he told me he was very sheepishly one day,
as though he were almost embarrassed by it. He said,
(23:14):
I've got a lot of money. I've got a disgusting
amount of money, he said, And he sounded as though
he was really embarrassed about it, and as though he
were letting me into that secret slowly because it'd come
to start to trust me. The idea of an understated
multimillionaire is kind of nice. Yeah, yeah, I like that.
I thought that was a really nice quality, that the
(23:35):
money didn't really matter that much. It was. There were
other things that were more important.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Like you well as the future. Together in the future
was like I imagine.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
You in the kitchen of the of Happy Valley, and
which study would you like? The one down the corridor
from mine or the one next to mine? Very sexy, enticing,
kind of hints at what the future might be.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
That's very seductive for women.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
It's like that talking about the future, even perhaps before
you're thinking of it or allowing it.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Yeah, I wouldn't have allowed. He was the one to
introduce the future, not me, because I was too cautious
to do so. I probably was the first to say
I love you and he said no, no, too soon,
and then I pulled right back. But he was starting
to paint these pictures that I embedded in my own
brain and started to fantasize over. We all do that,
don't we. You know, we start to imagine that beautiful,
(24:28):
glorious thing lying ahead. I'm going to be lying, I said.
If I said that the money didn't matter, I'm a
journalist in an industry that is absolutely going down the toilet.
I took a redundancy from Fairfax Media two years ago
and quite frankly, I will probably never have another staff
position and never get the benefits of superinnuation or any
of the things that a staff position brings. And I
(24:50):
don't honestly know how. You know, as a journalist you
make your living these days particular, j Young is sort
of writing I like to do, which takes a lot
of time and is dense and research heavy. So yeah,
it was this relationship promises me him and I'm in
love with him. It promises me a farming future, which
I'd always found appealing idea of, you know, growing vegetables
(25:11):
and having animals, and I'll be able to write and
not worry about how much I pay my way through life.
So the money was important in that way for me.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
More of my conversation with Stephanie after this shortbreak tell
me about him meeting your family.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
He stood me up for the first time. He was
meant to come for a family barbecue at my place
and just didn't show up. And it was only it
was my mother and my brother and his family, so.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
He didn't show up.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I know, and I should have been, well, you, I'm
so close to my family that I didn't feel embarrassed,
and we're close. I didn't feel embarrassed, but I was.
I went into a complete state of anxiety and just
bulled up on the couch.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
What reason did he give?
Speaker 3 (25:57):
He didn't. I couldn't get him, I couldn't find him.
It was just before Christmas twenty fourteen. And I should
have left him then. I should have said no, no
one treats me like that. But I didn't have enough
self esteem. I didn't have the resources to do that.
I felt so immersed and entrenched in the relationship by
that stage, and in love. And the next day I
(26:19):
rang him or texted him, and he made some He said, oh,
his daughter had asthma, and oh, yeah, that was a
really bad thing to do. I'm sorry, and I sort
of Over Christmas, I went to Queensland to my mom's.
I started to prepare myself for the relationship beang over.
I actually did a really good job of it. I
stopped thinking about him, I stopped you clutching my phone
(26:39):
looking for messages. But he kept texting me. He drew
he drew you back in, he drew me back in,
and so when I got back and then he arrived
at my place with a string of pearls, and I
was forgiven. Yeah, I was forgiven. Stupidly in hindsight, But
what about meeting his kids. That happened maybe six seven
months after I'd first met him, and it felt like
(27:01):
a huge milestone in the relationship. I mean, I think,
you know, if he's willing to introduce he talked about
breaking the bubble. I want to break the bubble between
my life and your life, you know, I want you
to meet my kids. And I just felt like soaring.
I was jubilant. And I met them one night at
a Thaire restaurant. It was excruciating. They were very quiet
and shy. God knows how many other women he'd introduced
(27:24):
them to and they had to go through this or
deal with I was nervous trying to make conversation with
just becoming a teenage girl and her younger brother, and
it was very difficult. At one stage, I think, I mean,
I was blundering around with the conversation and I think
I said to the girl, is it hard to remember
(27:44):
to pack all the things that you need when you
move between mum and Dad's place? I mean, terrible question,
awful question. What was I thinking? But I felt like
it was blundering around. But he very quickly wrapped up
the night after that. My suspicion now is that he
felt that we were getting into dangerous territory, where as
(28:07):
I discovered much later kids had spent for a little
time with him. This is here's the spoiler alert. He
didn't live in the house on the harbor. His ex
wife did.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Still, well, I was going to ask you, did you
ever go to his house?
Speaker 3 (28:19):
No? I didn't ever go to his house. And that
was eventually what made me leave the relationship, because he
canceled two nights in a row on me when I
was meant to be going to the house, and I thought,
this is I can't do this anymore. I was in
such a mess by that stage. The excuses for not
going to the house were They kept evolving. So initially
it was I mean for the first say, five months,
I didn't even ask because I thought too soon, too soon,
(28:42):
And I was.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
One we spent time at your house?
Speaker 3 (28:43):
Well, yeah, we spent time in my apartment. I think
my biggest fears were he may not be that into me,
maybe there's another woman. Like the scale of what I
discovered about him afterwards, I could never have imagined. I
didn't know that these people really existed.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
You're an investigative journalist. The first thing I would have
thought you would have done is google him.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Well I did. I did google him, and I found
that certain planks of his story were very true. He
was the grandson of a very well known Sydney businessman
who'd started a major Australian company, and there's no question
about that. As a fact, he had lived in this
I saw his driver's license with the address of this house,
this harb Aside address. I saw it. When I researched
(29:24):
the book, I came to discover some really interesting cognitive science,
some work that well well not on cognitive science principles,
and one of them is thing called anchoring, whereby you
place importance in some facts at the expense of other facts.
So I anchored my beliefs about him and my belief
in him, the fact his story was true, in the
fact that while his grandfather is X. I've seen his
(29:46):
driver's license, so he must live there and let other
things slip on by.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
You wrote lists, didn't you?
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (29:53):
I wrote list to try and calm myself down.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Like what would you write down?
Speaker 3 (29:56):
I was trying to steal my anxiety, and I thought
maybe if I could rationally put things down in writing.
I'd calm myself down. I'd write reasons why he's not
lying to me, reasons why I shouldn't be worried, reasons
why the fact he didn't turn up on the weekend
shouldn't bother me. And when I look back at those lists,
they are all things he said to me. I'm envisiting
(30:17):
you with gray hair, I love you completely, I et cet.
There were all things he said. They were not actions.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
They had seen a dog that he said was them.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Oh yeah, I knew the dog existed.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
And there was such detail in his excuses exactly, and
they were quite elaborate, weren't they was never just like
I can't come. It's sort of you talk about it
them unfolding in three acts.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Yeah, yeah, in the most incredibly detailed way.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Would they so well?
Speaker 3 (30:45):
For example, this weekend that he said he was his
dog had been bitten by a snake. He was meant
to come to my apartment on a Friday night and
have dinner with me. Come up. He was down at
the farm and he was meant to be coming up.
And around about four in the afternoon, I got the
text saying I can't find my dog, then another, and
I replied to each of them with concern or questions,
and then another one an hour or two later. Founder
(31:07):
were at the vet. I'm not sure she's going to
make it. She's been bitten by a snake with the vet, thinks.
Then silence for the rest of the night, nothing till
the next morning, but then a text very early the
next morning saying, I think I'll be able to come
up to town. We think, well, she'll make it now,
there won't be any point in mess staying here with her.
I'll come up, you know, I'll be there for lunch.
Then a few hours later, I've actually got a friend
(31:28):
who's a vet in another town and he's coming to
look at her. And there were slight contradictions, but I
wasn't seeing the contradictions because in the morning you're saying
we think she's going to make it. Well, then if
she's going to make it, why do you need to
bring another vet? Like I can see all of these
contradictions now. The text went on all weekend with updates
and no, I'm not.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Going to come confusing like being bombarded with details and bombarded.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
I think the effect the details had was simply to
reassure me of the truth of the story. Why would you?
It just seems so real. The vet friend arrived, they
went back to his town with the dog. They had
not seen each other for a long time. Their friendship
had been a casualty of the divorce. Now they were
catching up, and it was really good that they were
(32:10):
catching up becoming friends again. So he's going to stay
there the night, see tomorrow, I see you tomorrow morning.
And then finally I saw him late on the Sunday.
But the text went all weekend and kept putting off
his arrival time.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
You must have thought you were going crazy.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Oh I did, I did.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Did you know the term gas lighting?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
No?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Well, no, I didn't believe it or not, But I mean,
I think that's This conversation about gas lighting is really
only maybe I'm dreaming. I don't know. Maybe it was
out there, but I don't think we talked about relationships
like this.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
No, gas lighting is quite new.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
When I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, I didn't
know that term until many years later, when I looked
back and I went, oh, that's what it was.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
I wish i'd have read an article about that, because yes,
you think, oh, this is just me.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
This is just the very specific dynamics of this relationship.
