Credibility | EP 6 | Saskia's Story

Mike Livengood pled guilty to just one count of second degree rape. He took a plea deal that meant he would only serve eighteen months in prison by the time of his sentencing. Hearing the one You Heard last episode, the judge's hands were tied, but she had watched those chatterbait videos and she was sure of what she saw.

It was clear to me that miss Inwood was comatose, not asleep, but comatose unconscious.

Absolutely, any technicalities in the law didn't matter. The videos spoke for themselves. To Judge Jill Cummins, this was rape.

You were a predator to miss Inwood, and I completely understand it. The damage done to her.

Is probably irreparable.

Do you understand that by pleading guilty this morning, you are waving or giving out that presumption of innocence?

Yes?

I do so was to plead guilty this morning, I do.

You're honor okay? And are you pleading.

Guilty today, sir?

Because you are in fact guilty, Yes, you're of the one account.

You'd think that would have been the end of it, But for Saskia, things were about to get much worse. Mike was just getting started I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal. Season five, episode six, Credibility. Mike's guilty plead marked the end of his criminal proceedings, but his sentencing hearing wouldn't be his last time in court. It wouldn't be Soaski as either. For a year, the criminal matter took center stage, but the whole time, there was another

I got served the divorce papers.

At first, having those papers in hand was a relief. She wanted a divorce as quickly as possible. But as Saskia sat in the courthouse lobby reading the documents Mike sent she realized this wasn't just any divorce filing.

He was actually saying that I was complicit in all this, and I knew about chatter baden It's pages and pages of allegations that him and I were a team camming together.

Just four days after Saskia realized what Mike was doing to her, four days after Mike left the house, he filed for divorce on the grounds of cruelty Saskia's cruelty towards him. Mike said that Saski's allegations that he raped her, secretly, videotaped her, and posted nude images of her without her knowledge were all false. Saskia was making it all up. The divorce complaint reads the parties would spend evening time posting and watching other couples doing the same. This was

To get this divorce complaint just floored me. I knew that this was going to be really ugly.

These divorce proceedings were completely different than the criminal case Mike was about to face. That case was the State of Maryland versus Mike Cleven Goood. It was the state's job to prove Mike's guilt. This divorce case was Mike Levin Goood versus Saskia in Wood.

It really felt like I was the one on trial.

Mike could have gone for a no fault divorce. Instead, he was determined to take Saskia down, and this path had a lot to offer him. His criminal trial hadn't taken place yet, so the divorce was a bargaining chip. Saskia thinks that Mike was using the divorce case to get her to back down and make his criminal troubles disappear.

I think that he assumed that I would accept some kind of deal for alimony in exchange for not testifying. It would be easy to throw some cash my way, and that's what I'll I'll go away.

Saskia could have used that money she was dipping into her four to h one K just to pay her divorce attorney, but that kind of deal she'd never accept.

If the condition is that I don't testify it, there's no way. I don't care. I'll be destitute. We're gonna follow through with this.

The criminal proceedings went ahead with Saskia as an active participant in the case, but even after Mike pled guilty, even after the criminal matter was closed, he charged ahead with the divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Saskia wanted a divorce too, But like I said earlier, this was no typical divorce. Mike was saying Saskia was a liar and there was a lot at stake. If a judge believed him, Saskia could owe Mike her rapist tens of thousands of dollars. She could even be charged with false

And then in January of twenty twenty one, the Dors actually went to trial.

This is extremely rare, only about five percent of divorce cases make it to trial. It was the middle of COVID, so much of the trial took place over zoom. Saskia sat at her kitchen table, staring at Mike through her screen.

He was sitting there in an orange jumpsuit after pleading guilty to rape.

At this point, Mike had been convicted, but in spite of that, at this divorce trial, Mike would claim he was innocent. That's why he was so determined to see this case through. You see, Mike couldn't win his freedom through his plea. He'd waived much of his right to an appeal, but convincing knew judge that Saskia was lying

Mike looked very arrogant and cocky and had no emotion or feeling. I think he thought that it would be just a wash.

