EP 30 - Tina

A friend of mine described it really well. She said, it's not like he's a catch me if you can type person. He actually lies to make himself.

As normal as possible, just like your average boat.

And it's true his bacade was authenticity.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, A show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. Tina Maya is a successful e commerce consultant in the UK. In twenty sixteen, a casual, romantic fling turned her entire world upside down. It showed her a dark side of humanity, one that she'd never seen before.

There's definitely an element of control. He can walk away, but he can remotely control the rest of your life.

Her story is also one of community. Along the way, she found a group of other women who had been deceived and betrayed by the same man. Tina's become their spokesperson and the spokesperson for a much larger story. Tina was raised to be opinionated and strong willed.

So I was born in Iran actually before the revolution. We came here in nineteen seventy eight, and I grew up in Southeast England, though very green leafy parts of the world.

When she graduated from university, traveled and spent years living abroad.

I went to Australia, in Thailand and India, as well a lot of places Costa Rica. You know that I spent a lot of time of building my career and living life.

In the nineties and two thousands, Tina was early to adopt the internet's potential, especially for commerce and online retail. She made a career working in digital sales that ended up taking her to New York City, where she met her husband. By her mid thirties, he welcomed the son, Leo.

He was an incredible baby and I really enjoyed becoming a mother.

But her husband, on the other hand, struggled.

He wasn't a very handsome father. It was just thea when me it gets work.

For a while, when Tina was offered a prestigious job back in the UK, she separated from her husband and made the leap. Now her daily life was focused on work and raising her son. For Tina, being a single mom to one child felt manageable. She loved that dynamic.

I was at a mom's drinks thing and I remember having a conversation with one of the moms who had a lot of problems with the second child.

Oh my god, you got it right, like one child the tree.

When her son started grade school, Tina had more nights to herself.

He spends more time with friends, he goes sleepovers, but a little bit more independence. I wasn't actively going out and dating or anything like that. I was so busy. I wasn't even thinking about dating. It wasn't on the radar.

In twenty sixteen, she attended a tech conference in London. That day she must have met in exchange contact info with at least thirty people, one of them being Neil Lahman.

He's a very charismatic person. He's very good looking. I suppose he was a bit flirtatious.

Neil was from Essex. To put it in American terms.

I guess the American version would be Jersey, sure.

Big party culture in spray hands. Tina's interaction with Neil was nothing special, just a friendly exchange of business guards. She assumed it was a professional connection, but soon Neil began texting her.

And then one day he texted me and I had just closed a very significant deal, so I was in a very good mood, and he said that he was in the area and asked me if I fancied going.

For a drink that night. Her son was at a sleepover.

I said, you know what, why not.

It was perfect timing, so they met at a neighborhood pub.

We sat down and started talking. He was very open, asked me about you my life.

She talked about her son and her ex husband in America, and Neil shared details about his past.

He told me that his ex wife they lived together in the US, and she had cheated on him and she'd run off with his best friend.

The reason his wife had left was because Neil couldn't have kids.

She was very bitter about the fact that he couldn't give her children. And then he went on to tell me about the fact that he'd had cancer and has testicular cander, so it was impossible.

It was a touchy subject. Neil seemed deeply hurt by his ex wife. Tina felt for him.

He seemed almost a little bit vulnerable, like he had this sort of emotional vulnerability about him.

The name was going well, and before long they found themselves in another bar, making jokes and inching closer together. She liked him, but she wanted to keep it casual.

I didn't see it as being a long term, serious relationship prospect. That was not where my head was. It's not the sort of time that I had. I wasn't interested in bringing anyone into my son's life.

It was just letting my head down and having a bit of.

Fun, really, and Neil knew how to have a good time.

He had that sort of cheeky, chappy, jack the lad kind of thing about him.

It was fun.

At the end of their night together.

He walked me home in the very early hours of the morning.

They kissed goodnight, and Neil said he wanted to see her again. He was often in her area because he owned and managed a few properties there. He promised to text the next time he was in her neighborhood, and he did so. After their first night out together.

He continued to text me, and then he would come over once a week or so.

Tina couldn't remember the last time she had a fling like this. It had to have been well before her marriage. It was just what she needed. It made her feel sexy and confident. Before they slept together, I said.

To him that it wasn't on the pill. Does he have anything? Said no, I'm really allergic to late text.

Tina was forty one, and after his testicular cancer treatments, Neil couldn't have kids without the pill or using regular condoms. They settled on another method.

I was quite adamant about using withdrawal methods, and I asked him, did you withdraw in time? Because I could have gone and got a plan B.

But he was like no. Absolutely.

Over the next few months, they saw each other whenever they could, and Tina got to know more about him.

He said that he went to the London School of Economics, which is sort of Harvard Business School level.

But when Tina tried to talk about the neighborhood where are the school's located, Meal seemed confused, like he didn't know the area. But it had been decades since Neil was in school, so Tina didn't think much of it.

I didn't really question it too much.

I wasn't thinking of him as husband's material or something, so things weren't registering too much with me.

Eventually, Neil's appeal started to wear off.

There was just one too many things that just wasn't adding out.

Who ring true, Like he would make a plan and then have some weird excuse and like it started to be less fun.

Now she was ready to move on, so she stopped responding promptly to his texts.

Kind of wanted to phase it out anyway, So it got a little cold.

A few weeks later, she didn't feel quite like herself.

It was misplacing things.

I was looking for my car keys all over the place and realized that I'd turned them in the wheelie bin with.

My rubbish when I threw the rubbish out.

This feeling was familiar.

Funny thing I normally handy two things like that when I'm pregnant. I don't get morning sickness, I don't get cravings, but I get very forgetful.

She confided in a friend about what was going on.

She said, to me, go and get a pregnancy test.

And she said, as soon as you do that, I mean you realize that you know you're not pregnant, then the period of p I'm like, you know that, that's a really good idea.

So she got the test.

So I went to the back room and read the instructions and then yeah, popped the lad on your face to wait three minutes. Immediately came up quite nun okay, I'll just wait the full three minutes for the knot to come up.

She was pregnant at forty one. Even though it was unexpected and unplanned, she felt immediately connected to this child.

It's hard to describe, but she was very present in me, very early on. There was something very very strong about this present and I felt that right away.

Even still, it was a massive shock because the baby had to be meals.

There hadn't been anybody.

Else but Neil was infertile, so this baby was a medical miracle. Tina turned to her friend, who suggested maybe Neil would be happy about the baby.

She was like, oh, these he is. He didn't know that he could have children.

Miracle baby or not. Tina knew that she and Neil didn't have a future together. Now she had to break up with him and tell him the news.

Wow, okay, this is going to be awkward.

Then she took a few days to think and finally sent Neil a message.

So I said, I need to talk to you, but to meet up tomorrow. I can come to meet you, but need to have a little chat. And then he said something along the lines of yeah, yeah, sure, I'll send my brother to meet you and I know because we need to talk, and he said, well, I don't see why there's anything you can't tell me here. I was like, really, you want me to tell you what I need to tell you over text and he said yeah. I was like, okay, Hi, if you insist, and so

I was like.

Thesectomy, and I sent him a picture of the pregnancy test and I said, well it didn't work.

She wasn't expecting anything from him.

One of the things that I immediately said was I'm not expecting or asking you to be a father to the child. I am letting you know because it's a responsible thing to do, and you can be as I'm involved, as you wish.

She didn't know how he would react, but she certainly wasn't expecting what happened. Next.

Things turned nasty on his part, which took me aback. He said, the whole load of nasty voice mails.

Hi, Tya, let's talk about this baby.

Okay.

Now there's something very strange about this baby. Let me explain it.

To you, and you could just hear in his voice that turn, and how nasty he became, as like real viteroal.

In these messages, Neil doubled down on his story.

I have zero span is medically impossible. If it were, I'd still be living happier with my wife in the USA. We split up because she wanted kids and I couldn't have them.

As the messages and cars kept coming, they got more personal.

He said thing that you'd be a single mom, you won't be able to get a job, and you won't be able to work, and you'll be.

Poor, then meaner and.

Oh he accused me of thinking of him as a cash can.

Then kind of scary.

And then he said that he had gone to the police and reported me to the police. At first he said harassment, and then he said that he'd reported me for entrapment.

And some of his messages were downright strange.

He started to come up with a story when he was in the hospital with his kidney infection, they found cancer cells, and how selfish I am, and what a horrible person I am at having told him that I was pregnant, then that I'm basically killing.

Him from her first date with Neil. She knew he wasn't a keeper. She had no idea he could be this cruel.

Whoa, This is not normal. This was really strange.

So I'm going to tell you something. I will have nothing to do with you, nothing to do with you claiming I'm father with your child.

You can keep the baby.

Great for you, but it ain't mind, darling. It's seriously, seriously, he isn't mine.

I just thought he was an assphole.

My friend, who's kinder than me, thought that he was in some sort of state of shock because he thought he could never have children.

But Neil wasn't in shock, and he wasn't in denial. Tina didn't know it at the time, but this was something far more insidious.

This is something that he's got too many, many, many many times over.

When Tina Maya told the man she'd been casually dating she was pregnant, he became a different person. Neil Lawman started sending her callous voice messages about how the baby could not possibly be his. He even accused Tina of harassment. Regardless of his disturbing reaction, Tina wanted to have the baby on her own. She was sure of that, so After his vitriolic messages, she drew a boundary with Neil.

Said, yeah, I'll let you know when she's born and you can decide if you want to have a dnatist or not. That's you're right, And then he replied, no, thank you. I will not be participating in any dnatist. Okay, no worries.

As far as Tina was concerned, Neil was out of the.

Picture, and I went on obviously I had a lot to deal with.

She blocked him and moved forward with the rest of her pregnancy. It wouldn't be her first time as a single mom. Tina's friends and family rallied around her to buy support, and she needed it, especially when the baby was born.

When I went into labor, both she and I got an infection. She wet blue, and she was there in an incubator. She also had very very very bad georgice.

Her newborn baby, Josephine, was in critical condition. She had a severe lung infection. The doctor wanted to prepare for a blood transfusion.

He said, so, you know, just in case of the worst case scenario, we're going to need to get medical history, blood types of parents. In cases some kind of rarity, the genetic rarity or something like that.

It's like, well, I could only give you half.

But half wasn't good enough, especially considering Neil's history of cancer.

There was probably a complex medical history that we needed to know about before we get this baby a blood transfusion.

She was two days old.

Instead of reaching out to Neil, she decided to call one of his friends, the only friend of his she knew how to reach.

I said, listen, here's my hospital number, and this is the doctor's name. Can you just have him tell them blood's, like any kind of medical history, anything like that.

Neil's friend tried to get him to go or at least to call the hospital at Is.

I know absolutely. I told him he needs to get his down there right away.

But Neil never showed up.

No call has come through to researchers. So yeah, he's not here and has not been here.

And then while Tina was lying in her hospital bed, she got a text from Neil.

He sent me long abusive text messages.

There.

I wouldn't lift a finger to help your child, even if she did have my DNA. I'm not giving any information to any doctors. I'm like, oh, okay, you are a psychopath. This is a two day old baby, and all I asked is for you to make a phone call, which anybody would do for a stranger's baby, for a kitten. No human being would refuse to make a phone call to potentially, say, a baby.

But Neil refused. He was not interested in helping the baby. He was more concerned with lashing out at Tina.

That he called me vile tongued, foul woman and all sorts of like, horrible name.

It's not you.

I just given birth.

I was in hospital with needles stuck in me for the antibiotics and things like that.

But this is a really evil person.

She was beyond anger.

I was disgusted. I was disgusted. I was like, yeah, whatever you are, you have no humanity.

Up until this moment, she'd planned to raise the baby completely on her own, without asking Neil for a single penny, But after he showed his true.

Colors, she decided, you know what, I'm just going to send the Chelseapool Agency how to keep for the next eighteen years. Bye bye.

She figured the courts could handle Neil and she and her family could move on. Luckily, her newborn daughter recovered without needing a blood transfusion.

After a week of being in hospital, we were both able to go home.

When she got home with Josephine or Fifi as she calls her, their house was full of joy. Her son, who was eight, became a doting big brother.

Right son adored her from day one.

And she's just the sweetest baby.

Now with two children to support, Tina had to return to work just two weeks later.

So I took the mandatory two weeks and went back to work and I was back on a train in London. I had a nanny and my friend helped me out also with hope and yeah, that's work.

One day, while she was on her way to work, she decided to call the UK's child support agency to get the paperwork started for child support. After they looked into Tina's claim, the agency contacted her with surprising news about Neil.

It came back that firstly, it said that he only had to pay five pounds a week because he was in receipt of benefits.

Meaning that Neil was on unemployment. But that didn't add up to Tina. She met him at a tech conference. He owned his own company. She'd met his coworkers. She tried to explain this to the child support agency, and I.

Said, well, he's not, and if he is, he shouldn't be because he's got a business.

I mean, I've seen it. I know he has a functioning business.

But the government didn't have records of his businesses or income. And that wasn't all.

Yeah.

Other interesting thing was that five pounds a week it was split between my daughter and three other children.

I was like, okay, so here's a new spin.

Neil had three other children? What about his story of being infertile. Tina went into investigation mode, searching for business and personal records of Neil Lawman.

I went all the way back to one from a number of years ago.

In Neil's records, she found the name of a woman someone who changed her last name to Lawman.

Says, okay, that must be his ex wife. If she is an it might be his current wife.

Maybe this was the woman he'd been married to in the States. But Tina didn't really know what to believe anymore.

At this point, I realized that there's a lot of lie So I go on Facebook and Norman isn't a common name. I put it up and there's her Facebook profile.

The first thing she noticed about her profile she was not.

In America, She's right here in the UK.

And the second pictures of two girls who are undoubtedly his daughter's.

Looking at the photos of two little girls clearly related to Neil made Tina's headspin. At the very least, she knew she'd found the right person.

So I text her on Facebook and yeah, obviously I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know how she would react, if she would respond at all. I didn't know if they were still married, and he'd like about that. I had no idea what to expect from this, But yeah, what could I do? So I wrote her message. As she immediately responded, The first line of a very long message said, I'm so so sorry that you have been his victim.

When Tina applied for child support, she discovered a trove of information about her daughter's biological father, Neil Lahman. First that he was on unemployment and claimed he was unable to make child support payments. He wasn't the high flying tech guy he'd pretended to be. Second that he already owed child support for three other children. The whole story about him being infertile from prostate cancer was a complete lie,

Yeah, we stopped talking and communicating, and.

His ex wife had a story to tell. She'd been with him for ten years, they had two daughters together. Then one day Neil walked out, leaving her with a significant amount of debt.

If she hadn't been bailed out by her parents, they would have been on the streets or something like that. And yeah, she seemed traumatized.

Neil had claimed that his wife cheated on him, that she left him because he was infertile. He said she was still back in America, But it turns out Wendy very much lived in the UK. In fact, she lived in the same neighborhood as Tina. Now Tina could safely assume everything he'd ever told her was a lie.

So we now know that the whole America thing was a lie. Cancer thing.

Well, yeah, even if he'd had cancer, they did not cause in fertility. I'm like, wow, Okay, right now we're down a rabbit hole.

Tina and Wendy agreed to meet for dinner to talk in person.

So we met up in London. We both liked sushi, so we went to a very nice sushi restaurant right away.

Tina was struck by how familiar Wendy seemed. The two women had the same energy, independent, confident, and outgoing. Wendy had some important information for Tina, things she needed to know. You see, after Neil left her, Wendy found out about two more children, two sons he had father before her daughters were born. Tina stared at Wendy, processing the reality that her daughter was one of five, how many more kids were out there, and what would that mean for

She'd said that she had never told her daughters about the older voice that she'd found out about.

Since Neil left Wendy, he'd barely spoken to their two young daughters.

Nothing, absolutely nothing in all of these years, except an annual birthday phone call to one of the children, where you would lie about having said a gift that never arrived.

Tina and Wendy ordered another round of Martini's and talked until the restaurant closed before they said goodbye. Tina got an idea, let's.

Do something a little bit bunny, so we took a selfie. We were both giving the bird.

And we sent him an email with just a picture and insightled the other mother mother uha.

He went ballistic.