And what you describe is so familiar to anyone who's
been involved with a guy who's either a liar or
a psychopath or an emotionally abusive.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
You start doubting yourself.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah, you don't think, oh, this guy's a dick and
cut them loose, because even though it's from the outside,
people look at you and go, what are you doing?
Speaker 3 (33:19):
But no one on my outside was saying that. On
my outside, even your therapist, even my therapist who I love,
and I do not blame her for this for a moment,
because she wasn't in the middle of the relationship. I
could in an hour session every couple of weeks or
every week. I couldn't tell her everything that was going on.
I can't remember what I missed to tell her. She
wasn't seeing red flag. She kept on saying, a man
(33:40):
with a difficult ex wife, two children, a farm, business interests,
property development is going to have a complex, complex life,
and it's so different from your life. I'm not seeing
red flags.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Steph.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Did you find yourself protecting his image from other people
by not telling people everything about how many times you cancel.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
Or I'm pretty open. So I was probably telling my
friends the truth.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
At what point did they say the.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Only one did? Most of my friends would go One
friend said, stop being a weirdo, you know, until you've
got a concrete evidence that he's lying, Stop being a weirdo.
And my brother and sister in LAWA would say, you're
going to ruin it. Relax, you're going to ruin it.
There was one heterosexual friend, a guy who was then
he's another phenomena for women of a certain age, my
(34:31):
age and even younger. By this stage, I was in
my late forties and he was in his mid forties,
but he was seeing women who were in their early thirties. So,
you know, even though it's only about two or three
younger years younger than me, I was never, you know,
a rare single man in his mid forties. He was
separated with a young daughter as well. But I don't
think he ever looked at, you know, would look at
a woman my age with an eye to thinking I was,
(34:54):
because there is you know, he's going out with thirty
year olds.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
That's important to understand because that's the context for which
someone who does show an interest in you and not
a twenty eight year old. That's really flattering, and there
is a level of gratitude for that appreciation of that.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah, yeah, and that's very real.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Absolutely. But this one heterosexual friend, I think he knew
me just from a very few things I said. He said,
he was cynical. He didn't even need to ask me
many questions. He didn't really. We sat in one night
at a sushi bar when I was and I pulled
my anxieties out to him and he said, yeah, yeah,
when are you going to let this finish? When are
you going to finish this?
Speaker 1 (35:32):
How long had it been?
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Oh? That was probably a seven months or so into
the relationship. And he was ultimately the one that said
you've got to end this. And he was the one
that sort of picked me up and fed me I
hadn't been eating at the very end, and said, you've
got to end this. This is ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
How did you end it?
Speaker 3 (35:50):
I email my ex and said, I don't know what
sort of hollow man you are, but you're a hollow man.
And I put my finger on it because now I
can understand the psychology of what I was, what I'd
been dealing with, which I didn't until I left the relationship.
Oh he's a hollow man and I put my finger
on it, and that email when I broke up with
him before knew anything.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
So what happened after you decided to end it?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Because you worked at Fairfax at the time, you were
sitting next to one of Australia's leading investigative journalists, the
extraordinary Kate mcclearmon, who said, who's brought down entire state
governments through her investigative reporting? That would have been like
just something she could have done before breakfast, exactly one
of my tea.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
No, it was actually another colleague and another great colleague
and Davies who now works the Guardian, who said to me,
let's do some searches on him. And this is probably
around seven months into the relationship, and I was expressing
anxieties to her about it and I said, oh, no, no, no, no,
this is a love affair. This isn't I mean, I've
done my preliminary googles, and I knew the sort of
searches that we could do, title deed searches to see
(36:53):
what he owned, if he indeed was this multimillionaire, whether
he owned the house that he lived in, bankruptcy searches,
and about social media. He didn't have a very big
social media. He had a Twitter account. It was pretty.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Typical for a man.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
That's not a red flag. Oh that's not a red
flag at all, and very little online about him. But
just as I said before, you know enough to reassure
me that his grandfather was who he said, and that
he had had an architectural practice at one point. But
I said to Anne Davies, I said, no, this isn't
this is not a story. This is a love affair.
And of course that wasn't really the real reason. I mean,
(37:26):
it was part of it. I didn't want to be
a snoop, but I couldn't better look at what the
truth was. And that's not uncommon. It's called wilful blindness
in psychological terms. And it's the same phenomena as the
person that goes to tan on sun beds whose doctor
says you shouldn't do that, that's going to give you cancer,
or smokers, and it's the same phenomena. You turn your
(37:48):
eyes away from what you fear, what you don't want
to know about. It's not it's not convenient and convenient
to look at it, and I was being wilfully blind. Sure,
there was a part of me that didn't want to
snoop and felt that was a betrayal, But it was
more about I don't want to look, I can't look.
I can't look.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
What made you decide to start looking a little?
Speaker 3 (38:07):
Well, after I dumped him. After I dumped him, and
then my curiosity was like insatiable. I had to know
what I'd encountered and can I keep some of the secrets.
From what I discovered, I discovered that he wasn't who
he said he was at all, that he was bankrupt,
that he didn't live in the house that his ex
wife did. That in fact, I think he had no
(38:29):
fixed address. I think he moved, possibly between women. I
think there was some suggestion that he squatted on boats
on the harbor. Apparently there are any number of empty
boats on the Sydney Harbor. Owners don't visit very often.
I discovered he'd been with another woman from the very
first day of our relationship. I discovered that he didn't
(38:49):
have the custody of the children that he claimed he had,
that there was no farm, and ultimately I discovered that
he had been just simply a meddler in the Happy
Valley purchase. Had presented himself as a buyer, but he
had no money to buy it. And I eventually heard
from the person that did buy it, who says he
(39:09):
spent much much more money on the property than he
should have because of Joe's meddling in the sale. So
he fooled lots of other people as well, in business
as well. It wasn't just me. He's a very clever
con artist, really, But the thing is about it, it's
so weird. The benefits were so few for him. Really,
he didn't get I don't think he's got money out
of his corn artistry. And I think what he got
(39:32):
out of me and the other women that he's been
involved with is an audience for his grand stories, which
at the time I didn't see were grand stories. I
just thought he's a busy man trying to buy a
property and he wants to talk all about it. Now
I can see it was just self grandizement. It was
him going, look at me, look at me, I'm so successful.
And I allowed him to help build his facade around
(39:53):
the hollow shell by listening to him, and I suppose clapping,
you know, I was the audience.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Did you reach out to the woman he'd been with
through your relationship? How did you find her?
Speaker 3 (40:03):
So her social media? I found evidence of her on
social media, and eventually, long time, long time afterwards, I
did reach chat to her.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
How did you discover that they'd been together through that time?
Speaker 3 (40:13):
That her social media revealed just endless photographs and on
both Facebook and Instagram that all the dog the day
that his dog had been bitten by a snake, he
was in fact at a resort in the Hunter Valley
with her, playing board games and drinking wine at various
wineries and swimming in a swimming pool in between sending
(40:35):
me text messages telling me about his dying dog, which
presumably was it a vet hotel or a pet hotel somewhere.
Her Facebook and Instagram gave me all the evidence I
needed to see the pattern of lies. And once I
knew the pattern of lies in that he had been
lying to me at that level about her, about about
what he'd been doing, I could see that clearly the
(40:57):
lies didn't stop there, that this was a much bigger scale.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
I must have been devastating.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
It's funny, you know, I think it helped me start
it began, and my recovery, it was like, how can
I be surprised by it? That's the like I know that.
The night that I sat there, I was on the
phone to a girlfriend in Melbourne as I went through
his Facebook, her Facebook, this woman's, other woman's Facebook, and Instagram.
It was devastating and stunning, but not surprising. And I
can't explain why I wasn't like something had to be
(41:29):
up and I came to see that by the end.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
But was there a relief in learning that you weren't crazy?
Speaker 3 (41:35):
The relief came mostly not so long after that, when
I started to google the words pathological liar and boyfriend.
And once I'd done that, this whole world opened up
to me, and it was pop psychology rather than medical psychiatry,
but it revealed so much to me about who he
(41:55):
was and why he was the way he was, and
the existence of these sorts of people out there, narcissistic
people with personality disorders most likely. And the Internet, if
you've ever been, once you've started to google, it's like
a rabbit hole. There's so much out there too, so
many people telling their stories about these people. There are
so many of them out there. It's terrifying. And after
(42:16):
my original Good Weekend article, I got so many emails
from people saying that happened to me, similar story, and
they're just gobsmacking, like women who've tried to commit suicide
after these relationships have ended and losing every scaic of
money that they've ever earned, and that the husband somehow
or the ex boyfriend or partner taking everything, turning children
(42:37):
against them, and I should also women are capable of
this behavior too. It's not just men. I've certainly heard
from many more women than men, which is probably a
symptom of the fact that women tell their stories more
readily than men do. But I've heard from men to
and one woman who I interviewed for my book who
had a bad relation She's an American woman lives in Florida.