When Mike and his attorney opened their case, their strategy was clear. Turned the spotlight off Mike and onto Saskia. Their goal was to undermine Saskia's credibility. But what does that really mean. Well, they would have to prove she wasn't believable. They'd introduce patterns of behavior, aspects of her character that would show she wasn't a reliable narrator. How would they do this by saying she'd lost her mind?

She was very depressed, she was unable to get out for work. I'm depressed, I can't take it. I can't work to stretching me out. The kids are stretching me out, like is starting me out.

This is the courtroom audio from the divorce trial. That's Mike's real voice you just heard, and calling out Saskia's anxiety and depression wasn't the only way he tried to undermine her credibility. He also talked a lot about her use of drugs and alcohol.

She drank the signiat to get him out.

There was douqu on her heart more than mine, very quickly snowball into seven eight nine drinks. She also received the adderall and from a friend. When she starts drinking, she doesn't stop.

All of this was to introduce doubt about Saskia. Saskia's lawyer objected to a lot of this testimony, arguing that Mike's side was trying to enter character evidence unfairly, but the judge allowed Mike to continue.

I felt it goes on the twilight zone. The fact that the judges were even listening to these things was blowing my mind.

When sask and Mike's divorce trial began, he was zooming in from jail and his legal strategy was to discredit she was very repressed there.

With drug you on her part more than ane. She starts drinking, she doesn't stop.

Saskia sat through hours and hours of this testimony, listening to Mike drag out every time she drank too much and every time she couldn't get out of bed. It wasn't that these moments hadn't occurred, it was that Mike was using them to say Saskio was responsible for everything that happened to her. He was telling the story of the worst period of her life, but in this story it was all her fault. She was the one causing chaos.

These things were so dehumanizing and so dismissive of what I had been through in my pain.

I have to admit it's hard for me to listen to Mike make this argument without feeling angry. Mike knew her family's mental health history and how Saskia was determined to remain stable walk the same path as her dad. Saska thought Mike was on her team, and yet Mike had been exploiting her mental illness, her use of alcohol and drugs for years. Saskia's friend Heather put it best.

It was to his advantage to keep her in this drunken, drugged up, bad mental health state, because the more vulnerable became, the easier it became for him to take advantage of her.

But as Mike testified and his attorney spoke, his culpability faded into the background. He zeroed in on her behaviors, her imperfections, to show that she shouldn't be trusted and even that she was to blame. I want you to hear Mike's account of October twenty seventh, twenty eighteen, the night of the Halloween party, the night Saskia saw what was on Mike's computer screen. The audio isn't perfect, so listen closely. Here's his story of that night.

We've been out of the part a home, we're both stuck and ended up looking at cturbate the website.

When they got home, they went onto Chatterbait, the camming website, but just as they were logging on, she.

Got up and wanted it off, so kind of it off, went to bed and that was for the evening. Next morning, he was very very aggated, wanted to look at the website, which we did, and then became very focused on my use of pornography, meaning looking at the website. Without her that then we became.

Very emotional, but as all kinds of things.

And that's at the point where.

She stood there in front of the dresser and she looked at how she said, you know, I now know be doing and it was just shut the shock and out of nowhere.

It's completely floordy that moment when I realized that with the worm that was going on there.

In Mike's memory, he and Saskia were at a party. They were both drunk, looked at a website. The next day, Saskia went crazy on him out of the blue. There could only be one explanation for all of this. Saskia was mentally ill. In court, this strategy is often effective. It plays on misconceptions we all have about what it means to be a rape victim. If you've watched any crime show or any courtroom drama, you're probably familiar with the character of the perfect victim.

As sure as I live and breathe, William Harris is the man who raped me in that alley.

Think of Law and Order SVU. There's the perpetrator, the bad guy, and then there is an innocent victim. She's written to be brilliant, beautiful, and beyond reproach.

