EP 14 - Lorena

As a little girl. You don't say, oh my gosh, I can't wait to grow up and marry a guy who cheats on me and makes me feel like the only way I can leave is if I'm going to be homeless in a ditch.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. Lorena is a Midwestern mom who's never met a stranger. When she meets someone, she wants to really connect.

If you want to sit there and talk about the blue sky and the green grass, please go find somebody else, because I don't have time for that. You want to tell me who you are and what you want to be all over that.

She came to the interview with an extra large iced coffee in hand and the energy level to match.

Caffeine. Caffeine, let's a caffeine? Does stall make it? I have eleven children and I have four grandkids. I'm busy eleven children.

She was eighteen when she had her first and forty when she had her last. In that time, she didn't go two years without being pregnant. How did she get here with eleven kids? While she belonged to a conservative Baptist church. In her community, big families were the norm, and she loved motherhood. But today she sees that she was a frog in boiling water. She didn't realize the temperature was being turned up until it was too late. Lorena was raised by a single mother, and their family

I really really wanted the nuclear family. I really wanted. Well, look, it's the mom, and it's the dad, and it's some kids.

Her mom worked in a hospital and would bring Lorena along with her sometimes to sit in the waiting room. While she was there. She fantasized about a career in medicine, working with premature babies.

I wanted to be a doctor. I actually wanted to be a neonatologist.

But as she got older and became a teenager, she and her mom started butting heads. She felt like her mom didn't have time for her, so Lorena started to do exactly what she wanted. When she was sixteen, she ran away from home. She says it wasn't as dramatic as it sounds. She just went to a friend's house. When her mom found her, she'd been smoking weed, and her mom did something drastic.

My mother figured out that she could put me in direct treatment centers. It was almost like a little mini prison.

She went to three. The first wooding keeper because they found out that she wasn't struggling with any drug addiction. The second was a psychiatric hospital. They assessed her and kept her there for a few weeks before they determined that she didn't need.

To be hospitalized, and so she found another place. And the third place she found they put everyone there on eight hundred milligrams of lithium twice a day, whether you needed it or not.

As soon as she turned eighteen, she got out of there and moved out of the state with her boyfriend. Within a few months, she found out that she was pregnant.

From the very moment I took that pregnancy test and saw that positive line, I was so excited. I just was so incredibly amazed that I could be a mall. But she experienced deception early on in that relationship. I was twenty He told me he was twenty five. I find out that he lied to me, he's thirty five. I found his driver's license thirty five that's a lot of age difference. You're not on equal grounds. There's not equal footing.

So she did what she'd always done growing up, figured life out by herself. She left him, took the baby, and moved back to her home state, which we're not naming here to protect her privacy. And back home, she got herself into college. While she was in school, she had another baby. She was excited to have a second, but she didn't want a long term relationship with the father.

I'm in college. I'm mostly making a's couple of bees there except twenty four I had my second child. I was in a glass that I really shouldn't have been in, and I made a.

C Now that she had two young children that she was raising alone, going to medical school seemed unreal life stick, so she changed her plans and decided to get her business degree. She began studying to become an accountant.

I'm in a business class and I see the sky across the room and I'm like, oh my gosh, he was strikingly handsome, well dressed, and the smartest one in the class. He asks me if I want to study, and I'm like, he is setting the standard on all the tests and he's wanting to study with me, and I'm like, yeah, I love that. And so we make plans and when he comes over, we don't study.

We're going to call him Peter. So she and Peter stayed up all night talking.

Anyway, we're talking and and he's just listening to me. He left somewhere between four and six am.

He kissed me, and then he left the next day, he called her. He called me right after he got out for four. Hey, I was just wanting to come by and see you.

Wow.

He made her feel important. They started planning playdates with her two young kids and movie nights at her apartment.

And I loved the way he made me feel. He made me feel seen and heard. He made me feel like I was the smart one. And I don't think that I had felt like some man had ever been that interested in me before.

Things were moving quickly. After just a few dates, they became inseparable.

With most of my past relationships, they were like easing into relationships, you know, you talk a little bit. But with him, we never stopped seeing one another.

She was into him, but Lorena had two small children to protect. She didn't want them to get attached to Peter. So three months into their relationship, she said she couldn't continue unless he was serious.

And at that point in time, he told me he loved me and he wanted to pursue the relationship with the possibility of marriage, which I was like what.