(42:59):
She had a bad relationship with, funnily enough, an Australian
sports person who'd gone to Florida to play in his sport.
She now has this sort of account lean life coaching
kind of service that she promotes through Instagram. Mainly, she
says she gets fifty percent men contacting her about bad
women in their lives. That's the only stat I can
(43:22):
really offer, because this is not researched, and I don't
know how you would ever actually research it. Because I've
also got to be aware that a proportion of the
people who contacted me after the original article and also
after the book in the last couple of weeks, I've
got dozens more. I think you've got to be aware
that some of them might just be aggrieved. They might
have blown out of proportion what their claims about their
(43:45):
ex are. They're pissed off, they're unhappy, they've broken up.
So I think you've got to set aside a few
of those and go, that's a fair point. You know,
you can't take everyone as fact. And I don't know
how you to ever research the troop without going into
these relationships in such detail. How do you ever prove
the truth of them?
Speaker 1 (44:01):
People feel so stupid, yep.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
And if they tell one line that doesn't work, they
move on to the next line. Yeah, and they can.
They the most incredibly intricate stories, and they tell one
lie after another, and you can see there are contradictions.
But well I could see there were contradictions in his stories,
and that bothered me. But yeah, I was just immersed
in it, and I so much wanted it to work.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
More of my conversation with the real life Bertie Bell
Stephanie Wood after this break, when your original Good Weekend
piece came out, our mutual friend of Meilily Lester, was
your editor on that story, and it was absolutely stunning
and so powerful.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
And everybody was talking about it.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
I can see the cover of The Good Weekend in
my mind's eye when I think about it. It came
out on the Saturday, and on the Sunday I had
lunch actually with a number of journalist girlfriends, and.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
We were all saying, who is this guy?
Speaker 2 (44:59):
We need to find out who this guy is? I
imagine because you gave a lot a number of details,
you were careful you didn't use his name. But did
people recognize him and contact.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
You family members? Some of his family did.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
What did they say?
Speaker 3 (45:13):
They made comments about the fact it wasn't the first
time they'd heard these stories.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Did they feel bad? Yeah, they did, I suppose reaching
out to you. They weren't defending him. Put it that way,
they weren't defending What about Joe himself.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
I heard from him. Yes, after that original Good Weekend article,
I got a couple of very odd messages that were
really disconnected from reality. He talked about how he was
with an inner new relationship there. It was sort of
an apology, but it wasn't an apology. It's very difficult
to describe just how weird the emails are. They're literate,
(45:50):
the punctuation and grammar is right, but there's a nonsequential
nature to them as sort of a discombobulating kind of
effect to them. And as I talk about in the book,
it's it was really disturbing for a while, but then
I started to laugh and I heard things that he
was saying about me, which were, I'm if I don't
(46:10):
take my medication, I do some strange things. Last night,
I stole money from my mother to buy my apartment.
I am a lesbian. It just doesn't tell this to
I hear it through a guy through a sauce.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Yet, And have you stayed or did you when you
reached out to the woman he was having their relationship with,
was she angry? Was she still with him at the time?
How did that conversation unfold?
Speaker 3 (46:39):
It was a really really terrifying moment when I reached
out to her, because I didn't know whether they were
in a relationship or not. And as I detail on
the book, it was there were a lot of light
bulb moments as we talked about was she open to
talking to you? It's very open to talking to Had
she ended the relationship?
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Maybe she had. She made a funny comment about a whiteboard.
Speaker 3 (46:58):
Yeah, when we started to compare stories, she said, you know,
he must have had a whiteboard. And I got a
picture in my head of him with different colored market
pens and biting his lip and looking at his whiteboard
and different columns. And I was blue when she was red.
And he'd compared the stories of how he was lying
to each of us, and he lied to us differently.
There were different lies. There were things that he said
(47:19):
to me that he never said to her. He had
a different name for his ex wife, for her that
he told to her to me out like and who
knows why? Who knows why?
Speaker 1 (47:27):
A lot of stuff to keep straight.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
A lot of cut stuff to keep straight. And as
a lot of people said to me, why why would
you put yourself through that? The exhausting nature of that
juggling act. It's just insane. Stephanie, how do you date
again after Joe? I don't know me I really don't know.
Will anyone want to date me? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Shut up, look at you gorgeous and smart and oh well,
I mean kind and brilliant.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
You're very sweet. People might be scared that I might
write about them, and I don't think anyone's ever going to,
you know, come up to the standard of Joe in
terms I think. And I think I'm done with writing
about my personal life. I'd never wanted to write about
my personal life, and it's just unfolded that I have,
and it's ridiculous. They're the stories that get the most traction,
(48:17):
and I right now want to pull away from doing
personal stories completely. I never want to write another one.
But as I say that, I know that they're the
stories that make a difference in people's lives. I feel
I get so many people saying, thank you, your book
is my bible. Now you've saved my life. I understand
what happened now, and that's enormously gratifying. You know, we
(48:37):
don't live long in this world, and not many of
us can actually make a difference. And so as I
say I don't want to write more personal essays, I
can see their power and how important they can be.
But as for dating, I don't know. I just don't know, Like,
how do you have an online date with someone? Now?
Even if you're optimistic enough to think that there's someone
online that might be half decent, what do you say
(48:59):
to them when they ask? What do you do?
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (49:01):
I write books about fakes that I meet online? What
do I say?
Speaker 1 (49:06):
And I think they'd be fascinating?
Speaker 3 (49:07):
And also I think, and I don't want to make
a big deal about this, but I feel a bit
awkward about it. You know, once you have some sort
of profile, I don't know, dating online it feels weird
to me.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
I've got a friend who is who writes about sex.
She's a sex kind of advice giver. But that would
be hard to date.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
That would be really hard to date. Imagine taking that
on board.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
And she's just got married recently in her what would
she be, late fifties probably yeah her. Thank you for
writing this book. I wish I could have read it
a lot of years ago. I hope that a lot
of women do read it.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
I hope a lot of young women do yes to
stop them before they start a pattern of bad relationships,
and to show them that they're worthy of great love
from the beginning, and if someone's not giving it to them,
you walk away, and that to be single is often
almost always better than being in a bad relationship.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
You can see why this story was just crying out
to be an on screen thriller. And what's really wild
is that this happened to Stephanie quite a few years
ago when online dating was actually online, that is, before
the apps even and as you heard, she never even
got into the Tinder and the bumbles and the hinges.
So it's crazy to think about the cat fishing and
the fraud that can go on now when there's AI
(50:25):
in so many new ways that liars can manipulate and
cover their tracks. And really that's why this story and
now this series is really important, because this could have
ended up in a much worse situation for Stephanie than
it did. Women get hurt by men they meet online
or on the apps. They get hurt emotionally, they get
hurt financially, and sometimes tragically, they get hurt physically. And
(50:50):
that's why Stephanie really wanted to tell her story.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
So if you're out there.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
Dating now, navigating the world of the apps, stay safe,
follow your instincts, research your dates like you're a journalist
or a detective, and if something in you says this
guy seems too good to be true, maybe he is.
Speaker 3 (51:11):
The didn't
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Say
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mama Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on For MoMA Mia, this
is no filter. I'm mea Friedman and I wanted to
pop a little extra bonus episode into the feed this
(00:34):
week because a lot of people have been talking about
the new series called Fake that stars Asha Ketty, about
a woman who falls in love with a con man,
and today we wanted to bring you the true story
of the woman in that series in an interview that
I did with Stephanie Wood, who is played by Asher
(00:54):
in Fake. I did this interview a couple of years
ago with Stephanie. She's in her late forties or she
was when she decided to go on a date with
a guy she met online. And she'd been online dating
for a while and had found it pretty unsatisfying, as
many people do. So when she met this guy called Joe,
who is handsome and charming and seemingly different from the others,
(01:18):
she fell for him. She felt pretty hard and pretty fast,
and she had no idea that it would change the
course of her life forever now. Stephanie is an award
winning journalist and an author. She's smart, she's experienced, and
she does not stand for bullshit. But when she met Joe,
all of that sort of fell away, because, as we know,
(01:39):
love does funny things to the brain, and Joe turned
out to be well, as the name suggests, a total fake.
And fake also became the name of Stephanie's book, which
is now the name of this new series on Paramount Plus.
It stars Asha Ketty as Stephanie and David Wenham as Joe.