I tried to get away, but I couldn't.

She just left me there.

Storytellers love this archetype. The protagonist is clear, and audiences love it too. We know exactly who to root for. There's no room for doubt.

The problem is that most victims don't behave the way this imaginary perfect victim behaves.

That's Deborah Turkheimer, a professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

I am a former prosecutor and I handled cases involving special victims.

Deborah wrote a book called Credible, Why We Doubt accusers and protect Abusers. She's an expert on sexual violence. She says, the perfect victim character doesn't just live on screen. She's the benchmark, the standard that all rape victims are judged against in the courts and circles of friends everywhere.

The perfect victim standard includes misconceptions about how victims behave and how they ought to behave before, during, and after the abuse. Before there ought to be no drinking, no drug.

Use, and Saskia, as we know, was on a lot of substances when she was raped.

During the abuse, the perfect victim fights, she fights back, She fights hard.

But Saskia was knocked out.

And then afterwards, the perfect victim, he's able to recall with precision every single detail of what happened, which again Saskia couldn't.

In every way, Saski failed to rise to the perfect victim standard. The reality is most victims do.

It's unfair to impose a set of rules that, for the most part, can be followed and aren't followed.

And yet the rules remain and they serve abusers like Mike, because when victims aren't perfect victims, we can write them off and we can turn them into other characters.

The regretful woman, so someone who had consensual sex and then decided it was a mistake and so is now quote unquote crying rape. The gold digger, someone who is making this up because she wants money.

And then there's the hysterical woman.

Someone who just really doesn't know what's going on and doesn't have a firm grasp of reality.

It's one of the oldest and most effective ways to discredit a victim, to make the judge question their sanity and doubt what happened to them. Here's Alice Perey, Mike's attorney from the divorce trial.

What did you see that makes you believe that she was struggling?

He was very depressed. He was unable to get out for work. Many many time he was struggling with you take care of the kids.

He's in which as I'm feeling like shit. How often would she tell you something like that?

So many times I could not even count.

And with any particular reasons why.

She felt like shit because of this undepressed I can't take it. I can work as here me out. The kids are stripping me out like this, step from me out.

By Mike's account, Saska wasn't composed or stable or credible. She was a woman in the midst of a breakdown. Her word couldn't and shouldn't be trusted. She had to have lost touch with reality because, according to Mike, he and Saskia were camming together having sex on camera all the time.

How many times had had the two of you canned on chatterby, you know, two to three dozen hives? And how many times had you observed other people camming on Chatterbay.

Three four a dozen times?

With the clip became were extremely adventurous.

With not a lot of livius. There were no bound bee. That was something that they did not experience previously any relationship.

But Mike wasn't asking the judge to take his word on all this. His divorce attorney, Alice Perey, said she could prove it. She had a plan.

I would like to really admit all of the pictures in all of the videos because I think how much of them is relevant to mike client's case.

And when Alice said all, she wasn't just talking about the videos from the criminal trial the ones detective rule recovered from twenty seventeen. In twenty eighteen, there.

Are hundreds of photographs, hundreds of videos, and they take place over the course of years, in years six.

Or seven or more years.

There was more evidence, much more, and Alice claimed it would show Saskia consented to everything, every sexual act, every video.

What happened is the defendant has under oath, been fleedings and requested responses to admissions, just denied everything. Right, never post her You're never participated in videos and.

You say this never happened.

And there is a picture of a living color or video of it in movie motion Israel.

And according to Alice, it would show that Saskia was not to be believed in the criminal trial, there were about thirty videos recovered from Chatterbay. These videos were the key to prosecuting and convicting Mike, But in the divorce trial, Mike said he never raped Saskia or took images of her without her consent. She agreed to all of it, and to back that up, he said that he and Saskia often made pornography together.

Which was done over the course of seven years, to the tune of over two hundred photographs and videos.

Two hundred photographs and videos. His divorce attorney, Alice Perey, seemed confident the.

