EP 16 - Chelsea

There were no red flags. I could have seen the Eric on paper. He seemed like the perfect therapist. I shared things with them I have never said out loud, and I am looking at a photo of his face being charged with the exact same things that atrumpotize me.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. This is Chelsea's story. Chelsea has a high profile career, so for this episode all the names have been change to protect her anonymity.

I really hope that one day I will be in a place where I can present myself publicly and say, look, this is me, this is my real name, this is where I'm really from.

Chelsea's been through more abuse than anyone should have to experience. As a child, she was trafficked by her parents. She says that her experience wasn't like the movies where she was kidnapped and held against her will. Instead, her mother brought her to adults homes who groomed and sexually abused her. At the time, her mom worked for a man who was later charged with multiple counts of child sexual abuse. Chelsea knew she needed to get away from home for good.

Education was my escape from home. I got scholarships, I was an amazing student. I went to every opportunity I could find for any sort of on the home program, whether that was camps, whether that was college courses over the summer. I used education as my way out.

She got a scholarship to college and stopped talking to her parents. The further away she got from home, the angrier she became about the abuse she experienced as a child.

And then there are all those feelings of betrayal of like, what were all of these adults doing? Was there no responsible adult in my life?

In order to survive, Chelsea focused on building her own life and outside of home. She not only survived, she excelled. She got an advanced degree and began a highly competitive, successful career, and she threw herself into work. She says that on the outside it looked like she had it all together, but on the inside it was a different story.

I was a scared little child walking around in like an optimist prime suit. I think anyone meeting me on the outside just thought, Wow, that person has it all together, Like that person is invincible and deestructible. Meanwhile, I was just dying on the inside.

She got married after college, but quickly realized she needed to work on herself and her trauma before she could invest in a successful marriage.

My ex husband and I were very amicably splitting up, and also during that time, I was starting to confront some of these things that had happened to me when I was younger that were negatively impacting the way I was able to show up in relationships.

She started working with a therapist online processing the abuses from her childhood, and around the same time, she reconnected with an old friend who were going to call James.

James began reaching out. He had also gone through a breakup, and we were kind of just processing this of us both having this rebirth of rediscovering ourselves after a long term relationship.

She and James started talking every day. After a few months, she realized that.

There was something there we wanted to explore. It just felt like he was this person who was there the entire time, right under my nose.

James really saw her and met her where she was emotionally.

One of the things that really drew me to him was just how focused he was on my emotions. It felt really wonderful, and it felt really safe and really attentive, and he just had such an incredible way of viewing the world and was also just very cultured in a way that I hadn't experienced.

He gave her access to a world Chelsea idealized, a community of artists who expanded her worldview.

James had this whole artistic side to him, like he was a visual artist. His medium was kind of like social commentary photography, but not your typical photography, like a lot of like distortions of images, and I just really appreciated him as an artist.

James came from a wealthy family and he had inherited a large real estate portfolio. It met, his schedule was flexible, and he had a lot of disposable income. So for their third.

Date, I remember him standing there and just saying, this might sound crazy, but are you doing anything for Thanksgiving? I was like, no, I'm not. I'm estranged from most of my family, so holidays are always kind of a weird time. And He's like, I'm kind of doing a solo thing in New York City. Would you want to fly out with me? And I was like, why not, Let's do this. Our third date was this week long

After their week long third date, they became a couple. They lived a few hours apart, so on the weekends they'd go to each other's cities, where James planned elaborate outings.

James was really into arts and culture, so we would go to museums and see different musicians or plays and it was really fun. Everything just happened so fast. It felt like out of a fairy tale.

These dates quickly progressed into a relationship, and Chelsea says that above all, being with him felt so easy, so.

Right, and that was something we would always say together. This just seemed so easy.

One of Chelsea's friends was married to James's best friend, so right away they had a community together. But that also meant Chelsea's friend had seen James in prior relationships.

She did warn me early on that he had a history of She described it as being selfish.

Early on, Chelsea saw a little bit of that, but she didn't necessarily see it as selfish. It was more overbearing.

He was very concerned about my sexual history, frequently asking questions about the identity of my prior partners, the number of prior partners I'd had.

He would ask to go through her phone. She hated that and it gave her pause about the relationship, so she addressed it with him directly. His reply made her feel better.