(01:59):
It's being hailed as a love and lies fueled thriller,
and this is the true story behind it from the
woman who lived it. Here's Stephanie Wood. Steph When you
met Joe, what was your first contact like with him?
Speaker 3 (02:14):
It was we met through online dating and we caught
up for a drink at a bar in the city
in Sydney. There were no sparks for me and I
don't thin for either of us really, although who knows
what he ever felt. I thought he was a little awkward.
I thought he was a bit short, which he proved
not to be. Must have been hunched and down in
that chair. He talked a lot about himself, and women
(02:36):
are pretty used to men talking a lot about themselves
and I sort of peppered the conversation with questions, which
as a journalist you learned to do to keep conversations going.
I think we were there for a couple of drinks
and said goodbye, and I didn't imagine i'd see him again.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
How long had you been online dating for and what's
it like as a woman.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah, I hadn't been doing it for a long time.
I've not done a lot of it because I find
it so awful.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Why is it awful?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Oh, I guess the caliber of men you're meeting. I'm
sorry to say, I find it hugely awkward. The sort
of walking into a space, a bar, a restaurant to
meet someone that you've never ever set eyes on before,
and you have no context for who they are. It's awkward.
They're usually incredibly disappointing. I think a friend pushed me
(03:27):
into it right back in about probably around two thousand
and five, when i'd broken up with the guy I
thought I was going to marry. I think maybe it
was just starting around then.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
So you're in your thirties then, late thirties, yeah, late thirties.
If you're a woman in your late thirties, what kind
of men are on the apps.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Well, of course, it's widely variable. I was looking for
intelligent guys, which I mean, is that okay? I mean,
you know, I suppose I wanted someone who seemed to
have a bit of wish about them and a bit
of humor. I've never sort of had a physical checklist
at all. If I were to be honest, I don't
want someone who's short. But apart from that, I'm fairly
(04:06):
open to, you know, physical imperfection.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Did you decide who to swipe left on and who
to see?
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Well, in those days it was a bit different. The
tinder didn't exist, and I've only ever used hinder once
in my life. It was just looking at what their
interests were mainly, and their political leanings was important to me,
I suppose, And how will they wrote?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, tell me about that, because I imagine as you.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Get more look at more and more profiles, you learn
some some red flags and some green flags.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
I wouldn't know about red and green flags. It's more
about what you like and what you don't like.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
I kind of more mean that like yeah, you go,
oh yeah, I'm someone.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Who speaks intelligent, writes intelligently, and well without spelling mistakes.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
High bar for a journalist.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Well, it is a high barb. But is that such
a high bar for someone I don't know? Isn't that
a fairly for an moderately intelligent person. Isn't that half
decent writing skills? Like I don't know. Maybe I am
too fussy about that.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
I doubt yourself.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
But you like what you like, you like what you like.
That was always important, And I guess I was looking
for compassion, someone who was thoughtful and compassionate and sincere.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Women in their.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Late thirties are notorious for scaring men because of the
whole biological clo of course situation. Did you find that
that was kind of a subtext in all the.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
No, And this is incredibly weird. I imagine for women
who are in their late thirties now to hear who
was still looking. And I wrote an article for Good
Weekend about this, probably in twenty sixteen. I think it
was about not having had children. There was so little
said back then about women's fertility. It really was. And
(05:51):
I've googled, I've gone back through the archives of newspaper
archives to see how much was written about women's fertility
and declining fertility, and very little was written. I think
I was probably little and I wanted to have kids,
but I was a little like I wasn't. I don't
think I ever had a surging biological clock, which I
know a lot of women do. I was concerned. I
(06:12):
did want to have them, but I don't I think
I thought I could still have them in my forties.
And as I said, there was just not a lot
written about it. So you weren't necessarily looking for the
father of you, you know. I don't which a lot
of pressure was. Although the guy that I broke up with,
who I had thought I might be with, he had
some medical issues that could have affected his fertility, and
we certainly had did talk to doctors about out what
(06:34):
our chances might be. So it was obviously on my mind,
but not in a panicked way, and I certainly would
never have raised it. I don't think that was ever
my thought. I don't think I ever went to any
of these dates, and there would have only been back
then about four or five six states, and I don't
think it was on my mind. I think on my
mind was is this guy nice? Is this guy decent?
Is he someone I could spend time with. There was
(06:57):
one really nice guy, but I don't think he was
very much into me, which is okay, devastating blow at
the time, but you know, you move on from these things.
Like there was one that I think probably ended that
period online dating for me. We met for coffee one afternoon.
He wanted to tell me he wasn't particularly good looking man,
and that was fine, but he wanted to tell me
(07:18):
about his recent holiday to India where he had visited
a tantric sex ashram. But it had to have STD
tests on the way in, And I just sat there
with my coffee in front of me, going in my head,
are you serious? You really really want to tell me
about this on our first date.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Well, at least did have the test?
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Well you sure, we never got to check that out. Really,
But the funniest thing about it was that he recommended
I'm not I don't dabble in the share market. But
at the end of that encounter he said, oh, I've
got this great share tip for you. When I got home,
I actually happened for a very rare moment, I had
some money in my bank account. I thought, bargot, I'm
(08:01):
just going to go and buy some of those shares
and then they actually gent me a bit of money,
which I've sold them since.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
But he's self alighting on that very bad.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
That was exactly exactly and I sort of was so
amused by it as well.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
What was it about Joe's dating profile that appealed to you?
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Again, He's writing, He could write, and he could express himself.
It was articulate. He seemed to have a love for
the environment and nature, the things that are important to me, politics,
the current affairs the world, and a curiosity and an
interest in the world. And that came through really strongly
on his dating profile.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
In that first date. Did he tell you he had kids?
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Yeah, so that the foundational story was that he'd been
through a fairly ugly divorce. At some point, possibly second
third date, he started to lead on that his ex
wife was completely psycho and why wouldn't I believe that,
You know, there are people out there who have mental
health problems. He was Now in hindsight, I can see
quite cruel about how he talked about her, but at
(09:02):
the time I took it on face value. He had
custody one week on, one week off with his ex
wife of two children and told me he lived in
a harbourside house, that he'd a modest harbourside house in
a well known suburb of Sydney that he'd built himself.
And what he told me he was an architect or
retired from architecture and had gone into private equity, and
(09:24):
that he had a small sheep farm south south of Sydney.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Was he your age?
Speaker 3 (09:29):
He was about three four years older.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Than me, and you were in your early forties by now.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
I was, no. I was in my late forties by
this stage. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Did he ask much about you on that first day?
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Not really.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Eventually.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
I was getting a bit frustrated by that, because to me,
that's a bit of a sign that someone's not particularly
interested or has very inefficient communication skills. I've been a
food and I'm not writing about food right now, but
in my background I was a food writer and a
restaurant critic. And he eventually asked me a little bit
about that, and he made a comment that was probably
(10:02):
the biggest red flag of that first date. He said,
you must be very well connected, well, not especially, and
it's not something I seek out. I'd run for a
mile from the opening of an envelope sort of thing,
you know, it's just not who I am, my world.
I find it tedious. I said, oh no, no, no,
not at all, not at all. He then did this
(10:22):
incredible backtrack and sort of reversal of position, which I
can now see he often would do when he had
said something that wasn't didn't meet with my approval. I
suppose he said, oh no, I wouldn't like it if
you're well connected, because I'm very private. Even when I
was an architect, I didn't like my work, our work,
the firm's work being published. And in hindsight, I've got
(10:43):
lots of architect friends and that's the holy grail, to
get their work published in architectural magazines, and it's how
you get business as well. So it was such a
dumb thing for him to say. But I don't know
that you're analyzing as much at that point. You sort
of your mind is so busy sizing them up, I
suppose physically, and trying to think of things to say
(11:05):
and trying to keep the conversation flowing without it becoming
awkward that I send something wasn't quite right, but I
moved on. You kind of have to to keep it
going in a way.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
How did that first unremarkable date turn into a second.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Well, i'd been single for quite a few years, and
when you've been single for quite a few years, you
start to hear things like, oh, you're too fussy. Women
shouldn't be so picky, and I've been bored, Like I
have a full, interesting life, but that's a fairly substantial
part of life, and when it's not there, it's like, oh,
here we go again, not another night. It would be
nice to be with someone. And so I wasn't expecting
(11:42):
to hear from him, but he did email me and
asked to help me out again, and I thought, oh, whatever,
I'll go. And I think maybe what happens is that
when someone starts to show interest in you, and it's
quite clear that it's interest, your head does do a
bit of a yes, three hundred and sixty degree degree turn,
and it was like, oh my god, he's interested in me. Okay,
(12:04):
let's have another look at this. And I remember going
to that second day and being quite beside myself with nerves,
which I hadn't been on the first one, Like I
was just a bit nervy on the first one, but
the second one I was like, oh my god, he's
interested in me, and it was like the moment he
registered interest in me, all of a sudden, the game
changed a bit, which is silly. It's so silly because
(12:25):
of something we do. It's something we do. We should
be sizing up constantly for a long time, whether they're appropriate, suitable, honest, decent.