Evidence will convinced Repoort that she was a willing participant in these matters.

While working on this episode, we reached out to Alice Perrey. She declined to comment. In these additional images, it wasn't just that Saskia's eyes were open, as we've talked about in previous episodes. Alice claimed that in lots of instances, Saskia was a weak and she was posing and performing for the camera. If Saskia was saying she'd never consented, she was lying or she was delusional. From the early days of reporting this season, I knew that there were

I remember one time he took a picture of me and showed me how good my butt looked, or something like that, and I explicitly asked him, what are you doing with that picture, and he's like, well, of course, I'm going to erase it. I would never show it to anybody.

But she can only remember this happening a handful of times. Mike said he had two hundred photographs and videos, and most of these images.

I don't remember taking them. I never knew of their existence.

All of this brings up another painful truth about rape case. No matter the corroboration, no matter the amount of prosecutors, family members, and experts standing behind a victim.

There's an initial default doubt that is sort of culturally ingrained in US.

That's law professor Debrah Turkheimer. Again. She says, doubt is built into the crime of rape.

It's really difficult in the criminal setting to get past that very high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And that's true of every crime, but it's especially true of rape. Historically, there were special instructions that were given to juries that said you should be even more cautious about convicting in this case because accusers are so untrustworthy. Now those formal instructions aren't given, but we still have a default to.

Doubt when someone comes forward. That's true even in a case like this where there's so much.

Evidence, even sometimes when it's on video right, there are questions of interpretation.

No judge or jury can turn back the clock to be in the room at the time a rape happened, and no one can get into the minds or bodies of the people involved. And that's also a challenge for us as reporters. That's my producer, Caitlyn Golden.

We can't go back in time, and so in understanding the story, the only thing we can do is rely on the evidence that is available to us.

When it comes to images like these, attorneys will always make arguments of what was really going on. But our team didn't understand the degree to which these were just arguments until we saw the images for ourselves. After months of reporting, we finally got access to the case files from the divorce and the criminal case. We saw the kinds of photos we heard so much about from Mike's attorney, ones where Saskia's eyes were open. One in particular has stuck with us.

I remember the first time I saw that photo and I had to immediately close my laptop because I mean, it's so hard to describe as anything other than horrific.

Like, yeah, she's not there. No, No, she isn't there. I hate even describing it, but the only way I could describe what I saw is it's like a corpse with her eyes open. It's really upsetting. So when I look at that photo, I think, of course, she doesn't remember this.

Yeah, And the idea that images like this where her eyes are open or being used to say that she was awake and consented to everything.

Mm hmm, is so disturbing. Seeing this image, it felt clearer than ever what happened to Saskia is real, it matters, and Mike, not Saskia, is to blame. But in the divorce trial back in twenty twenty one, there was only one person that needed to be convinced of all this, that was the judge, and Saskia was unsure what she'd make of these images.

I knew that I wasn't going to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Before Mike's attorney could show the videos, the judge asked to review the content herself. She stepped into her chambers to watch in private. As everyone waited for the judge to return, Saskia sat in her kitchen, staring at Mike through her screen. The man who'd hurt her was now in jail. He was just a little box on zoom, and yet he had power to make her feel so small. He was the one behind bars, But the judge was deliberating over Saskia's actions, her character.

It felt ridiculous and absurd and dehumanizing that I had to go through that. But I also knew that I just had to get through it.

Saskia knew the truth, the truth is always the best defense. She just hoped the judge would see the truth too. After a brief recess, the judge returned, So, I.

Have gone through the additional videos, and it looks as though Miss Ininwood knows. She at points that pictures are being taken and I'm not sure about knowing she's being videotaped, because I don't think I saw anything that expressly shows that. So this could very well be a situation where, you know,

The judge couldn't say for sure that Saskia did or did not know she was being filmed, or whether she knew this content was being shared, so she asked the officers of the court to turn around, and Mike's attorney, Alice Perey, pulled up the evidence. She wanted to show Saskia the videos and make her answer for them in front of everyone. Saskia looked at the video on her screen.

Made me feel like a fool and made me feel like less than a person.

The whole time, she couldn't stop thinking about Mike.

It's heartbreaking to think that he put everybody through that just so that he could get away with humiliating me.

With Saskia on this stand, the judge let Mike's attorney, Alice Perey, proceed in the same way, Do you recall this video? No, I don't.

Do you recall when it was eight?

Objection?

She just said no, she doesn't recall.

How root, ma'am.

Do you recall when this video was taken?

No, because I don't recall the video.

The attorneys fought back and forth on objections and relevance as Saskia just sat there.

It was so re traumatizing to have to defend myself as dehumanizing to have your life whittled down to that, and to have people talking about things that are affecting your life and you can't anything. You're just sitting there, helpless, having to listen to it. And it's something I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Alice continued cross examining Saskia for just a couple more minutes, asking Saskia if she posed for pictures for Mike, and then the judge popped in, can you go.

Ahead, Miss Parade, anything else you want to ask?

Yeah?

No.

Other questions of Miss Enwood.

None, I will save my time for miss to let all right, all right?

Any She didn't ask much any any redirect are all right? Thank you? Okay.

Alice spent her remaining time questioning Mike again. Before long, she ran out of time. Both sides closed their cases. In the weeks that followed, Saskia waited and waited for the divorced decision. She wasn't expecting any kind of big win. She just wanted those papers in hand.

I had no faith in the justice system anymore. I just wanted it to be over. I was already so disheartened about everything and not hopeful at all. It was like I was waiting for the time to rent out. Everything was just getting in the way of me just being divorced from this monster. I wanted nothing more than to be divorced and be able to move on and I could really say that this is not my husband. This is a monster who was posing as my husband, and now he's totally calm.

Finally, a few months later, the judge released her decision. We're going to have a producer or read part of it for you. And remember, Mike is the plaintiff here, Saska is the defendant.

The judge wrote, this court credits defendants testimony and expressly discredits plaintiff's testimony.

In other words, she didn't believe Mike. She believed Saskia.

Plaintiff attempted to convince this court that defendant was aware of the site and aware that she was being sexually penetrated and otherwise manipulated by the plaintiff. The court is unconvinced. The evidence revealed. Defendant has struggled during the party's marriage and before with addiction and mental health issues, making her

Another judge saw through Mike's lies and came to the same conclusion. On paper, she won, but in reality to Saskia.

It didn't matter. Of course, yes, she found that he was not incredible and that I was credible, but it still didn't take away from what I had been through in this divorce and would have been taken away from me.

It was exactly how Saskia felt after Mike's plea deal. She was told that this was a good outcome for the court system, but it didn't feel that way. Professor Debraah Turkheimer says that's often how these cases go.

Even in the end, if the survivor is found credible and there's that vindication that comes along with it along the way, that process can be enormously difficult, degrading, even traumatic.

Saskia was granted a divorce on the grounds of cruelty.

The judge wrote, this court can think of few actions that weren't a divorce on this ground, more so than the rape and sexual exploitation that occurred here.

I've had to live through two and a half years of proceedings to get there, when he'd already been convicted in criminal court. She spent two and a half years defending herself, having to answer for every drink, she had, every hospital stay, having all of her vulnerabilities put on display when Mike had raped her, and this crime isn't unique to Saskia.

You can see his hands, his wedding ring, and then I realized that I am in these images.

On the next episode, of Betrayal, we meet other survivors.

It has been a real journey for me to get to the point of realizing that it's not my gut that's broken, it's him it's broken.

For resources on sexual violence, visit RAIN dot org slash betrayal. That's our ai n N dot org slash betrayal. You can also get free confidential twenty four seven support through rain's National Sexual Assault Hotline. Just text Hope to six four sixty seven three or call one eight hundred sixty five six hope. You are not alone. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your story, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That is Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com.