Aaron | Betrayal Weekly

Hey everyone, just a note before we begin. This episode discusses suicidal ideation. Please take care when listening. Betrayal Weekly is officially back. This is season three, episode one. Each episode tells a unique story of deception and broken trust, and each storyteller has found their own path forward. Whether you've been with us from the beginning or you're just tuning in, welcome, We are starting this season with Aaron's story.

I'm at work, just plugging away, and I get an email notification on my smartphone. I look down and it's from the FBI ari information about Sabrina Taylor.

I'm Andrea Gunning in This is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything.

My name is Aaron Ward. I'm a software engineer working in video games.

Aaron spent his whole career working on popular video games.

I worked on Halo Infinite, I worked on Minecraft. I've worked on a bunch of little projects for Nintendo. One of my minor claims to fame is I had the number one played game on nick dot com in two thousand and eight, which was SpongeBob SquarePants Refrumble.

Aarin's a third generation computer nerd. He grew up in rural Ohio with his siblings and parents who worked in computer science.

My parents were what I would call upper middle class, both white collar, working professionals.

Aaron's parents made enough money for their families to live comfortably, but a lot of people in their community struggled to make ends meet. His parents tried to give back wherever they could.

My parents always volunteered a lot. They were very generous, and they also helped lead a lot of local fundraisers.

His parents taught him to be generous with his money and his time.

My parents were a lot about honesty and a lot about trying to help people that needed it.

Aaron spent most of his free time playing video games or reading about them.

I was a really big Nintendo fan, and I had a subscription to Nintendo Power.

Nintendo Power was a magazine all about Nintendo games. It had comics, game reviews, and articles. Aaron read every issue, and when he was in fifth grade, he read an article that sparked his interest.

They mentioned the opening of the digit Campus.

Digitpen is a college near Seattle that specializes in video game design. Even though Erin was only in fifth grade, I knew.

Very early on. That's really what I wanted to do with my life.

Getting into DigiPen became Aaron's life goal.

One of our freshman year activities when I was in high school was writing three things that you wanted to try to accomplish in your life. My three things were working on a triple A video game title, graduating from DigiPen, and being a Jeopardy Champion.

As of this recording, Aaron is not a Jeopardy Champion yet, but he's accomplished his other two goals. His senior year in high school, he was accepted into DigiPen. He left the farms and factories of rural Ohio and jumped headfirst into a world of video games. It was exciting and Aaron learned a lot, but DigiPen had one big shortcoming.

DigiPen has a ninety five to five male to female ratio, so DigiPen was four years of having almost no female socialization. As someone who had mostly female friends in high school, that was a big change for me.

Aaron noticed how being in a male dominated environment was impacting the people around him, and he didn't like what he saw.

I had seen a lot of my peers at DigiPen starting to go down that path of misogyny because they weren't being around women in their day to day lives, so the only women they were exposed to were actresses or people in the media.

Aaron didn't want to go down that path, so he read books and worked with his therapist to learn what healthy relationships really looked like.

One thing I learned is to try to not be transactional in relationships. It's not about I do this for you, do this thing for me. Relationships need to be about the broader scope of caring for each other and being there for each other when stuff is hard.

After graduating from college, Aaron and some friends moved into an apartment together. He was working as a video game programmer and loved the life he'd built. He felt ready to meet someone and decided to give dating in Seattle a try.

I was not super outgoing. I was not a go out to the bars and meet someone kind of person, and that's when I turned to internet dating. At the time two thousand and seven, the iPhone is barely a thing. There is no tender, so what I'm left with option wise are Craiglist personals.

Craigslist personals was a subsection of Craigslist for people who were looking for relationships, romantic connections, or friendships. You could post an ad about yourself and what you were looking for.

I had noticed there was a glut of men looking for women ads, so I mostly focused on responding to the few women that had posted their ads up.

One day, while scrolling through Craigslist, Aaron saw an ad that caught his attention.