A few months after that, Lorena went to the doctor for a routine physical.

I get a phone call and they tell me I'm pregnant. So Peter came over that night and I told him, and I was so scared. I remember we were standing in the kitchen and he picked me up, put me on the counter, and looked in my eyes and said, please, please, will you marry me. I don't want our child to not have a father. And I was like, yeah, yes I will.

Peter adopted her two younger children, and now, as a mom of three and a wife, getting her college degree became even more difficult.

I had basically taken that semester off in the fall. I think I took one class and passed it, and then in the spring he said, well, how about you just stay home with the kids. And I'm like, well, that's really thoughtful. So I decided, hey, let's try that. I'm so happy to be at home with my kids because I have a ever had this opportunity to just be a full time long All of.

A sudden, she had the nuclear family she'd always wanted, and Peter promised he would be their provider while she paused her education. He excelled in his.

His professor had told him, you're very smart. If you ever decided to go back and get your master's degree, don't sell yourself short. Go to an Ivy League school you can get in.

So Peter started applying to MBA programs, and it turned out his professor was right. He was accepted into one of the top three business schools in the country, and the family moved to the Northeast for his education. Alone in a new city with her kids, Peter encouraged the family to start going to church.

His mother was very religious. She was Pentecostal, and he wanted me to go to church. So I went, and you know what I found God, I Jesus right there.

She hadn't grown up religious, but the church became a home away from home. When Peter graduated from his MBA, Lorena was there at his graduation with their family and now five children. He even graduated with a high paying job offer to make it even better. The job was close to their home state, and.

This is like the biggest energy company. It's huge, and he's got a good job there.

Back in the Heartland with her five kids and her ivy league husband, Lorena had a dream life. She and Peter started looking for a new church. That's when they found.

This really cool organization IBLP, Bill Gothard's Institute in Basic Life Principles. Oh, come here and learn about our program, and it will inspire you and grow you as a parent, give you kind of an idea of how to live.

A better life, how to be a better mother, how to be a better father, a better husband, a better wife.

They gave the family workbooks for homeschooling their kids and guides to parenting. They provided free meals and childcare. It all came with a conservative, fundamentalist ideology.

I bought into that. Peter bought into that. We bought into that.

If you've heard of the Dougger family and their reality TV show Nineteen Kids Encounting, you've probably heard of IBLP. The church and the Douggers were featured in the documentary Shiny Happy People that came out in twenty twenty three. The Dougger's religion promotes having as many children as physically possible, and Peter certainly believed in that. At first, IBLP was a culture shock for Lorena, especially what they expected women to wear.

Like the Duggers like what they have. The women they are wearing, every single one was in what they call a jumper or a long dress that looked like it came out of the eighteen hundreds.

But Peter thought it was a good example for their daughters. He liked the modesty.

He's like, well, I really like for you guys to be dressed like this. It's more modest, and we're setting a standard here in our house. And it did not take long before I conformed and wore what everyone else wore.

The church had strong beliefs about gender roles in the household.

Women cannot be over men. Men are the umbrella of protection. The women were there to make the food and to keep the kids quiet.

And the most important principle, allow God to dictate the amount of children you have. So she and Peter had another and another.

Sex was every day, and sometimes it would be twice a day unless he was traveling clearly, or we had just had a baby, and then it was We'd wait two weeks.

All the while Lorena was doing the childcare on her own. Peter would never change diapers. I think with number three he might have changed ten diapers, But then after that, with babies four through eleven, I would say that he probably changed each one of them, maybe twice, and there may have been a couple that he never changed at all. She understood that their religion had conservative beliefs about gender roles, but deep down she hoped that he would do more, especially when it came to the kids.

I thought that the church was going to help him to be a better husband and a better father. Instead, it helped him hide things better.

One night, as Lorena and Peter were going to.

Bed, he was kind of dozing and I was striking his head and I was like, Peter, I love you so much, and he said I love you too, Crystal. I was like, what what did you just call me?

Lorena quickly fell into a religious community that promised to help her with childcare, marriage, and parenting, and the church wanted families to have as many children as possible. By now, Lorena had seven children with her husband and Peter. One night, she was taken aback when her husband called her by the wrong name Crystal.

I was like, what did you just call me?

Who's Crystal?

And he shot out of it, shot up. He's like, I didn't say that. I don't know who Crystal. I don't know what Christal, I don't even know what Crystal. What are you talking about?