But instead, I don't think it's uncommon. The moment someone's interested,
it often changes the way you view the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
That's such an important insight, isn't it. And I think
I think as women were conditioned, Oh if he likes me, yeah,
I better be not grateful.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
But oh yeah, no, no, yeah, gratitude, it's not that
might well be the emotion. And I was never like
the hottest girl at school or the one that had
boys following me, So it had always been a bit
exciting when a guy did express in me. And it
wasn't as if it was uncommon, But it wasn't. It
wasn't every minute of every day, as you know, in
(13:15):
my twenties and thirties, when I was in the height
of mind.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
And it had been a while since, and it had
been a.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
While, so yeah, after a lot of disappointing dates and disappointing.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Them a lot of time on my own. A lot
of guys that are not a lot of guys, but
there were certainly a couple of guys who turned out
to be really dishonest, And thankfully it never went beyond
a couple few days. But then what odd guys who?
One who proved it turned out to be married. I
got the sense that he was estranged from his wife.
Turns out they were still living together and, according to him,
had an open relationship.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
I wonder if she knew that.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I wonder if she knew it was an open relationship.
And then another one who turned out to be living
with a girlfriend and didn't tell me. Thankfully, they didn't
go very far, and I was pretty upset when I discovered.
But not it was not so I wasn't so embedded
in the relationship that it was devastating. It was that devastating.
I mean, it's I think they leave their little marks
(14:05):
on you.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
So Joe was clearly single and that was important.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Well, yes, on the face of it, Well, yes, as
we thought at that time.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Now did things accelerate quite quickly?
Speaker 3 (14:16):
No, we still did it around a bit. The third
date nearly didn't happen because he made another strange comment that,
in hindsight, I should have taken us another red flag.
We were discussing which restaurant we should go to, and
I said, do you want me to book and he said, yeah,
that'd be good. You know, it'll be interesting to see
how the waiters react to you if they recognize you.
And again it was because I was a food critic,
(14:39):
but I'd mostly been a food critic when I lived
in Melbourne. I hadn't done so much in Sydney, so
I wasn't that well known here and that suited me. Fine.
If you've ever been recognized by my waiter or a
chef and a restaurant who thinks they're going to get
a good review or they can get some benefit out
of it, it's awful.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
It's awkward.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, it's horrible, and I don't like that. And I
got really crossed with him and I just slammed. We
were emailing at that stage. We hadn't got to the
point of having comfortable phone calls. Of course, email opens
up all sorts of ways of both disemb and manipulating
the conversation, and if we'd been talking on the phone,
I might have perhaps picked up things better, but I
(15:18):
just flung an angry response at him and said, you know,
you've misunderstood me. That's not who I am at all.
And then he somehow in another email a few days later,
I said, so, I suppose we're not going out Saturday
night then, and I said, no, I'm going away actually now,
and he said, I really stuffed up. That wasn't what
I meant at all. And now, damn it, I can't
find an email he sent me because I've kept most
of them, but it was like, damn, I wanted to
(15:39):
remember what he'd said, but he convinced me yet again
that I'd misunderstood what his intentions were about that now
or his interest in the waiters recognition. And so we
eventually had a third date, and I think again it
was the fact he was interested in me was making
my bells ring.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
How soon did you go away for the weekend?
Speaker 3 (15:59):
That was after our fourth date. So we had fourth
date where we kissed, and then he said, you know
it takes message that night, I'd like to go away
with you for the weekend.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
To seal the deal.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, to seal the deal as it is as it was.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I don't want to cry about that, but I do
want to ask was the sex great?
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Oh God, no one's asking me that yet, And it's like,
I don't want to talk about this. It was great
because I hadn't had it for so long. I don't
think guys get this that women just don't go on
single Women aren't out there every night having casual sex,
certainly not the ones I know. He was warm and
loving in hindsight, very selfish. I won't say more than that,
(16:37):
but at the time I was loving it.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
And I ask that not just because I'm voyeuristic and strange,
but because when the sex is good in a relationship
or that hadn't been sex for a while, that can
be confusing as well for a woman. Yeah, that hard
experience where that can change my brain chemistry and think,
oh I.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Really like you, And it's like, yeah, no, that was
just good sex. It's doesn't mean you're a good.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Person, or doesn't mean it was good enough that I
think it was turning my head and altering my chemistry.
And in fact, as I write in Fake, our brain
chemistry when we're in completely changes.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
You use a norweg is it a noruig model?
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Skept and I don't pronounce that properly, I know, but
it's the heady period of love where you're completely tied
in knots with love and besides yourself and can't think straight.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Quite bonkers, quite nuts.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
And there are scientific it's just almost a pop culture
words as I understand it in Norway, there are scientific
reasons for it. The ancient part of our brain, the
limits system, is surging with neurotransmitters and hormones because this
is fundamental to our biology. Isn't it to mate and
to reproduce. It's so fundamental. And also it's fundamental to
(17:48):
want to attach to somebody because that's how we survive
in the wild, you know, in primitive primal, it's very primal.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
How much time did you spend together in those early times.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I would see in probably two or three days or
every fortnight, which of course is not much. But I
was under the impression you had the children on the
other week. I felt as if I was in the
very delicate situation that he'd talked about the children being
very fragile and him being very fragile as a result
of the divorce, And I thought, you know, I can't
go in like a bullet at gate here. I can't
(18:20):
demand to meet the children. That's not right. You know,
I've got to be sympathetic to this situation. And if
I do get demanding and so I must meet your
children and I must see your house, I could just
ruin everything.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Had you dated a guy with kids before?
Speaker 3 (18:34):
No? Never, never. I mean my instinct was go gently,
go very very gently.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
So you didn't meet his kids at first? Did you
meet each other's friends?
Speaker 3 (18:45):
He met a few of my friends, but not for
a while. A couple of times he stood me out
when there were events. I was going to a Christmas
party at a journalist friend's home and he was meant
to join me. Funny thing he didn't come. He didn't
there was an excuse. And this pattern started very early,
the cancelations early, probably within oh three months. I mean
(19:10):
there was a period there where I actually went to
the States for five weeks for work, and so it
was all a bit truncated and remote distance relationship for
a little while while I was away. But we sort
of started to go out seriously, probably end of August
twenty fourteen. But by November he was starting to cancel
on me.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
What sort of reasons would he get, Oh, the.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Most insane reasons. He'd been poisoned by sheep drench. He
was in his loo, his duney on a hill on
the farm where he just had a shack, which is
apparently why I never got to see it, vomiting, he
was terribly ill. He had a tooth infection. These are
all not in chronological order. These are the sort of
excuses that unfolded over the sort of fifteen month period
(19:52):
we were together. A truck carrying his sheep had tipped
over and there was chaos and carnage. His dog had
been bitten by snake. His son had been running around
a friend's pool and fallen over and been concussed. His
daughter had asked me his daughter had fallen out of
a tree and damage to collar.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Bo.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Yeah, a lot of bad luck.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
He had a lot of bad luck. I mean, I
started to get incredibly at my suffer anxiety, as so
many people do. This made me so anxious it was
hard to separate whether there was instinct about something not
being right or it was just my anxiety. You know,
people say, oh, you should follow your instinct, but when
you're anxious, so true, what's instinct? What's anxiety. I couldn't tell.
(20:32):
I was so keen to try and make it work.
At some point in the relationship, maybe six months, and
he'd said it sold the little farm with the shack,
and he was now looking to invest in a much
much larger property, and he started to talk about this
specific property. I think what happens in relationships is it's
not just the person that you're in love with, it's
the idea of the future that you're going to have
(20:53):
together that you fall in love with. A love affair
is about not just the person that you're in love with,
but about the future that you've fallen in love with,
or the idea of this future you might have together.
And so he was looking at investing in this big property.
It was such a spread, such a pile that it
was on sotherby is real estate website. So it existed. Oh,
it totally valid, absolute existed. I mean the detail that
(21:16):
he talked about, the sale, the negotiations, the neighbors, the
people he was vying with to get it. He talked
about constantly going down there and having meetings with the
owner to discuss what would be included in the sale
and what wouldn't. There were council problems, and there were
water rights. The detail was immense, and eventually he took
me to see it. And it was not the sort
(21:38):
of place that you arrive at on a Saturday morning
and wander around and then leave, you know, without an invitation.
It was an appointment only style, large multi bedroom, multi
living area, a huge estate, and we went there and
met the owners and we walked around and the wife
took me on this tour and said, oh, I do
hope he gets it. I do hope Joe gets it.
(21:59):
I don't know what's going on, but I hope he
gets it.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
So is he wealthy?
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, that's what I had been. He'd led me to believe.
We never did anything lavish. But I also, I mean,
I'm not design a handbag kind of person. And so
he drove a beat up old land Rover Defender. He
didn't wear particularly special clothes, and I just took that
to be someone who had money but was understated and
didn't care about the trappings of wealth, which I really
(22:24):
liked that approach. He'd pay for meals, and with my
restaurant habit, we went out for dinner quite often, and
sometimes I'd pay, but I think probably he paid more
than I did. He tipped taxi drivers, we'd go it
for breakfast. He took me away three times to country cottages.
Again nothing lavish, but he paid. I'd say he spent
(22:46):
at least three, four or five thousand dollars through the
course of the relationship on me.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Did he ever ask you for money? Never?
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Never?
Speaker 3 (22:53):
And he gave me presents. He gave me pearls, He
gave me opals. I make jewelry, and he gave me
these opals. He gave me these little Victorian antique silver,
beautifully engraved trinkets. There were never signs of great wealth.
But he told me he was very sheepishly one day,
as though he were almost embarrassed by it. He said,
(23:14):
I've got a lot of money. I've got a disgusting
amount of money, he said, And he sounded as though
he was really embarrassed about it, and as though he
were letting me into that secret slowly because it'd come
to start to trust me. The idea of an understated
multimillionaire is kind of nice. Yeah, yeah, I like that.
I thought that was a really nice quality, that the
(23:35):
money didn't really matter that much. It was. There were
other things that were more important.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Like you well as the future. Together in the future
was like I imagine.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
You in the kitchen of the of Happy Valley, and
which study would you like? The one down the corridor
from mine or the one next to mine? Very sexy, enticing,
kind of hints at what the future might be.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
That's very seductive for women.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
It's like that talking about the future, even perhaps before
you're thinking of it or allowing it.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Yeah, I wouldn't have allowed. He was the one to
introduce the future, not me, because I was too cautious
to do so. I probably was the first to say
I love you and he said no, no, too soon,
and then I pulled right back. But he was starting
to paint these pictures that I embedded in my own
brain and started to fantasize over. We all do that,
don't we. You know, we start to imagine that beautiful,
(24:28):
glorious thing lying ahead. I'm going to be lying, I said.
If I said that the money didn't matter, I'm a
journalist in an industry that is absolutely going down the toilet.
I took a redundancy from Fairfax Media two years ago
and quite frankly, I will probably never have another staff
position and never get the benefits of superinnuation or any
of the things that a staff position brings. And I
(24:50):
don't honestly know how. You know, as a journalist you
make your living these days particular, j Young is sort
of writing I like to do, which takes a lot
of time and is dense and research heavy. So yeah,
it was this relationship promises me him and I'm in
love with him. It promises me a farming future, which
I'd always found appealing idea of, you know, growing vegetables
(25:11):
and having animals, and I'll be able to write and
not worry about how much I pay my way through life.
So the money was important in that way for me.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
More of my conversation with Stephanie after this shortbreak tell
me about him meeting your family.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
He stood me up for the first time. He was
meant to come for a family barbecue at my place
and just didn't show up. And it was only it
was my mother and my brother and his family, so.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
He didn't show up.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I know, and I should have been, well, you, I'm
so close to my family that I didn't feel embarrassed,
and we're close. I didn't feel embarrassed, but I was.
I went into a complete state of anxiety and just
bulled up on the couch.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
What reason did he give?
Speaker 3 (25:57):
He didn't. I couldn't get him, I couldn't find him.
It was just before Christmas twenty fourteen. And I should
have left him then. I should have said no, no
one treats me like that. But I didn't have enough
self esteem. I didn't have the resources to do that.
I felt so immersed and entrenched in the relationship by
that stage, and in love. And the next day I
(26:19):
rang him or texted him, and he made some He said, oh,
his daughter had asthma, and oh, yeah, that was a
really bad thing to do. I'm sorry, and I sort
of Over Christmas, I went to Queensland to my mom's.
I started to prepare myself for the relationship beang over.
I actually did a really good job of it. I
stopped thinking about him, I stopped you clutching my phone
(26:39):
looking for messages. But he kept texting me. He drew
he drew you back in, he drew me back in,
and so when I got back and then he arrived
at my place with a string of pearls, and I
was forgiven. Yeah, I was forgiven. Stupidly in hindsight, But
what about meeting his kids. That happened maybe six seven
months after I'd first met him, and it felt like
(27:01):
a huge milestone in the relationship. I mean, I think,
you know, if he's willing to introduce he talked about
breaking the bubble. I want to break the bubble between
my life and your life, you know, I want you
to meet my kids. And I just felt like soaring.
I was jubilant. And I met them one night at
a Thaire restaurant. It was excruciating. They were very quiet
and shy. God knows how many other women he'd introduced
(27:24):
them to and they had to go through this or
deal with I was nervous trying to make conversation with
just becoming a teenage girl and her younger brother, and
it was very difficult. At one stage, I think, I mean,
I was blundering around with the conversation and I think
I said to the girl, is it hard to remember
(27:44):
to pack all the things that you need when you
move between mum and Dad's place? I mean, terrible question,
awful question. What was I thinking? But I felt like
it was blundering around. But he very quickly wrapped up
the night after that. My suspicion now is that he
felt that we were getting into dangerous territory, where as
(28:07):
I discovered much later kids had spent for a little
time with him. This is here's the spoiler alert. He
didn't live in the house on the harbor. His ex
wife did.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Still, well, I was going to ask you, did you
ever go to his house?
Speaker 3 (28:19):
No? I didn't ever go to his house. And that
was eventually what made me leave the relationship, because he
canceled two nights in a row on me when I
was meant to be going to the house, and I thought,
this is I can't do this anymore. I was in
such a mess by that stage. The excuses for not
going to the house were They kept evolving. So initially
it was I mean for the first say, five months,
I didn't even ask because I thought too soon, too soon,
(28:42):
And I was.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
One we spent time at your house?
Speaker 3 (28:43):
Well, yeah, we spent time in my apartment. I think
my biggest fears were he may not be that into me,
maybe there's another woman. Like the scale of what I
discovered about him afterwards, I could never have imagined. I
didn't know that these people really existed.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
You're an investigative journalist. The first thing I would have
thought you would have done is google him.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Well I did. I did google him, and I found
that certain planks of his story were very true. He
was the grandson of a very well known Sydney businessman
who'd started a major Australian company, and there's no question
about that. As a fact, he had lived in this
I saw his driver's license with the address of this house,
this harb Aside address. I saw it. When I researched
(29:24):
the book, I came to discover some really interesting cognitive science,
some work that well well not on cognitive science principles,
and one of them is thing called anchoring, whereby you
place importance in some facts at the expense of other facts.
So I anchored my beliefs about him and my belief
in him, the fact his story was true, in the
fact that while his grandfather is X. I've seen his
(29:46):
driver's license, so he must live there and let other
things slip on by.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
You wrote lists, didn't you?
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (29:53):
I wrote list to try and calm myself down.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Like what would you write down?
Speaker 3 (29:56):
I was trying to steal my anxiety, and I thought
maybe if I could rationally put things down in writing.
I'd calm myself down. I'd write reasons why he's not
lying to me, reasons why I shouldn't be worried, reasons
why the fact he didn't turn up on the weekend
shouldn't bother me. And when I look back at those lists,
they are all things he said to me. I'm envisiting
(30:17):
you with gray hair, I love you completely, I et cet.
There were all things he said. They were not actions.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
They had seen a dog that he said was them.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Oh yeah, I knew the dog existed.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
And there was such detail in his excuses exactly, and
they were quite elaborate, weren't they was never just like
I can't come. It's sort of you talk about it
them unfolding in three acts.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Yeah, yeah, in the most incredibly detailed way.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Would they so well?
Speaker 3 (30:45):
For example, this weekend that he said he was his
dog had been bitten by a snake. He was meant
to come to my apartment on a Friday night and
have dinner with me. Come up. He was down at
the farm and he was meant to be coming up.
And around about four in the afternoon, I got the
text saying I can't find my dog, then another, and
I replied to each of them with concern or questions,
and then another one an hour or two later. Founder
(31:07):
were at the vet. I'm not sure she's going to
make it. She's been bitten by a snake with the vet, thinks.
Then silence for the rest of the night, nothing till
the next morning, but then a text very early the
next morning saying, I think I'll be able to come
up to town. We think, well, she'll make it now,
there won't be any point in mess staying here with her.
I'll come up, you know, I'll be there for lunch.