He said that he started therapy and became very open about his efforts to try to address his insecurities. He started telling me about the therapist he started seeing, and it meant a lot for me to hear this level of accountability from someone. So I was willing to continue to try to explore something with James.

Because they both believed in therapy, they started couples counseling together. It was only three months into the relationship, but they both wanted to improve their communication and connection.

I was at this place in my life where I was very vulnerable but also energized to do the work to heal myself, and to have James reflect that back to me was really significant. I was dealing with a lot of personal sexual dysfunction as a result of digging into my own trauma history, and he was very open to hearing about my boundaries. It was very open to try to make our sexual connection a safe place. He had his own sexual dysfunctions, so that was something that

They were communicating better than ever. They were still long distance, but James began staying at our place more often.

So James had a key to my house pretty early. I worked really long and crazy hours, so I wanted him to have a key so that he could just let himself in and out. And had a dog at the time, and he and the dog had really bonded and it was nice to have him around.

When the pandemic started in twenty twenty, their lives officially merged.

Neither one of us wanted to be alone through that, and suddenly, five months into dating, James and I went from living a few hours away to we were living together and me working within twenty feet of him at all times.

Now quarantining together with Chelsea working from home, James's controlling behavior returned as the couple grew closer. James couldn't hide his jealous side. He became more controlling about who she was talking to and why.

I work in a fairly male dominated industry, so most of my colleagues and my team were men, and James was constantly fixated on who I was talking to. He would always ask, what's their story? What does that mean? They say, are they married? It's like, well, I think so, but what does it matter? They work for me.

He became almost paranoid, and Chelsea wasn't having.

It, and I was getting more confident in standing up for my own boundaries around my communication with other people, and frankly, I was just getting sick and tired a feeling constantly monitored by this person.

One day, they got into a heated argument about his behavior. He insisted on going through her phone. She refused and locked herself in the bedroom. That's when things escalated even further.

James, from the other side of the door, told me that if I did not come out and speak to him, and if I did not give him full access to my phone. He was going to distribute private images of me to my coworkers.

They were photos from early on in their relationship, photos James said he would delete.

I spoke to him from the door and was like, you said you deleted those, and he said, well, I didn't. I lied to you about that. He went on to say they meant a lot to me, You're just so beautifull, and I wanted to keep them. And I was livid that he had violated that trust. I was sick of it. The fact that he had just told me that he had images that he didn't have consent to was enough. I wanted his phone, so I stepped outside that door.

Chelsea thought she and her boyfriend James were on the right track, going to individual and couple's therapy, working towards a healthy relationship, but during the pandemic, James's controlling behavior took a dark turn when he threatened to release nude pictures of Chelsea to her colleagues, picture as he said he got rid of. When she went into his phone to delete the photos herself, she discovered another folder on his photo app, the hidden folder, which exists on every iPhone.

The first thing I noticed was a series of photographs of my condom where it looked like he was documenting or spying on me. That kind of triggered this, oh shit, what the fuck am I looking at feeling? It looked like he had maybe gone through rooms, placed objects in certain places to see if they were moved between when he was leaving or coming back and forth, and they had date stamps on them, so that was really strange.

She kept scrolling through the folder, which had hundreds of images in it.

There were whole collections of nude photos of different women.

She recognized some of these women. There were photos of his best friend's wife, the one that was Chelsea's friend, the one that had warned her about James's selfish tendency.

I'm like, God, that looks like her, But why would he have naked photos of his best friend's wife? Why would he have these?

Right away? She called her.

I was like, I remember you had a tattoo on your ankle. Which ankle is it on? And she told me and I was like, yes, photos of you. And she was just like that's not possible. I have never, never, never, And I was like, no, I don't think you sent these to him. I don't think you sent them.

Chelsea sent her friend the photos and she confirmed that, yes, they were photos her husband had taken of her, but she didn't know he shared them with anyone, much less James.

And you could just hear like the breath come out of her, and she says, I'm going to talk.

To my husband before she hung up.

She asked her friend, like, there's all sorts of other women in here. Do you know any of these women? And she did, a lot of these were the wives of James's friends. It appeared that James and his male friend group were exchanging these intimate photos with each other.

As Chelsea kept looking through James's hidden folder, she found something even more disturbing.