The headline of it was about how white guys are scared to date black women, and it intrigued me enough to at least read it. In the ad, she talked about how she was a nerdy black woman who grew up in a largely white Midwestern area, and how the white men of the Seattle area had never seemed to approach her or approached her in very poor ways.

Aaron responded to the ad, apologizing on behalf of the white nerdy men of Seattle. The author of the post thought his response was funny and wrote him back.

I found out her name was Sabrina. We exchanged pictures over email and had a couple of email back and forth before we decided to go out on a date to the local off leash dog.

Park on the day of their date, Aaron headed to the dog park feeling nervous but excited.

She showed up looking just like her pictures with her pet Dalmatian Satchel, who was very sweet, and we ended up taking a nice long hour plus walk where we both went through our lives and the things we have in common. She grew up in Iowa, I grew up in Ohio, so we both grew up in the Midwest.

Aaron immediately felt relaxed around Sabrina.

We also talked about all of our different nerdy interests, video games, anime, television shows. We were both big Sailor Moon fans. We had both played basically every Nintendo game that had ever been made, Mario's, Zelda's Final Fantasies.

After their first date, Aaron couldn't wait to see Sabrina again. He invited her to hang out with him and his friends at a pub they liked on the east side of Seattle. He was a little nervous with Sabrina click with his friends, but as soon as she showed up, his nerves melted away.

She got along with basically everybody. She is magnetic and draws a lot of people around her to listen to her talk about whatever she's talking about. She's definitely the kind of person that can make friends very easily in a crowd.

Aaron loved hanging out with his friends with Sabrina by his side.

The fact that she was so charismatic was excreefly attractive to me. It really helped fill in some of my gaps of getting conversations started and breaking the ice socially with new people.

After that night at the pub, Aaron and Sabrina had their first kiss.

We had great physical chemistry as well as having a lot of things in common, so that really felt like it was kind of a meant to be situation.

They started spending more and more time together. Soon they were officially boyfriend and girlfriend. They had long conversations about their backgrounds and dreams for the future.

She was an intern for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and she was finishing up her double bachelors in public health and women's studies, with her end goal being becoming a doctor. She had big plans for her life going forward. That was something that was attractive to me. In a possibly forever partner.

With Sabrina, the world felt big.

We went on a couple of little trips to the coast and being with her just really got me out of my shell and got me out of my apartment with my roommates and out doing things, even if it was just shopping or wandering around Pipe Place Market.

And of course they loved playing video games together.

She would have a game that she really liked the story of wasn't quite dexterous enough to beat, and so she'd get us started and I would do the later harder levels for her so we could both see the ending of the game.

They were on the same team.

Sabrina really made me feel seen and appreciated in a way that I hadn't been for a while. She always made me feel like I was a priority in her life, and I tried to do the same.

They began to talk about their long term goals.

I wanted the stereotypical white picket fence wife, two and a half kids, et cetera. She was looking toward medical school, so kids and getting married and stuff that was down the road a bit, and I was okay with that. At this point, we're still early to mid twenties, so we've got some time.

Aaron and his friends moved into a new house together in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.

A month after me and my roommates had moved into the house, Sabrina comes to me and says that her apartment is going condo. Obviously, she can't afford to buy it, and she's not making a lot of money as an intern at the Gates Foundation, and she's still trying to finish up that last month or two of school. She basically doesn't have anywhere to go.

So Sabrina moved in with them.

I was excited to move in with my girlfriend, even if it was on a slightly faster schedule than I was planning on in my head. I was happy to have her with me every day, waking up with me, going to bed with me, just beg here out all the time.

In true Sabrina fashion, she made the transition easy. She brought a lot of laughter and funded the house.

She got along really well with my roommates. She integrated very quickly into the friend group. It was just a lot of fun to have everybody living together. You know, we all played rock band together, and we could kind of be loud and crazy because we weren't sharing a wall with anybody, but.

Living in the same house also meant seeing each other's daily struggles up close. Sabrina had been dealing with chronic back pain. Aaron saw just how much of a toll it was taking on her.