Neil started sending unhinged emails to Tina, to Wendy, even to his ex father in law.

And then he'd also send a horrific email to my work, very graphic flood shaping email addressed to the entire company, including the CEO.

She was horrified this was too far.

So I reported this to the police and they did take it quite seriously, and they said that it was malicious munication.

But this wasn't the first time the cops had investigated Neil.

He was also involved in a very high profile fraud case of the Fimbo wine scheme, and his ex girlfriend actually ended up serving time for that, but he just walked away.

It's got free.

Allegedly he'd been implicated in a multi million dollar fraud scheme, and there was more. In total, he had eleven offenses in five convictions, but he never served any prison time.

Like Teplon, nothing sticks.

After Tina reported Neil to the police. She waited for an update. She'd given them all the information she had on him, and the officers said they'd call her when they made an arrest. But months went by without word when Tina called for an.

Update, strangely so that we can't find him.

He went on the ground or something, and then after a year the world was canceled, which I found odd.

Tina knew where he was. He wasn't hiding at all.

It's like, well, I can find him, why can't you.

This got Tina thinking.

It crossed my mind that he might have been an informant and he got himself out of these things by.

Giving information to throw the people out of bus.

Again, that's just a theory. If the police weren't going to give her answers or justice, she was going to find them herself. So she reached out to Wendy and together they came up with another idea.

He said, look, why don't we start a Facebook group that has his name in it, So at least if someone's looking to sort of date him or get into business and they look him up on Facebook, come up, maybe.

Give them a rip black give them a warning.

So we set up this Facebook group called the Neil Norman Victim support group.

It was a little tongue in cheek, but yeah.

The interesting thing was that, you know, one after another, people actually started to join and tell their stories.

As the group grew, Neil tried to get it taken down, but Facebook declared it legitimate public interest. Through this page, they discovered that Neil was allegedly running quite a few schemes. At the same time, there were lots of posts about his alleged shady business dealings. When it came to starting new businesses, the posts suggested that Neil had an.

M He would befriend somebody, get into their lives, yet understand their business, and then take over the business.

He would just make a.

Copy of it and then take all the customers and try and these businesses that were other people's in there. Suddenly he's an expert.

And then there were all the women he'd ghosted, women he'd met online and started serious long distance relationships with.

There was a diplomat he'd had an online relationship with for years.

When this woman finally booked a trip to meet him in person, he said he would pick her up at the airport, but when she landed, he wasn't there. She tried to call him and she realized he blocked her. She never heard from him again.

He's done that a lot. He's done that a lot. It's been quite a few people that he's had these sort of online ongoing relationships with.

These stories were bizarre. Was he doing it for the money to resell the expensive hotel room bookings and concert tickets or was it all just one big game to him? Whatever the case, in every story, Neil didn't stick a round. Instead, his victims were left to deal with the consequences of his actions, and some were never the same, like one woman, she.

Was only eighteen at the time, thought she was going for a job interview, and then he said, oh, there's a meetings going on in the office.

Do you have to meet me?

There's the restaurant downstairs and bought her a drake.

She wrote to Tina in her Facebook messages, she said that she woke up in a hotel room disoriented. She alleged that she'd been drugged and raped.

She didn't go to the police because she felt ashamed.

Multiple women shared stories like this one. Their Facebook posts alleged that Neil was not just a con artist, but a violent man.

The fact that they have these let's identical stories. Me said that, yeah, that's a pattern.

As the group grew, Tina continued to wonder did anyone out there have a story like hers?

And then another mother came along.

Her son was now an adult, but she knew Neil was the.

Father, and it turned out that her son was only a few weeks older than one of his other sons and they lived down the road.

From each other.

Their families knew each other. The boys never interacted, but they easily could have.

I mean, that's how close they were.

Through the group, Tina learned more about Neil's backstory and it was revealing.

As far as I'm aware.

He believed that his stepfather was his real father until he was about fourteen, and then the mother told him the truth that he was rejected by his own father, but he was never.

In Neil's life like his mom. Neil also had his first child in his teens.

When Neil was not eighteen. That's when he got the first mother pregnant. She was only fifteen at the time the baby was born, and he ran.

Off after that. It seemed like this became a pattern of his and this wasn't just about having unprotected sex or fathering many kids. He was intentionally deceiving women into believing he was infertile. These women who got pregnant would be tied to Neil forever.

There's definitely an element of control. He can remote the control the rest of your life. He can walk away but still keep that control.

So how many children does Neil Lahman actually have? Well, four have been confirmed by DNA, but there are many women who believe Neil is father of their children.

From people coming forward and talking to us, there are at least thirteen credible children that, yeah, the mothers have said that he's the father.

So the scheme clearly didn't end with Tina. The thirteen mothers have become a kind of group. They've bonded. Some of them are even friends.

Tina admits he does have good taste in women. It's his one deeming quality.

And it's interesting because he doesn't tend to go for vulnerable women. He doesn't tend to go for women who he can control financially, or who don't have close families and things like that. It's almost like a challenge to him that he will target women who are strong, who have careers who are accomplished and break them down.

But of course Nil's victims aren't just the women. Some members of Facebook group are Neil's now adult children. Many of them haven't been confirmed by DNA, but one of them tried to find Neil. He told Tina about the experience.

He told me about when he was a teenager. He'd try and find him, and he'd waited outside his office. He'd spoken to him on the phone, and he seemed all right on the phone, but then when he went to meet him, he waited at a coffee shop across from where he worked, and then Neil came down and saw him and just turned the other way and walked away.

A lot of these stories are very heartbreaking.

Hearing these stories, Tina felt even more certain that justice needed to be served, and in talking to a police officer, she heard something that piqued her interest.

This could be considered rape by deception.

Rape by deception is a situation in which a perpetrator deceived someone in order to get secual consent. The victim wouldn't have consented if not for a crucial lie, like one around the perpetrator's STD or fertility status. Rape by deception isn't a specific charge. It's a way of arguing and giving contact to a situation as rape, even if it falls outside the typical definition of rape under the law, and it's been used before in cases like Tina's.

There was another high profile case whereby someone who is a convicted rapist is taken to court because he'd claimed to have had of asephymy and got a woman pregnant, and the jury had ruled him guilty.

He was given a sentence.

However, they appealed it and the Supreme Court overruled the conviction.

For Tina, there's still a lot of work to be done around this issue. In the meantime, she's had to move forward with her life and focus on her kids.

My daughter is an absolute blessing gift. She's a ray of sunshine.

Yeah.

The irony of this whole thing is that she looks just like him.

Tina has learned to navigate some tough questions with care. For instance, her daughter has asked, it's my good a nice person.

I was like, your father, he's not a nice person, but that's nothing to do with you, And.

She's like, okay.

She's just very matter of fact and it's it's just funny how adaptable kids are.

Friends of hers very innocently asked, you know, so, what'd you dad, And she's like, oh, I don't have one. I don't have one.

When they do Father's Day things at school, she makes things for her brother.

Tina and her two children have a strong little family unit. But now that's not their entire family because Tina and Wendy decided to tell their kids about each other. When Wendy told her daughters.

One of the things that the older daughter did say was that she wanted to meet her sister.

Tina does worry about her daughter and how the situation will impact her as she grows up.

But at the end of the day, what hurts and what causes damage is the life, not the truth. I've seen it over and over again that a lot of the children, the people, the victims, have all been impacted so negatively by this trail of lines upon lives upon lives upon life, and the best way to combat that is by absolute truth. And my daughters will have a source of truth about her situation. She wasn't abandoned and it's not her fault. This is what he does. This is a hymn problem.

We end all of our episodes with the same question, why did you want to tell your story? Tina has a really specific reason. She wants to warn anyone who's just met Neil Lahman.

If I can help one person.

Avoid that pain, avoid going through this situation, or to get out before it's something devastating, If I can help one of the mothers out there to feel not alone, that overcomes all of his darkness, all of his lies, I think that that can only be a positive thing.

On the next episode of Betrayal.

That evening, one of the strangest things happened. I looked in the mirror and I said, out loud, but he's not coming home. And I thought, my god, am I being dramatic? Of course he's going to be home. And I dismissed it.

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 five star reviews, Go A Long Way, A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group