The other category of images that he had on this phone were dozens of photos of children, young children, two four six years old children. They were like little girls in bathing suits. And I don't know if he was taking these at some public park. I don't know if he was taking these off of social media sites, if some well meeting parent was posting something.

Her mind was racing who were these girls? And then she found one particular photo, the photo, the one she'd never be able to unsee.

The moment I looked at that photo, I knew something was fucking row, something was absolutely wrong.

Chelsea disclosed what she saw in detail. It's too disturbing to share here, but what she discovered, she clearly believed was see sam or child sexual abuse material with a girl's face cropped out.

Everything in me just told me, especially in the context of where this was kept with all of the other images. I was like, this is one hundred percent something he is sexually interested in, and I did not know how to handle it.

She was having an out of body experience looking at these photos, but at the same time she was still in her apartment with James on the other side of the door, screaming for his phone back.

I'm just like, I can't do that. You threatened me, can't do that, and he can tell my voice he can tell. And I opened the door and I tell him you need to leave. I've seen something. I've seen something.

Scared of him and unsure of what to do next, she gave him back the phone. She didn't tell him that she recorded anything. So he's left in a rage and Chelsea quickly locked the door behind him.

But then he spends the entire drive back, calling over and over and over again and yelling and raging and saying I'm going to turn you into the police. You took something from my phone. What you just did is illegal. You better delete everything. And I was just like, look, I'm not talking about this. I'm not talking about it. I'm not talking about it. And finally I just turned like a little and I tried to sleep.

When she woke up, her first thought was that picture, the one with the child's face cropped out.

My mind went in a million directions as to why he would have this, but I couldn't identify who the kid was. Did someone take this photo and then he just somehow found it or did he take it?

Day after day, the photo was all she could think about. She talked with an attorney and described the image, but he confirmed one of her fears that the image might not meet the standards needed for an arrest. It was right on the edge. A month after the discovery, James agreed to a joint counseling session. They hadn't seen each other or talked since their fight. Chelsea wanted the support of a mandated reporter, and she wanted to confront him there in a neutral environment to see if he'd confess

This is part of my trauma too. My go to coping mechanism is denial and rationalization, and I think I wanted a reason for this not to be what I thought it was.

It might sound naive, but part of her still couldn't believe this was real. She started by asking James about the photos of his friend's wives, and.

I said, why do you have these? Do you have permission to have these? Did she know and consent to you having these photos? He looked at me and he said, I don't need her consent. It's his property. He took that photo. It's his property to share with me. And I wanted to puke hearing.

That it was clear that he had thought about this extensively and that he knew how to operate just under the radar. Finally, at the end of their session, she asked about the photos of children, and that one photo in particular.

And so, in the presence of the couple's counselor, I pulled out my phone and I showed him that image, and I said, what the fuck is this? When I handed the phone to him with the child image, the tension in that room was just it was wild. You saw him immediately start to shake. His hands started shaking. He immediately said that is not a crime, There is no penetration, that is not illegal. He just kept repeating that. He instantly just went into she stole things off of

She sat there stunned. Chelsea and the therapist sat in silence. They waited for James's car to leave the parking lot. Why did he even bother to come that day? Chelsea has a theory.

Looking back, I think he was trying to figure out what I knew, because he knew I found something and he didn't know what I knew, And I think he was doing this to try to protect himself.

Her relationship with James was over, but it was only the beginning of a horrible dilemma for Chelsea. She grappled with reporting him to the police, but she was worried that she didn't have enough evidence.

I felt like what I had wasn't going to be enough. This is right on the cusp, and if I report James, what is going to happen to me?

Chelsea was afraid of James's wealthy, well connected family. She was also thinking of the legal threats he made and the threats about releasing photos of her. But more than that, she was afraid to report and have nothing happen at all. It took her back to the way she felt as a child.

When I saw these images on James's phone, it took me back to being those children, And it was so hard not to think about what those children might have been experiencing if they were being abused. And I can report this person to the police, but is anything going to happen? And can I emotionally handle that? Can I emotionally handle having nothing happen as a result of it, because unfortunately, that was the childhood thing that was playing out.

I understand where Chelsea is coming from. If you've listened to season two of Betrayal, you heard Ashley Litton's story of how her husband had over one thousand images of Sea Sam in his hidden folder, but he served less than a year. These cases are wildly under prosecuted and with only one image as evidence. Chelsea's concerns were valid, or rather realistic, but that didn't change her feeling moral obligation to the girl in the photo and victims like her.