It had gotten bad enough that she had to call out of work a couple of days for it. So I encouraged her to go to the doctor and, you know, kind of get this checked out.

Sabrina agreed. The day of her appointment arrived, and when Aaron came home from work, he was anxious to hear how it went.

I come home and she's seated on the couch, looking very defeated. So I sit down and I hold her hand, and that's when she tells me her doctor had diagnosed her as having multiple sclerosis.

When Aarin and his girlfriend, Sabrina moved in together, Aaron realized how much her chronic back pain was impacting her day to day life. He encouraged her to go to the doctor's and she did. When she came back from her appointment, Erin could tell right away that something was wrong.

So I sit down and I hold her hand and I asked her what happened that day, and that's when she tells me that her doctor had diagnosed her as having multiple sclerosis.

Aaron held her close as Sabrina began to cry.

She started talking about all the things that she might not be able to do, and I tried to come for her the best I could.

Aaron was in shock. His grandfather, Harlan, had died of multiple sclerosis, so Aaron knew how difficult MS could be.

I heard the horror stories from my dad about how bad it was for Harlan. I had known a couple of friends that had an MS and had their lives cut pretty short. I had a thumb in the air guess of her life expectancy being somewhere in the fifties, maybe if she was already diagnosed before we had turned thirty. I was just devastated.

Their shared dreams for the future, house kids, growing old together crumbled in front of his eyes.

I didn't know what to do besides just hold her and tell her. I promised to help her through whatever came up. I was going to do whatever it took.

Though it only been dating a year, Aaron was committed to staying by her side whatever their future held.

I never had the thought of not committing to it. It didn't scare me off. I was in for the long haul at this point. I wanted to be there for her. This is the reality now, so let's figure it out. Let's do what we can.

Sabrina had an undergraduate degree in public health, so I.

Kind of let her take the driver's seat as far as learning about the disease and letting me know what she needed from me to assist.

Sabrina's first symptom was back pain, but over time she started experiencing other symptoms as.

Well, generalized soreness and limb pain, and casual exercise from like walking the dog was starting to bother her. So walking the dog became entirely by responsibility.

Then standing at all became a challenge.

So I took over a larger share of the housework and basically all the cooking. It was a little exhausting. Quite frankly, it's kind of just lucky I was still in my late twenties and I kind of still had the energy to do all of that. A lot of caffeine, a lot of sugar.

Aarin did everything he could to make Sabrina as happy as possible during this incredibly challenging time.

I was paying for a lot of makeup a lot of clothes. She had very particular tastes. As my dad liked to say, she has champagne taste in a beer pocketbook.

Sabrina was working at a nonprofit, but her symptoms quickly began interfering with her job.

She's been calling out of work a couple times a month at this point. One day she calls me up and says, well, I got fired.

Aaron was immediately defensive of Sabrina.

What the hell happened? They can't just fire you if you're sick.

Sabrina explained that she had called out of work because she was having a high pain day, but then she had to run an errand that couldn't wait, and while she was out, she ran into her boss.

Her boss had seen her out shopping on a day when she was supposedly in so much pain she couldn't get out of bed.

Aarin was frustrated.

If you're calling out, you need to stay home.

He told her to just let him handle the errand next time.

After she's fired from her job, she's basically stuck at home. She talks about going back to medical school. I'm very encouraging of this because she needs to have a job. For us to function as a unit. I don't make enough money to support us both forever.

Sabrina still needed a few more college credits before she could apply to medical school, so she enrolled in community college classes. Arin was now the sole per for both of them, but Sabrina's spending habits didn't slow down. Aaron was left scrambling to cover the costs.

I end up getting paiday loans and spending a good chunk of every payday going to each payday loan place to pay the loan off, and then immediately loan the money again.

He watched his credit card bills stack up. Sabrina was still spending money on luxury items like make up and clothes while they were struggling to make ends meet. It was unsustainable and stressful. Aaron confronted Sabrina about her spending habits a few times.

It usually broke down into a lot of tears and promising to do better and saying I should be able to live comfortably.

Sabrina's symptoms were progressing, and she wanted to make the most of the years where her quality of life was still relatively good. I want to experience the world and fill her days with things that brought her joy. Aaron wanted that too, but the financial pressure on him was mounting. He was also paying for all of Sabrina's medications.

After losing her job with the nonprofit, Sabrina struggled to maintain insurance. She would tell me that, oh, I've got my insurance set up. It's fine, you can go in. It won't cost that much.

But when Aaron went to the pharmacy and they ran Sabrina's insurance, it often didn't go through.

So it goes from twenty thirty bucks to three hundred four hundred bucks. That was several hundred dollars that I usually didn't have every month. But I have to have the medication today because we're out. Medication is not something you can live without.

So Aaron did whatever had to be done to make sure Sabrina got her medications on time.

It often came down to borrowing money from people, or paying bills late, or the internet get shut off for a few days, having the rent check bounce, just to make sure that the medications were filled on the day they needed to be filled.

As the months went on, Sabrina's MS symptoms worsened. She began using a cane for walking assistance. It was harder for her to keep her balance, and she began fainting frequently. Her soreness and limb pain became more severe.

Because of all the pain, she was having a lot of trouble keeping her energy level up. Seeing her struggles with the illness was definitely a major challenge for me. I didn't want to see her in pain. I wanted to try and make her life as easy as possible, because I knew that this was going to be a pretty rough ride for her.

He offered to support her by coming to doctor's appointments with her, but the scheduling never worked out. In the middle of a very challenging time, there was a bright spot. Aaron got his dream job.

I got a job as a software engineer at Nintendo. This is my dream company. I got business cards that say Nintendo and my name. It's a huge deal to me.

Aaron and Sabrina had moved out of the house with his friends and into an apartment of their own. On top of starting his new job, Aarin was spending hours each day taking care of Sabrina. It was difficult.

By this point, We're much less romantic partners and much more caregiver and receiver. I did all the dishes, I did all the cooking. We don't really have that romantical relationship anymore. We're always broke. We're not going out on dates.

Aarin was caring for Sabrina financially and handling their household tours because her MS symptoms made physical labor painful. But Sabrina's quality of life was still good enough for her to spend time with friends and have independents, and so her personal spending never slowed.

She was going out with friends and often spending money we didn't have. She's buying new clothes all the time, spending one hundred plus bucks a month at the map counter and Sephora packages from different delivery companies somehow magically getting paid for. And this is on top of all the medications.

Aaron felt powerless to stop Sabrina's spending. As her MS symptoms worsened, so did her mental health. She began struggling with suicidal ideation.

At first, it was, well, if we can't refill my meds on time and I have to go without a couple of days, maybe I should just kill myself so I don't have to experience the pain for that week until a paycheck shows up.

It felt like all of Sabrina's safety and stability rested on Aarin. He worked hard to cover all of her medication costs, but his paychecks weren't enough and he was going into debt to afford everything. Then, Sabrina began calling Aaron while he was at work. Usually there was something specific that she needed.

Often it was medication related, but it started to expand beyond that. There was an occasion where suicide was threatened if I couldn't come up with five hundred dollars to buy a custom cosplay outfit for convention.

Sabrina's calls began taking up more and more of his workday. She was in such a delicate mental state he felt like it was unsafe to leave her alone.

All of this basically just drove me into a level of depression and exhaustion that I became unrecognizable to a lot of friends and family. I was always eating cheap garbage. There were a lot of times where I skipped lunch at work for a week or more because I didn't have the five bucks I needed to go get lunch.

The cost of Sabrina's MS medications was impossible to keep up with. Aarin tried everything.

I filled up several credit cards trying to cover everything. I basically sold everything I owned. I had a video game collection that in today's dollars probably would be worth twenty five to thirty thousand dollars, and I was selling it for pennies on the dollar because there was something we needed now. It was always I need a couple hundred bucks. Now, I need to buy medication tomorrow. I need to make sure the rent check doesn't bounce again.

Aarin was living in a survival state, always trying to keep up with the most urgent need. Then, after Aaron had been racking up medical debt for a year, Sabrina heard about a new treatment from her doctor. It was a glimmer of hope.

The experimental intervenous treatment for MS came up. The first time the medication was called interferon.

It was the early two thousands and there weren't as many treatment options available for MS as there are today. For the first time in months, Sabrina seemed optimistic this treatment could be the key to getting their lives back on track. Instead of the weekly and monthly payments, this treatment lasted a few months. Her doctors were hopeful that interferon could help manage all of her symptoms instead of

If I could pay seven or eight hundred dollars every couple months, then we wouldn't need to be buying all these other medications. This experimental treatment would be able to cover everything, or at least make a significant difference in her well being, possibly to the point where she might even be able to go back to work. It felt like a god said the possibility that we could actually start moving forward as equal partners again, and instead of just me taking care for all the time.

The way they were living was unsustainable, so Aarin was willing to take a risk.

I decided to move forward with it. I got some help from my parents to help start the initial treatments.

He kept offering to attend Sabrina's appointments with her, but it never worked out.

They were always scheduled in the middle of the morning or in the middle of the afternoon on a workday. I took time off to try and join her appointment. Oh they had to cancel and reschedule.

Aaron had put everything he had on the line to help Sabrina access this treatment. It was becoming more and more concerning to him that he'd never spoken to a doctor about it directly. Every medical update he heard came through Sabrina.

I had been talking to my dad about it, and he told me that I should start asking for receiptet since I could never make it to an appointment.

So Aaron asked Sabrina to see a receipt for one of her interfere on treatments, and when he did, something strange happened.

I could kind of see panic on her face for about a half a second, but the.

Panic quickly disappeared and she told him.

Sure, I'll get you on. That became a week or more, and then over a month into oh, it's time for the next treatment.

Aaron knew something wasn't right, but he was starting to lose the will to argue with Sabrina.

I think at this point I had just been beaten down emotionally so badly that I kind of just stopped caring. I didn't even have the strength to fight and argue about just basic information.

At this point, Aaron and Sabrina had been together for five years, and it had been four years since she was diagnosed with MS. Paying for her m's treatments for years had been a huge strain on Erin. He was racking up debt and his mental health was getting worse. But Erin knew that having MS was a much bigger nightmare. He had watched Sabrina suffer for years, and the idea of doubting any part of her experience made Aaron feel guilty.

Who lies about being this sick?

One day, Sabrina approached Arin and told him that her doctors were recommending she'd start a new version of interfere on, one that she'd only need every six to nine months. But there was a catch. It cost eight thousand dollars for each treatment. She was planning to ask a mutual friend of theirs for help. Up until now, Erin had been paying for all the interfere on treatments himself.

Not having to panic about it at this point was such a priority that I agreed to go along with it.

Arin and Sabrina went to their friend's house to ask for his financial support.

The friend brings up, okay, so you want to borrow fifteen thousand dollars and I had to hide the shock on my face because suddenly the number had changed. I didn't want to mess it up by confronting Sabrina about it in front of him, So after we leave, I confront her in the car about what's this extra seven thousand dollars for? And she tells me, well, I want to start school up again. There's a couple thousand bucks

By this point, Aaron did not trust Sabrina to handle money responsibly.

The first thing I told her was, I know how you are about spending money. If you're going to do this, go do the medical treatment first. Don't go buy the MacBook, don't pay for school stuff. You go do the medical treatment first. She said, yes, yes, of course, of course, I'll do the baking treatment first.

But Erin didn't feel comfortable just taking Sabrina's word for it. He needed to see for himself how she was spending this money.

Her computer was broken, so she had been doing some of her work on my computer. That meant that she had saved her bank log in on my computer. So after she deposited the check, I started watching the balance of the account.

Every day he checked to see if she had made the eight thousand dollars payment for interfere On.

And every day I would open the bank account and see a couple hundred bucks get nibbled away, and then big purchase at the max. Dore went to the mall and spent fifteen hundred dollars on clothes and makeup.

Aaron watched in horror as the bank account slowly drained. There was still some part of him that expected her to pay for the treatment. For a while. Well, there was still enough in the account eight thousand dollars to afford it.

It's getting smaller and smaller. I'm not seeing the big expenditure for the treatment. And then one day we've passed below the line of what the treatment costs. That was the whole reason we were supposed to borrow this money in the first place. And she's spending two hundred bucks a week on my little pony phone game micro transactions. It gets below half of what she supposedly needed for this treatment. And then it finally gets below a thousand dollars, and that was the day, I kind of snapped.

Aaron had woken up before Sabrina to walk the dogs.

I went in the kitchen. I grabbed a bunch of black garriage bags from under the sink. She was still in bed.

He woke her up, handed her the trash bags, and told her to start packing her things.

At first, she tried to deny that she had spent the money, and that's when I revealed that no, I had actually been watching her bank account. And that's when the whopper to end all whoppers comes out of her mouth. She tells me that she's been working the day shift at a strip club while I've been at work at Nintendo. She doesn't have a receipt for it, but she did get the treatment, and that's what she spent her stripper money on.

Aarin wasn't buying it.

Honestly, I think this was the last time I ever believed a word she said. She managed to get me to not throw her out with crocodile tears, claiming she would get me receipts.

Aaron knew he should walk away from the relationship, but the reality was a lot more complicated.

An emotionally abusive relationship is like a cult of two people. The cult leader no longer had control over me, but I also didn't have the emotional and financial strength to leave.

At this point, Sabrina suggested opening their relationship and seeing other people. Arin agreed. In the months that followed, Sabrina was still adamant that she had paid for the interfere on treatment.

I could never get documented proof of it. No receipts, no information from the doctor, no nothing.

Erin was trying to find a way to leave the relationship, but he was worried about what would happen to Sabrina when he left. She had been dependent on him for six years. Now.

I still believe that she had MS, but that she just wasn't nearly as bad as what she led on because I had seen enough visual indicators to convince me that she was at least impaired. Somehow, it felt like she was just taking advantage of my family's history with MS to try and squeeze as much money out of my family as possible.

Since Erin and Sabrina had opened their relationship, he started seeing someone named Kia. He loved spending time with her. She was like a breath of fresh air. One night, while Aaron was out on a date with Kia. He got an alarming text from Sabrina.

Sabrina had told me that she was in the bathroom, had taken a whole bottle of pills.

Sabrina had made a suicide attempt. Aarin began to panic. He knew Sabrina often lied in exaggerated things, but if there was any chance at all that this was true, he had to help her.

So Kia and I rushed home. We parked outside.

While Aaron and Kia were still in the car, the front door of the house opened.

And Sabrina walks out with two of her friends to go out to dinner.

She didn't see him in the car. She walked right past him. For Aaron, that moment changed everything.

This was surely a power play to try and keep my attention.

Aarin was starting to realize that his girlfriend, Sabrina was lying about the severity of her MS symptoms to get financial support from him and his friends. Aaron hadn't found a way to leave the relationship. He was still worried about her physical and mental health. One night, Sabrina texted him that she had attempted suicide and locked herself in the bathroom.

So Keia and I rushed home, parked outside, and while we're sitting out there, Sabrina walks out with two of her friends to go out to dinner.

Aaron was scared that Sabrina's life was at risk and she needed immediate medical attention, but here she was dressed up to go out laughing with her friends.

This was purely a power play to try and keep my attention. After Sabrina came home, I told her that I saw her leaving, and she tried to tell me that they were taking her to the hospital. I told her I knew that was bullshit.