Then a few hours later, I've actually got a friend
(31:28):
who's a vet in another town and he's coming to
look at her. And there were slight contradictions, but I
wasn't seeing the contradictions because in the morning you're saying
we think she's going to make it. Well, then if
she's going to make it, why do you need to
bring another vet? Like I can see all of these
contradictions now. The text went on all weekend with updates
and no, I'm not.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Going to come confusing like being bombarded with details and bombarded.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
I think the effect the details had was simply to
reassure me of the truth of the story. Why would you?
It just seems so real. The vet friend arrived, they
went back to his town with the dog. They had
not seen each other for a long time. Their friendship
had been a casualty of the divorce. Now they were
catching up, and it was really good that they were
(32:10):
catching up becoming friends again. So he's going to stay
there the night, see tomorrow, I see you tomorrow morning.
And then finally I saw him late on the Sunday.
But the text went all weekend and kept putting off
his arrival time.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
You must have thought you were going crazy.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Oh I did, I did.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Did you know the term gas lighting?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
No?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Well, no, I didn't believe it or not, But I mean,
I think that's This conversation about gas lighting is really
only maybe I'm dreaming. I don't know. Maybe it was
out there, but I don't think we talked about relationships
like this.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
No, gas lighting is quite new.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
When I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, I didn't
know that term until many years later, when I looked
back and I went, oh, that's what it was.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
I wish i'd have read an article about that, because yes,
you think, oh, this is just me.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
This is just the very specific dynamics of this relationship.
And what you describe is so familiar to anyone who's
been involved with a guy who's either a liar or
a psychopath or an emotionally abusive.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
You start doubting yourself.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah, you don't think, oh, this guy's a dick and
cut them loose, because even though it's from the outside,
people look at you and go, what are you doing?
Speaker 3 (33:19):
But no one on my outside was saying that. On
my outside, even your therapist, even my therapist who I love,
and I do not blame her for this for a moment,
because she wasn't in the middle of the relationship. I
could in an hour session every couple of weeks or
every week. I couldn't tell her everything that was going on.
I can't remember what I missed to tell her. She
wasn't seeing red flag. She kept on saying, a man
(33:40):
with a difficult ex wife, two children, a farm, business interests,
property development is going to have a complex, complex life,
and it's so different from your life. I'm not seeing
red flags.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Steph.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Did you find yourself protecting his image from other people
by not telling people everything about how many times you cancel.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
Or I'm pretty open. So I was probably telling my
friends the truth.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
At what point did they say the.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Only one did? Most of my friends would go One
friend said, stop being a weirdo, you know, until you've
got a concrete evidence that he's lying, Stop being a weirdo.
And my brother and sister in LAWA would say, you're
going to ruin it. Relax, you're going to ruin it.
There was one heterosexual friend, a guy who was then
he's another phenomena for women of a certain age, my
(34:31):
age and even younger. By this stage, I was in
my late forties and he was in his mid forties,
but he was seeing women who were in their early thirties. So,
you know, even though it's only about two or three
younger years younger than me, I was never, you know,
a rare single man in his mid forties. He was
separated with a young daughter as well. But I don't
think he ever looked at, you know, would look at
a woman my age with an eye to thinking I was,
(34:54):
because there is you know, he's going out with thirty
year olds.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
That's important to understand because that's the context for which
someone who does show an interest in you and not
a twenty eight year old. That's really flattering, and there
is a level of gratitude for that appreciation of that.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah, yeah, and that's very real.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Absolutely. But this one heterosexual friend, I think he knew
me just from a very few things I said. He said,
he was cynical. He didn't even need to ask me
many questions. He didn't really. We sat in one night
at a sushi bar when I was and I pulled
my anxieties out to him and he said, yeah, yeah,
when are you going to let this finish? When are
you going to finish this?
Speaker 1 (35:32):
How long had it been?
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Oh? That was probably a seven months or so into
the relationship. And he was ultimately the one that said
you've got to end this. And he was the one
that sort of picked me up and fed me I
hadn't been eating at the very end, and said, you've
got to end this. This is ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
How did you end it?
Speaker 3 (35:50):
I email my ex and said, I don't know what
sort of hollow man you are, but you're a hollow man.
And I put my finger on it because now I
can understand the psychology of what I was, what I'd
been dealing with, which I didn't until I left the relationship.
Oh he's a hollow man and I put my finger
on it, and that email when I broke up with
him before knew anything.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
So what happened after you decided to end it?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Because you worked at Fairfax at the time, you were
sitting next to one of Australia's leading investigative journalists, the
extraordinary Kate mcclearmon, who said, who's brought down entire state
governments through her investigative reporting? That would have been like
just something she could have done before breakfast, exactly one
of my tea.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
No, it was actually another colleague and another great colleague
and Davies who now works the Guardian, who said to me,
let's do some searches on him. And this is probably
around seven months into the relationship, and I was expressing
anxieties to her about it and I said, oh, no, no, no, no,
this is a love affair. This isn't I mean, I've
done my preliminary googles, and I knew the sort of
searches that we could do, title deed searches to see
(36:53):
what he owned, if he indeed was this multimillionaire, whether
he owned the house that he lived in, bankruptcy searches,
and about social media. He didn't have a very big
social media. He had a Twitter account. It was pretty.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Typical for a man.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
That's not a red flag. Oh that's not a red
flag at all, and very little online about him. But
just as I said before, you know enough to reassure
me that his grandfather was who he said, and that
he had had an architectural practice at one point. But
I said to Anne Davies, I said, no, this isn't
this is not a story. This is a love affair.
And of course that wasn't really the real reason. I mean,
(37:26):
it was part of it. I didn't want to be
a snoop, but I couldn't better look at what the
truth was. And that's not uncommon. It's called wilful blindness
in psychological terms. And it's the same phenomena as the
person that goes to tan on sun beds whose doctor
says you shouldn't do that, that's going to give you cancer,
or smokers, and it's the same phenomena. You turn your
(37:48):
eyes away from what you fear, what you don't want
to know about. It's not it's not convenient and convenient
to look at it, and I was being wilfully blind. Sure,
there was a part of me that didn't want to
snoop and felt that was a betrayal, But it was
more about I don't want to look, I can't look.
I can't look.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
What made you decide to start looking a little?
Speaker 3 (38:07):
Well, after I dumped him. After I dumped him, and
then my curiosity was like insatiable. I had to know
what I'd encountered and can I keep some of the secrets.
From what I discovered, I discovered that he wasn't who
he said he was at all, that he was bankrupt,
that he didn't live in the house that his ex
wife did. That in fact, I think he had no
(38:29):
fixed address. I think he moved, possibly between women. I
think there was some suggestion that he squatted on boats
on the harbor. Apparently there are any number of empty
boats on the Sydney Harbor. Owners don't visit very often.
I discovered he'd been with another woman from the very
first day of our relationship. I discovered that he didn't
(38:49):
have the custody of the children that he claimed he had,
that there was no farm, and ultimately I discovered that
he had been just simply a meddler in the Happy
Valley purchase. Had presented himself as a buyer, but he
had no money to buy it. And I eventually heard
from the person that did buy it, who says he
(39:09):
spent much much more money on the property than he
should have because of Joe's meddling in the sale. So
he fooled lots of other people as well, in business
as well. It wasn't just me. He's a very clever
con artist, really, But the thing is about it, it's
so weird. The benefits were so few for him. Really,
he didn't get I don't think he's got money out
of his corn artistry. And I think what he got
(39:32):
out of me and the other women that he's been
involved with is an audience for his grand stories, which
at the time I didn't see were grand stories. I
just thought he's a busy man trying to buy a
property and he wants to talk all about it. Now
I can see it was just self grandizement. It was
him going, look at me, look at me, I'm so successful.
And I allowed him to help build his facade around
(39:53):
the hollow shell by listening to him, and I suppose clapping,
you know, I was the audience.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Did you reach out to the woman he'd been with
through your relationship? How did you find her?
Speaker 3 (40:03):
So her social media? I found evidence of her on
social media, and eventually, long time, long time afterwards, I
did reach chat to her.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
How did you discover that they'd been together through that time?
Speaker 3 (40:13):
That her social media revealed just endless photographs and on
both Facebook and Instagram that all the dog the day
that his dog had been bitten by a snake, he
was in fact at a resort in the Hunter Valley
with her, playing board games and drinking wine at various
wineries and swimming in a swimming pool in between sending
(40:35):
me text messages telling me about his dying dog, which
presumably was it a vet hotel or a pet hotel somewhere.
Her Facebook and Instagram gave me all the evidence I
needed to see the pattern of lies. And once I
knew the pattern of lies in that he had been
lying to me at that level about her, about about
what he'd been doing, I could see that clearly the
(40:57):
lies didn't stop there, that this was a much bigger scale.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
I must have been devastating.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
It's funny, you know, I think it helped me start
it began, and my recovery, it was like, how can
I be surprised by it? That's the like I know that.
The night that I sat there, I was on the
phone to a girlfriend in Melbourne as I went through
his Facebook, her Facebook, this woman's, other woman's Facebook, and Instagram.
It was devastating and stunning, but not surprising. And I
can't explain why I wasn't like something had to be
(41:29):
up and I came to see that by the end.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
But was there a relief in learning that you weren't crazy?
Speaker 3 (41:35):
The relief came mostly not so long after that, when
I started to google the words pathological liar and boyfriend.
And once I'd done that, this whole world opened up
to me, and it was pop psychology rather than medical psychiatry,
but it revealed so much to me about who he
(41:55):
was and why he was the way he was, and
the existence of these sorts of people out there, narcissistic
people with personality disorders most likely. And the Internet, if
you've ever been, once you've started to google, it's like
a rabbit hole. There's so much out there too, so
many people telling their stories about these people. There are
so many of them out there. It's terrifying. And after
(42:16):
my original Good Weekend article, I got so many emails
from people saying that happened to me, similar story, and
they're just gobsmacking, like women who've tried to commit suicide
after these relationships have ended and losing every scaic of
money that they've ever earned, and that the husband somehow
or the ex boyfriend or partner taking everything, turning children
(42:37):
against them, and I should also women are capable of
this behavior too. It's not just men. I've certainly heard
from many more women than men, which is probably a
symptom of the fact that women tell their stories more
readily than men do. But I've heard from men to
and one woman who I interviewed for my book who
had a bad relation She's an American woman lives in Florida.
(42:59):
She had a bad relationship with, funnily enough, an Australian
sports person who'd gone to Florida to play in his sport.
She now has this sort of account lean life coaching
kind of service that she promotes through Instagram. Mainly, she
says she gets fifty percent men contacting her about bad
women in their lives. That's the only stat I can
(43:22):
really offer, because this is not researched, and I don't
know how you would ever actually research it. Because I've
also got to be aware that a proportion of the
people who contacted me after the original article and also
after the book in the last couple of weeks, I've
got dozens more. I think you've got to be aware
that some of them might just be aggrieved. They might
have blown out of proportion what their claims about their
(43:45):
ex are. They're pissed off, they're unhappy, they've broken up.
So I think you've got to set aside a few
of those and go, that's a fair point. You know,
you can't take everyone as fact. And I don't know
how you to ever research the troop without going into
these relationships in such detail. How do you ever prove
the truth of them?
Speaker 1 (44:01):
People feel so stupid, yep.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
And if they tell one line that doesn't work, they
move on to the next line. Yeah, and they can.
They the most incredibly intricate stories, and they tell one
lie after another, and you can see there are contradictions.
But well I could see there were contradictions in his stories,
and that bothered me. But yeah, I was just immersed
in it, and I so much wanted it to work.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
More of my conversation with the real life Bertie Bell
Stephanie Wood after this break, when your original Good Weekend
piece came out, our mutual friend of Meilily Lester, was
your editor on that story, and it was absolutely stunning
and so powerful.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
And everybody was talking about it.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
I can see the cover of The Good Weekend in
my mind's eye when I think about it. It came
out on the Saturday, and on the Sunday I had
lunch actually with a number of journalist girlfriends, and.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
We were all saying, who is this guy?
Speaker 2 (44:59):
We need to find out who this guy is? I
imagine because you gave a lot a number of details,
you were careful you didn't use his name. But did
people recognize him and contact.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
You family members? Some of his family did.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
What did they say?
Speaker 3 (45:13):
They made comments about the fact it wasn't the first
time they'd heard these stories.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Did they feel bad? Yeah, they did, I suppose reaching
out to you. They weren't defending him. Put it that way,
they weren't defending What about Joe himself.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
I heard from him. Yes, after that original Good Weekend article,
I got a couple of very odd messages that were
really disconnected from reality. He talked about how he was
with an inner new relationship there. It was sort of
an apology, but it wasn't an apology. It's very difficult
to describe just how weird the emails are. They're literate,
(45:50):
the punctuation and grammar is right, but there's a nonsequential
nature to them as sort of a discombobulating kind of
effect to them. And as I talk about in the book,
it's it was really disturbing for a while, but then
I started to laugh and I heard things that he
was saying about me, which were, I'm if I don't
(46:10):
take my medication, I do some strange things. Last night,
I stole money from my mother to buy my apartment.
I am a lesbian. It just doesn't tell this to
I hear it through a guy through a sauce.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Yet, And have you stayed or did you when you
reached out to the woman he was having their relationship with,
was she angry? Was she still with him at the time?
How did that conversation unfold?
Speaker 3 (46:39):
It was a really really terrifying moment when I reached
out to her, because I didn't know whether they were
in a relationship or not. And as I detail on
the book, it was there were a lot of light
bulb moments as we talked about was she open to
talking to you? It's very open to talking to Had
she ended the relationship?
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Maybe she had. She made a funny comment about a whiteboard.
Speaker 3 (46:58):
Yeah, when we started to compare stories, she said, you know,
he must have had a whiteboard. And I got a
picture in my head of him with different colored market
pens and biting his lip and looking at his whiteboard
and different columns. And I was blue when she was red.
And he'd compared the stories of how he was lying
to each of us, and he lied to us differently.
There were different lies. There were things that he said
(47:19):
to me that he never said to her. He had
a different name for his ex wife, for her that
he told to her to me out like and who
knows why? Who knows why?
Speaker 1 (47:27):
A lot of stuff to keep straight.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
A lot of cut stuff to keep straight. And as
a lot of people said to me, why why would
you put yourself through that? The exhausting nature of that
juggling act. It's just insane. Stephanie, how do you date
again after Joe? I don't know me I really don't know.
Will anyone want to date me? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Shut up, look at you gorgeous and smart and oh well,
I mean kind and brilliant.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
You're very sweet. People might be scared that I might
write about them, and I don't think anyone's ever going to,
you know, come up to the standard of Joe in
terms I think. And I think I'm done with writing
about my personal life. I'd never wanted to write about
my personal life, and it's just unfolded that I have,
and it's ridiculous. They're the stories that get the most traction,
(48:17):
and I right now want to pull away from doing
personal stories completely. I never want to write another one.
But as I say that, I know that they're the
stories that make a difference in people's lives. I feel
I get so many people saying, thank you, your book
is my bible. Now you've saved my life. I understand
what happened now, and that's enormously gratifying. You know, we
(48:37):
don't live long in this world, and not many of
us can actually make a difference. And so as I
say I don't want to write more personal essays, I
can see their power and how important they can be.
But as for dating, I don't know. I just don't know, Like,
how do you have an online date with someone? Now?
Even if you're optimistic enough to think that there's someone
online that might be half decent, what do you say
(48:59):
to them when they ask? What do you do?
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (49:01):
I write books about fakes that I meet online? What
do I say?
Speaker 1 (49:06):
And I think they'd be fascinating?
Speaker 3 (49:07):
And also I think, and I don't want to make
a big deal about this, but I feel a bit
awkward about it. You know, once you have some sort
of profile, I don't know, dating online it feels weird
to me.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
I've got a friend who is who writes about sex.
She's a sex kind of advice giver. But that would
be hard to date.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
That would be really hard to date. Imagine taking that
on board.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
And she's just got married recently in her what would
she be, late fifties probably yeah her. Thank you for
writing this book. I wish I could have read it
a lot of years ago. I hope that a lot
of women do read it.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
I hope a lot of young women do yes to
stop them before they start a pattern of bad relationships,
and to show them that they're worthy of great love
from the beginning, and if someone's not giving it to them,
you walk away, and that to be single is often
almost always better than being in a bad relationship.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
You can see why this story was just crying out
to be an on screen thriller. And what's really wild
is that this happened to Stephanie quite a few years
ago when online dating was actually online, that is, before
the apps even and as you heard, she never even
got into the Tinder and the bumbles and the hinges.
So it's crazy to think about the cat fishing and
the fraud that can go on now when there's AI
(50:25):
in so many new ways that liars can manipulate and
cover their tracks. And really that's why this story and
now this series is really important, because this could have
ended up in a much worse situation for Stephanie than
it did. Women get hurt by men they meet online
or on the apps. They get hurt emotionally, they get
hurt financially, and sometimes tragically, they get hurt physically. And
(50:50):
that's why Stephanie really wanted to tell her story.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
So if you're out there.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
Dating now, navigating the world of the apps, stay safe,
follow your instincts, research your dates like you're a journalist
or a detective, and if something in you says this
guy seems too good to be true, maybe he is.
Speaker 3 (51:11):
The didn't
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Say
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