He blamed the mistake on sleep deprivation, and it made sense. After all, he was constantly working.

His schedule was six am to eight pm, So what's that fourteen hours a day. That's Monday through Friday and then Saturday and Sunday. He'd get called in frequently. We'd get out of church and he'd be like, oh, the office called, I gotta go.

Even though he was working NonStop and made a great salary, their money got tighter and tighter every year.

Christmas came and I remember asking him, can I please just spend seven dollars on each kid? Seven dollars a piece? And he was like, we don't have any money at all left. I'm like, where did all the money go?

Lorena assumed it was the financial strain of being a family of nine.

So I made everyone homemade gifts that year. I never putt he got one gift.

Despite money being tight, she relied on Peter to be the financial expert in the family. After all, he had an MBA from a top three business school. He printed out spreadsheets with their budgets and gave Lorena a weekly allowance for her and the kids.

I keep telling myself, it's going to get better. It's going to get better, because as sure as heck couldn't have gotten worse.

Right, she was wrong about that. At one point, Lorena tried to investigate what was going on financially. She checked on the bank accounts, wanting to understand their expenses and find opportunities to save. But Peter drew a firm boundary.

And he said, if you look at this bank account again, I will cut you off and you will not be able to see any finances.

After her eighth baby, she had serious health complications. While they were in the hospital, the doctor pulled them both aside.

The doctor says, listen, I know you have eight kids, and I know that you kind of have your beliefs on that and whatever, but in the best interest of your health, you need to put off having any more kids. Peter looked at him and said we're not going to do that. We believe in letting the Lord give us as many kids as we want. That's what we're gonna do. After my eighth child was born, I was in an immense amount of pain. I could not even hold my baby,

As their family continued to grow, so did their financial problems.

So at this point in time, he had a bankruptcy on his record, and he owed back Texas to the state we lived in. I know that he makes a good six figure salary, but I'm getting an eighth maybe not even that much, a tenth of it to feed and clothe the kids.

Lorena couldn't understand it. Peter explained that it was the expenses of the kids and the family that were bankrupting them. In an attempt to salvage their finances, they decided to downsize to a smaller house, and Peter found a new job.

And at some point in time they started requiring him to travel. So here are the kids and I in this dumpy house that he's never put much into. It was a very old falling apart dilapidated, two bedroom, one bath for eleven people. It does have running water, but the septic system is a barrel.

Lorena rose to the challenge.

I can squeeze blood from a turnip. Okay, I can show you how. My oldest son, at one point in time came to me and said, Mom, that makes a good six figure salary.

Why are you.

Living the way you're living? And I was like, we spend it all.

They relied on the church as much as they could. One summer in twenty fifteen, they took the whole family to an IBLP conference.

And the speakers that year were the Duggars. This was ry after their oldest son had gotten in trouble with Ashley Madison.

Ashley Madison is an online dating platform specifically for married people. Their slogan is life is Short, Have an Affair, And back in twenty fifteen, their user database had just been hacked. All their users' emails were now public and available online for anyone to see.

Missus Dugger was talking about how you could go on to some website and look up people's email addresses, and something just clicked in me. So right then and there we're in the middle of this conference, and I was like, oh, I need to go feed the baby. I go outside and I'm looking on my phone and I look up one of his email addresses and it shows that he has an Ashley Madison account, and I nearly threw up. I couldn't believe it.

She decided to confront him that night.

I said, this is what I found, and he was like, that's not me. That email must have been hacked. Oh look, I'm going to delete this whole email. Just get rid of the email completely, so that you believe me. Blah blah blah, blah blah blah. And so it was enough to go Okay, Well maybe he did because at this point in time I believed him because I really had no other options. I had no other place to go. My mantra is setting it. It's going to get better, It's going to get better.

She had nine kids. Lorena was independent, but raising a family in a household of this size going in alone was far too scary to think about. But the truth was she had been alone for a while.

He was gone, having to travel for quote unquote work at least one week out of the month, sometimes it would be two. So I was becoming more and more accustomed to him not being there. September twenty first, twenty one, Peter was on another trip, because that's what he did. I had decided to take my kids to our state fair. On the way out to the car, I passed by this box.

It was just a shoe box of old papers that had been floating around Peter's car for the past few months. She assumed it was just some of Peter's work documents.

Nobody looked in it because it's work stuff. Why would you, I mean, I'm not interested in this work stuff. Okay, so nobody looked in it. I must have walked past that box twenty times, but on this day, she was curious. I'm gonna look through it. I'm just gonna look through it. I'm looking through and I'm seeing all these folders, and I see one envelope full of birthday cards, and so I'm going through and I see this one and on the outside of it it's labeled Poppy, like Pa p

While her husband was on a work trip, Lorena found a shoe box of his old work papers, or at least that's what she thought it was until she opened it and I'm looking through and I can't believe I'm finding these weird things. At first, she didn't know what she was seeing. This is really weird.

It's just a paper target population progress chart and then self assessment scores calendar. That's what it says right here, what age regression? Only one domb question mark and then there's a VENMO routing number.

She kept reading and this is what she came across. Next.

I came across this one sheet and it said rewards. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Nanny Petty from Daddy, a point system, remote playtime, SERTs, dress up trips, books, watching movie, snacks and then it said little gets backward, and then on another page, make a schedule fourteen points, work out ten points, nutrition fourteen points.

It was like a report card or a list of activities to do with a kid. But then there was another column.

There was a little part that said punish things that I'd never really heard of, edging without release, and I'm like yardwork, huh, little did I know? Time out corner.

It was a reward system of some kind and it appeared sexual in nature. But that wasn't all. There were credit card statements from cards she didn't know about, and receipts for strange purchases.

Like, oh my word, what is this? Adult baby bottles, adult bibs, adult one sees like these are receipts for these things that Peter had purchased. There were things of him paying baby Bear. That was the name of one particular person he was paying. It was somewhere around twenty thousand and thirty thousand dollars I'd spent on all of this.

He'd spent thirty thousand dollars on sex toys and kink and who was baby bear? Something was very wrong.

She and Peter's sex life had always been tame, It was all just very vanilla. I remember one time we trying to bring up, Oh, maybe we should try handcuffs. How would you feel if I had handcuff shoot to the bed and he freaked out on me? Oh my gosh, we can't do that. What if one of us dies during it?

Princess Buttercup and Baby Bear were clearly indications of another side of Peter, one that she never knew existed. The Peter she knew was devoted to a conservative fundamentalist church, but this man clearly wasn't who he claimed to be. Lorena was afraid to confront him on her own, so she called her eldest son, who was twenty four. He said he would be there in a few days, and he gave her some advice.

And until then, you're gonna have to hold down the fort. You're going have to pretend like everything is fine. You're going to have to play the part of everything is fine when he calls tonight, Act like it's no big deal. When he comes home, Treat it like it's any other night.

Peter came home two days before her son made it there, so Loreena did pretend. Finally, her son arrived and they got to work.

My son is very technologically advanced, and we were able to go through the computers at home and find things that I never could have found on my own.

And what they found there painted a full picture of Peter's deception.

We found the real Ashley Madison account that he had. We found pictures of so many women in various states of undress. We found of women with property of Dom written in sharpie, property of Peter on one woman.

These pictures had timestamps dating back to twenty seventeen, four years prior. So how much money had he actually spent on affairs and why had he spent so much on adult diapers, onesies and baby bottles today? This is her understanding of what her husband was doing with these women.

He wanted to be the dom daddy, and he wanted a little girl to play along with him.

As far as she knows, all the women were adults. They were just sometimes pretending to be children or babies as part of a kink. Lorena pulled up his social media accounts where she found the messages he'd written to these women, even messages where he referenced Lorena.

The other thing that I found on there that he said was every night that I'm with you or with her, I will call my wife and I will talk to her for as little time as possible. That hurt.

Before she confronted Peter, Lorena made an appointment with a lawyer to talk divorce.

She had told me, the state that we live in is an ovault state, and there's not much that we can do unless you have a picture of him having sex. Basically, she said, you've got to have a picture of his genitalia going into someone else's genitalia. Well, I've found about two hundred of pictures and I think three or four videos.

Her eldest son was helping her collect this information for the divorce attorneys. They pulled documents together at night, sitting in their parked car in the garage while Peter slept in the house, and that's when they found proof of even more financial deception.

He was working at several different universities as an adjunct professor, so he's making money there and he's hiding it. We found this man has been spending clearly hand over fist tons of money and my children were like almost at poverty level. We had no money. He was hemorrhaging money on this lifestyle.

After they gathered all the information they could find, there was one last thing they needed to do.

My son says, Mom, I know we have guns in the house.

He took them and brought them to a friend's place, and once the guns were gone, he made sure his mom and siblings were out of the house, and then he confronted his dad.

My oldest son went inside to our bedroom and said to Peter, hey, dad, mom knows everything and she wants you to leave. And Peter sat up slowly, yawned and stretched big and said okay. And my son said please leave, and he said okay, and he left.

After that, Loreno only talked to Peter one more time on the phone to let him know that she was filing for divorce.

I don't remember all the nonsense he tried to say, but what he did tell me was what you are doing is far worse than anything I ever did. What I did, what I was doing was divorcing him. I just laughed. I was like it, okay, and we're done. And I have not had a conversation with him since.

That was in twenty twenty one. From then on, her son took over all communication with Peter that allowed Lorena to focus on her emotional and financial recovery. She also had to explain to her eleving kids why their father had left. Her youngest child was five.

Those early days are just such pipler. I do remember telling the children that we were divorcing because of Peter making some very bad decisions. I think the words I consistently used were poor choices.

But when friends and adult family asked, she told them the truth how she really felt about her husband. Peter was a black hole. She couldn't believe how strange it all was. He was spending tens of thousands of dollars on sexual fetishes, fetishes that included things like baby play, but all the while he was never interested in childcare.

One thing that kept coming back to me was how weird he was about changing diapers. And here he is, He's spent, you know, thousands of dollars on diapers.

After he left and I had.

Filed for divorce, I was still trying to go to church, taking the kids and all that.

But after what Peter did, church wasn't the same.

There's this cognitive dissonance. I'm now going, what else have I been told?

That's not right?

This whole patriarchy thing. How is any of this at all biblical? What's real and what's not real? I still have a difficult time going to church.

She stopped going to church and is taking time to reevaluate her spirituality and values. She started going to therapy, where she began understanding that what she experienced was spiritual abuse.

I'm not going to say all churches, because I believe that there are some really awesome churches out there. I've been to some, okay, But the ones that are perpetuating patriarchal abuse are the ones that are saying wives submit to your husbands. That allows for men to treat women however they desire, with no repercussion.

She was spiritually abused by the church, but also by Peter. Today, she doesn't know if he ever believed any of the fundamentalist ideology or if he just used it as a way to control her.

I look back and I can see Peter used that to keep me under control, to keep me where he wanted me, and to keep me behaving in the way he wanted. And three years ago, I couldn't have told you that. This is three years of heavy duty therapy.

And then there was his devotion to having as many kids as God would allow? Was that also just a weapon of control?

Looking back, I see why he did that. It kept me busy. His goal was to always keep me busy and to keep me from looking at what he was doing, because if I wasn't busy with the kids, then my focus was on him.

After all, Peter was smart. Unlike a lot of deception story, he really did get that fancy NBA from an Ivy League school, and after that he parked his wife in a fundamentalist church and began an insidious process.

Somewhere along the way, he had started shipping away at my identity of who I was and what I could become, and I believed him.

It hurts to look back and think about the life she had before Peter.

When I met Peter, I was a strong, independent woman. I was only twenty two, but I had two children and I was taking care of them like a boss. I had plans, I had goals.

Still, she adores each of her children, and she says they're the reason she's made it through. She's rebuilding her life and finally finishing her degree. It's important for her to explain that not only can betrayal happen to anyone, but so can indoctrination.

People do ask how does a capable, intelligent person go from Hey, I'm a single mom and I'm killing it. I'm full time mom, I'm full time student, I'm full time employee. How does someone go from that to I'm not allowed to look at the financial statements of the house. You're comfortable in the beginning, Hey, you know you're not really that great at keeping track of things. You might forget You've got so much on your plate. Let me

We end all of our episodes with the same question, why do you want to tell your story? And Lorena came prepared to answer this one.

The reason I wanted to tell my story is so that others who are out there in a similar situation might have their eyes opened and go, Wow, If she can do it with eleven kids, seven still at home, and with all the odds stacked against her, so can I. If my story can just help one person to see a little clearer, to feel a little bit of comfort, to think that their life is not over. You're not too old to get out. It is never too late to start over and find who you are. That's my hope on.

The next episode of Betrayal. Who is this person?

Have I been with? An ex murderer, a serial rapist?

I've got to find out this person's real name. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your Betrayal story, email us at betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. We're grateful for your support. One way to show a support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way. Big thank you