For the last five years of their relationship, Sabrina had been convincing erin that she was on the brink of collapse mentally and physically, and that he was the only person who could keep her safe. But now the extent of her deception was becoming clear to Aaron. This wasn't just exaggeration and bad spending habits. This was emotional and financial abuse.

The following weekend, I invited one of my good friends over to kind of steal my resolve, and I sat Sabrina down on the couch in the living room and I told her we are not in a relationship anymore. I'm not paying for everything anymore. I'm done.

The next weekend, while Sabrina was out of the house, Aaron's friends helped him move out.

I ready a due apartment across town, where she didn't know where I lived. I think she knew it was coming. She knew she was busted for the fake suicide attempt, and she had just resigned herself to the fact that the spigot that was Aaron is turned off.

Sabrina and Aaron still had a lot of mutual friends. After the breakup, Aaron distanced himself from their social group.

She told a lot of people that I was physically abusive, financially abusive, that I was the one pissing away all of our money.

Aaron was isolated from his community. I left to deal with the impact of years of financial and emotional abuse.

I was left with significant psychological trauma that I, unfortunately didn't take the time to properly process.

A few years past, Erin was trying to rebuild a base of stability in his life and pay off the debt he mounted while taking care of Sabrina. One day, Aarin was on Facebook when he saw that one of his old friends had posted a GoFundMe for Sabrina.

I clicked on the link and gave it a read. She was in Japan. Someone had cleaned out her accounts while she was in Japan, and she was stuck there with no return ticket and no money. I posted a reply to the GoFundMe saying that if you're going to start raising money for Sabrina, how about you start raising money to pay all the people back that she took money from and never paid back.

Organizer of the GoFundMe criticized him for calling Sabrina's character into question. His concern was shut down in the comments, but other people had started catching on to Sabrina's lies. The friends she was hanging out with in Japan. They collected evidence then posted their side of the story to Facebook.

Sabrina posted that she had spent the day at the Bullet train station trying to figure out what the best time to jump in front of the train was. In reality, she had spent that day at Disneyland, Tokyo, spending hundreds or one thousands of dollars and at the same time pleading poverty on Facebook.

Finally, Sabrina was exposed. The truth was out there and there was no way for her to talk her way out of it.

Over the next week, I probably fielded a dozen or more apologies. Sabrina's scam worked great until people actually started talking to each other, and then it all fell apart.

Other people began to come forward, sharing their own stories of Sabrina borrowing money and never paying them back.

It felt gratifying to know that I wasn't the only one, and at the same time, I was racked with guilt that if I had figured some of this stuff out sooner, maybe a lot of these other people wouldn't have lost all this money.

One day, something unexpected happened.

I'm at work at Nintendo, just plugging away, and I get an email notification on my smartphone. I looked down and it's from the FBI ari information about Sabrina Taylor.

The FBI was investigating Sabrina for fraud.

I gave the agent a call and we spent about an hour going through all of the different parts of my time with Sabrina, her MS treatments, and diagnosis.

The FBI kept erin up to date on Sabrina's case. She was charged with four counts of wire fraud. She appeared in court for the first time in November of twenty twenty one. After that, Erin was able to see the case the FBI had built against Sabrina.

It wasn't until I saw some of the evidence that I was one hundred percent certain that she had never had MS. They had forged documents using doctor's letterheads. They had statements from multiple doctors that they'd tested her multiple times that she never had MS. One hundred percent of it was a lie.

Erin had been paying for drugs like gaba penton under the impression that they were critical in managing Sabrina's MS symptoms, but gaba penton can be used to treat a variety of more mild conditions. After learning the truth about Sabrina's health, Eric did some research and learned that she was taking around three times over the maximum recommended dose of gaba pentten. We don't know what she was using it for, but the drug is often used off label for anxiety, and

She never worked for the Gates Foundation, she never graduated from you dub, and she'd never even gotten close to medical school, and has mostly lived her life off the generosity of others.

At this point, there was one question all of her victims wanted an answer.