My biggest priority at that point was protecting this particular little girl.

She knew if she was going to report James, she needed professional support to get there.

I knew I was going to need a lot of therapy, and that's how I about Eric.

Eric was a therapist who checked all the boxes and then some. In fact, he'd been a prosecutor on sex crimes before he went into counseling.

There were no red flags I could have seen there on paper, he seemed like the perfect therapist.

But she would soon find out he wasn't. Chelsey began working with a therapist for going to call Eric, and quickly Eric became a big part of her life. She started seeing him three times a week.

I felt like I was coming into that scenario with my guts pulled out. It was just like what do I do with all this?

She was working up to being able to report her ex James, and she needed a safe place like Eric's office to process her trauma, starting with her childhood abuse.

Working with Eric, he was able to help me accept some of these bigger terms that I was uncomfortable.

With, terms like trafficking and incest, Like is this.

The right term? I started seeing Eric to have that space to unpack the sexual abuse trauma and was just very early stages of unpacking that.

At this end time she was haunted by the images she'd seen on James's phone. It became all consuming.

I couldn't close my eyes at night and not see these children. I just kept fixating on who is this child?

Because Eric had been a prosecutor, she trusted his perspective, and Eric wasn't so sure she should report James. In fact, he worried she was taking on too much personal responsibility.

And one thing Eric would tell me all the time was, Chelsea, you can't solve this. You are not batman. You can't figure this out.

Since they broke up, James deleted all of his social media. She heard through the grapevine he was saying he'd been hacked, but Chelsea suspected it could be related to what she saw on his phone. She worried that while she waited to report him, he could be deleting or destroying evidence, and Eric helped her understand the pathology of people like James.

Eric would talk to me about these types of individuals, these types of predators. He would talk about their behaviors. His exact quote was, every once in a while they freak out and purge, but they eventually go back to doing it.

After two months of working with Eric, Chelsea felt ready to report James. She began to see it as the only way out.

I thought that maybe if I could face these things now, maybe that would make the nightmares if the kids stop.

But Eric dug in he still wasn't sure reporting was the right decision for Chelsea.

When I started saying that I really felt like I needed to turn James in, Eric was encouraging me not to. Said I needed to let go of the relationship.

Eric felt like Chelsea wasn't properly grieving and moving on from her relationship with James, and that by fixating on these photos she was trying to stay connected to him. Somehow, one night it just hit her she knew who the girl in the photo could be.

This image that's been haunting me. There's no face, but the ages are the right ages.

James did have a friend with two young daughters. Chelsea hadn't put those pieces together before, so she did some internet slew.

Thing my tard faced was on. I went on these parents' Facebook profile and couldn't read what I saw. I was like, that's it, It's got to be this kid. The ages of the right age. That cabinet tree looks the same as like in these photos that are showing up. I'm full on Facebook detective at this point, this could be that same house, same wall color, same cabinets as this has got to be.

It James had access to these kids. If this was the girl in the photo, reporting him felt more urgent than ever. Despite Eric's advice, Chelsea had made up her mind and called my lawyer.

I'm like, i gotta report this, and the help set up a meeting with a detective in the town that James lived who was the head of the Internet Crimes Against Children's task Force, and we set up a meeting for that following Monday.

After she set the meeting, she went to her regular therapy appointment with Eric, and she felt empowered.

I remember sitting there with Eric saying, things are going to change. I'm going to identify. I'm going to know the next time I'm in a room with a person like this, I'm going to know, I'm going to know it. I'm going to know everything about this person. I'm going to be able to pick them out of a room. And I remember Eric was really uncomfortable.

Eric ended her session early that day, Chelsea planned to prepare for the meeting with police in her next therapy session.

And I remember going to his office and I was hyped, like I had my narrative partially written. I was like, I'm going to do this.

But on the day of that therapy session.

Eric wasn't there. He was never late. I usually when I pulled in, I would park next to his car. The car wasn't there. Ten minutes go by. I'm looking at the receptionists. They're like, this is really weird. We can't get a hold of him. And she's calling. She said, the phone's going straight to voicemail. I don't understand what's happening. They said, We're gonna get another clinician, just please wait.