To where was the money going.

It was the kind of thing that was impossible to understand unless you watched it up close. Like Aaron had watching Sabrina's bank account drain transaction by transaction, he knew where the money went.

The truth is, the money was just going to traveling and shopping and not having to work. She was trying to live the lifestyle she thought she deserved and didn't care how many people she had to leach off of to make that lifestyle happen.

When Sabrina pled guilty, the US Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington released a statement about her crimes. We've laics actor read sections of it.

Taylor engaged in a sustained and calculated course of conduct that preyed upon her victim's best emotions. Taylor used a substantial portion of the defrauded funds to pay for luxuries, such as almost sixty thousand dollars from multiple trips to Japan and Korea, nearly thirty eight thousand dollars for online purchases from Amazon and Etsy, more than twenty nine thousand

Sabrina's sentencing hearing was six months later, in January of twenty twenty three. It was the first time Aaron had seen her in over five years. He delivered a statement at the hearing.

I laid out a lot of the trauma that had come with everything that you know, my dad had basically worked an extra year or two passed when he thought he was going to retire to try and cover all of my debts. Essentially, I told the judge that one of her favorite tactics was to threaten to commit suicide to get people to do what she wanted when she

Sabrina was sentenced to twenty seven months in prison. Assistant United States Attorney Joe Silvio released a sentencing memo, We've had a voice actor read part of it.

Taylor carried out an extensive Frond scheme using deceit and deception that preyed upon humankind's better angels. Several of Taylor's victims suffered substantial financial hardship, some likely will never be made whole financially. Equally as important, Taylor exploited and betrayed the trust of each of her victims, and many of Taylor's victims will continue to pay an emotional toll for many years to come.

I was definitely a lot less anxious during the time that I knew she was in prison. She has been returned to the Seattle area. I know she's still around here. Luckily I haven't run into her, but that's definitely something that's on the back of my mind.

Even though Sabrina isn't in Aaron's life anymore, her financial abuse will affect him for a long time. It's hard to know the exact number that Aaron spent on Sabrina, but he estimates it was at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. His debt severely impacted his credit and he'll be paying it off for years to come.

The total number I ended up owing my mom was just short of one hundred thousand dollars. I've been paying back what I could in the years since, and there is no way I'll be able to pay my mom back before she dies. I'm one of the lucky ones. I had someone that I could borrow that kind of money off of to get everything straightened out. I very easily could have had to declare bankruptcy over this.

Sabrina was ordered to pay some of her victim's restitution, but Aaron's name was not included in the list because of statute of limitations to Aaron, this isn't a story about how we shouldn't trust others.

She is the outlier. For every Sabrina that's out there, there are ten thousand people who actually need the help.

To Aaron, this is a story about how we should trust ourselves.

If you feel like you're being taken advantage of, or if you feel like you're doing everything for this other person, and I'm going to keep your head above water, start asking for proof. That was really what unraveled Sabrina's entire con was somebody asked for the receipts.

The experience has given Aaron a new perspective on financial and emotional abuse.

This kind of thing happens to a lot more people than anyone realizes, and it's not something you should hold against anybody when it happens to them. The same kind of thing can happen to anybody under the right circumstances. I am a lot slower to trust people than I used to be, but it hasn't kept me from trusting people at all.

We end every weekly episode with the same question, why do you want to share your story?

These things do happen to men, and you're not less of a man for this. Having happened to you, and I really think that we need to be just as honest as the women that are coming forward with stories like these. If this story helps one person get out or helps their friend get out of a toxic, abusive relationship, then this was all worth it.

On the next episode of Betrayal Weekly.

How in the world could someone stoop that low and go to that extreme? Were you too cowardly? Just tell me the truth.

If you'd like to share your story on betrayal, please email Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That is Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. Please note that we are not a mental health organization. If you are in crisis or currently experiencing domestic violence, we encourage you to seek local help or dial nine to one one. Please contact organizations that offer immediate support. In our show notes, we've included