This was her last session before she finally went to the police. She really needed guidance. So another therapist from the practice agreed to see Chelsea that day and I was.

Like, something is wrong. Eric is never late. Our last session was kind of weird. I felt like maybe I made him uncomfortable. And I could tell by the way she was responding to me too. She was like, something's not right either. I could sense it, and I started telling her what happened. I was like, this is what I've been dealing with. Eric was telling me not to do it, like I needed to like grieve this relationship, that doing this was just going to like let it

After that session, she finally reported James.

That Monday morning, I got up, I met with the detective and we had a three hour recorded interview. I showed him everything, told them the same story that I'm telling you now. He was so validating and he said he told me, he's like, this isn't contraband, but it is absolutely wrong, and you were doing absolutely the right thing by reporting it. But I want to manage your expectations. There are things I can try to do, but this

At the end of their meeting, the detective assured her that they do everything they could. She left the station relieved. It had been a difficult and draining day, but the day was far from over.

So I got my car went back home to to where I lived. I've been in my house for less than fifteen minutes. I've literally locked in the door, gone to the bathroom, opened to Lacroix.

And then she saw an email come in from her therapist's office and.

It says, I'm receiving this letter because I'm a client of Erics, and that they were notified that he was arrested and that he was immediately terminated, and they were reaching out to me to facilitate continued care. One of the last things it says is any questions related to the status of Eric maybe directed towards and they provide a detective's name in the phone number, and I'm like, oh my god, I already knew everything in my body knew what had happened.

She went to the court records website and typed in Eric's name.

I see possession of telephonography. I am looking at this mugshot of this person, and this is a person I have just said the last several months with the most and the most intimate and trusting of a relationship. I shared things with this person I have never said out loud before. And I am looking at a photo of his face being charged with the exact same things that a trumpotize.

Me.

Just sat there staring at the screen, just feeling like I wanted to tear my skin off, thinking about every detail I told this person and then thinking that they were sexually aroused by these things.

Then she pulled up the police report and what she read there was a nightmare.

They seized all of his electronic equipment. They found thousands of videos and the descriptions are horrific.

She replayed all the things he'd said in sessions with her, then.

Thinking about all of those things he told me about how a predator would behave. I'm like he was telling me about his own behavior, and I arted vomiting.

The person she'd turned to in this situation would be a therapist.

I didn't know what to do next. There were so many layers of things I had to process. I could not have told this story to a worse person.

For the first time in her life, she took a leave of absence from work.

When Eric got arrested. I just hit an emotional rock bottom and I realized my coping mechanisms don't work anymore. I can't outperform this.

During this time, mental health was her main priority. She started group therapy, which proved to be healing.

I needed a room of people to say that's fucked up, that shouldn't happen. I needed to see that outrage from someone and what we called it in my program this reality checking. You need the validation oh like, wow, this feels really wrong with just be wrong to you and people are like, yeah, that would be really wrong.

While she was working on stabilizing herself, she got an update from the police about her report on James. They didn't have enough to arrest him, but the police had done a knock and.

Talk when they told him that someone observed a concerning image of a child on his phone. He said it didn't come from my phone, and if it did, it wasn't illegal. And then this is the really telling thing. He asked the police officer if they're prosecuting me for taking stuff off of his phone.

As far as Chelsea knows, that's the only outcome of her report.

So to this day, this guy will stand out there and scream that he was in this relationship with this crazy woman who's trying to ruin his life, and you know that I was the bad guy.

As for Eric, he pled guilty to distributing child sexual abuse material and was sentenced to twelve years in federal present. That same year, Chelsea decided to move across the country and start over.

It ended up taking about four years before I was able to confidently say that these things happened, and not doubt myself, not blame myself, not think that this is my fault, to my responsibility. And today I'm really proud to say I have created the life I've always dreamed of, and I'm glad that every day now going forward is better than any day that I've had before this happened. So there's a rebirth in it.

We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question, why did you choose to tell your story?

The reason I reached out is I was just so inspired by the stories that we shared. I was so inspired listening to other survivors and the ability to retell this story and release it is so significant, and I hope that someone else hearing this feels empowered to do

On the next episode of Betrayal, and this is the first time I was seeing him in four years, and I remember it being like I am in big trouble. 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 support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal.