Hi everyone, Andre here, I have some exciting news to share. ABC has turned Betrayal Weekly into an eight episode anthology, which means each episode features one of your favorite Betrayal Weekly stories. You'll get to see the people involved, hear from people who have never spoken before, and actually see where the story took place. We are so proud and
excited to share it with you all. It's called Betrayal, Secrets and Lies, and it premieres this Sunday, March twenty ninth, at ten pm Eastern Standard time, nine pm Central.
Please check it out.
I'm here today with Stephanie Young and Clayton Eckard. You are the host and you are the storyteller of our Glass podcast and ihearts new podcast, Love Trapped. We're in Austin, Texas. This is really exciting for people who don't know. Love Trapped is about your story, Clayton and your relationship with Laura Owen, which started as a business transaction and then turned into a paternity scandal and then.
A three year pursuit for justice.
Yes, you guys have done an incredible job and I'm just glad to talk a little bit about your show and why it's right for the Betrayal audience.
Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having us for the Betrayal audience.
Can you tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do for the show.
My name is Stephanie and I am the producer, writer, and host of Love Trapped. I've been working on this since June of last year, so we're coming up on almost ten months and I think I've needed that entire time to do all of the research for this project.
And I am Clayton and I am the liver of this whole experience.
It's a life.
But I've been really grateful that I have a platform to help not only me, but the their victims with receiving justice.
Give me a little bit of a top line about what's been going on for you in your life over the last few years and why you need justice.
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. It's been three years of my life that I am not able to let go of until there's resolution, and currently it's just slowly chugging along, and she's still out there and about and has looked for her next victim. And for me, it's a matter of being able to stop all of this and make sure that she doesn't have the ability to continue to perform these antics that she's done for ten plus years. This goes far beyond me.
So a little bit about love trapped.
It's the story of your post Bachelor life, your experience on the show. You are still a bachelor yourself, yeah, but.
Your experience on the Bachelor.
And so we meet you on this podcast after like in the aftermath of that, and through your move to Arizona, you end up meeting a woman named Laura Owens, and through that meeting, that chance encounter, all this craziness and complicated stuff comes out of that meeting. When I first heard about your story, it feels like a brief romantic experience with a person doesn't work out. There's a moment of rejection that Laura can't face, and there is fallout
from that And what was that? Like, how would you define that fallout?
One of the darkest energies that I've ever experienced. It was so uncomfortable that I had instant chill and before she sent me the messages saying she was pregnant, I had the exact thought in my head that I don't know what that just was, but whatever it was, it's far from over. And lo and behold eleven days later. From that point, you know, she sends the initial messages that she's pregnant. But it was a very, very uncomfortable presence. It's just it was as if the lights went off
and she was no longer there. It's like nothing I've ever experienced.
Right, So it became really clear that she wanted a romantic relationship with you. She wanted to have a dating relationship with you, long term relationship with you, and when that didn't work out, she was telling you that she was pregnant.
And there was this she wanted to be connected with you in some way.
It was trying to leverage this idea of you being potentially the father to stay in connection with you, and was doing whatever she could to stay in connection and keep you on the hook. One of the things that I think a lot of our betrayal listeners will relate to is that moment of when the mask comes off.
We talk about it a lot.
Actually, there is a moment in time when a lot of the storytellers I work with where they discover the day of discovery the husband that they've known for twenty five years then reveals their double life, and they physically change. Yeah, their voice changes, their face looks different. So I think a lot of our listeners and other stories can really relate to that moment of you saying no to Laura and then something shifts.
Yeah. I mean I was just going back, as you're describing that, back into that moment, and I just chills again because her demeanor went from crying to stone cold, just expressionless, and there was this darkness where her eyes didn't go all fully black, but it felt as if they did. And it was just this instant I said, no means no, Laura, that there's nothing more here to explore. She wiped her last year and she said no, I understand,
have a great day, and it was just this. It's like two separate entities, like I was talking to one version and then all of a sudden, there was a switch that flipped. I mean, it was that sudden. So it's interesting that you say that that's what other people have experienced, because yeah, I saw it face to face, and I've just never experienced something like that.
Yeah, after that interaction in the car, what happened from there? Tell us a little bit about the harassment, and then everything you had to go through.
Yeah, so we were involved in a real estate transaction. She reached out to me originally to do real est date. You know, I made the mistake of mixing business with pleasure and it wasn't Yeah, lesson learned. I don't do that now, but I, you know, crossed that boundary. But then I had mentioned her that in the car the next day. I said that was unprofessional. You know, I can pass you off to another age, and she said, no, I want to work with you. I said, okay, let's
keep professional from here on out. She said she agreed to it, but then she kept going back to trying to make it more than that. So over the course of the next few days, it was this, well, hey, I actually still want to explore this, And then it got to the point of if you're not willing to explore a relationship, I'll just go work with somebody else,
to which I said called her bluff. I said, okay, then go do that, and then she said no, no, I really want to work with these It this back and forth, and it ultimately she just kept texting me, kept texting me, and then she started alluding to the fact that she was fertile and she knew that she was fertile during this period of her life, and she was concerned that night, even though we didn't have sexual intercourse, that when we were grinding, something could have fluid, could
have you know, been transmitted. So she starts alluding to it before she said she was pregnant, and I'm like, no, I'm not doing this, and so I was like, hey, I'm going to block you like this. I don't want anything more to do with you, like, please stop texting me. You're harassing me because there's constant messages coming in. We're talking paragraphs long. So I ended up blocking her and then that was, you know, eleven days or probably a
few days later after that. On day eleven from the time from when we originally hooked up, was when I got that email from her and she had sent over a positive pregnancy test and like a doctor's note. Yeah.
And so it really has been this journey of proven that she could have never been pregnant, that you are not the father.
What has it been like covering this story, Stephanie.
It's been mind blowing because every time you think that you've heard it all, there's something else that comes out, and you're just like, this can't possibly be real. And I think one of the most mind blowing things is the timeline of events. So in betrayal, you just mentioned like some of these people have been together for twenty five years, and it's that, you know, shock of being
betrayed by somebody that you've known that long. With Clayton's case, he met her via LinkedIn message on May seventeenth, the hookup happened on May twentieth, and then by June first, she was pregnant. So this is like a speedy timeline compared to some of the betrayal stories, so that to me is shocking and covering that part of it, it's just like whoa, This is like a very quick timeline to go from zero to one hundred.
And the unrelenting barrage of information because she then filed like you've become inbroiled in just a legal battle.
She filed a parenting plan, which I couldn't believe and was in shock that I had to respond to it via the court system. Otherwise they would submit a default judgment and most times they would assume the majority of the time people found parenting plans are actually pregnant. So I was going to throw away the paperwork, and then I had someone on the on the illegal side of
things that said, no, you can't do that. You need to respond, and I went into the court and he the judge, asked me why I was, you know, countering this you know, parenting plan, and I said, because there are no children. He said, you mean like they haven't been born yet. I said no, there's no child or children, like they don't exist. And he just looked at me. He's like, are you are you being serious? Are you messing with me? I said no, I'm telling you she's
making all this up. And he was just perplexed and he goes, okay, well I'll push this up the court. So he like basically just like push it into another realm of the court. But it was yeah, I'm like, I felt ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous. I'm like, I don't know how to respond to this. She's making
it up. How do I prove this? And that's you know where we end up going with it was Okay, well, let's get her to prove pregnancy, because I mean, that's how I get out of this, you know, because this is something that now she's going to hold over me and how far is she going to take this? And you know, as we've just recently uncovered and obviously through the timeline of this podcast, like she took a public so then it became a I need to prove to the public now, court of public opinion. I have to
be able to prove that this is all lie. Yeah.
I want to jump in and just say that from the time that she told Clayton she was pregnant to the time that she filed in the court in Arizona, it was only about eight weeks, so she was technically
still in her first trimester. And as a woman, you know that most people don't tell people that they're even pregnant until after the first time twelth weeks, right, Yeah, So I think that was another interesting part of this that from the time that she found out she was pregnant to the time that it was filed to establish paternity in the court, there's only eight weeks.
Well, I think what's interesting too. For one, you can tell she has the time better than I do at this point. For me, I mean, I just it just feels like a blur of three years. You know, it's like the emotions are so strong, but I don't know exactly on what dates these things happen. It just felt like it always smushed together. But the other side of it too, You see the ignorance of a man to people go, oh, come on day eleven and she's pregnant. Why would you even take that up and believe that
in the first place? But because I was googling, I mean, as a man, I had no idea. I'm like, I don't know how to fact check this or and I wasn't bringing it to my family originally. So this is just me living this experience and I'm just googling, and Google was like yeah, I mean, secondly, someone can miss their period and like show shows signs of pregnancy or be test positive as soon as like ten days. So
I was like, well that we're on day eleven. It's just one of these things where at first I'm fighting this alone. Obviously I don't want this to get out to the public, but it's you know, there's like I also don't understand what I'm up against because I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I'm a guy. I don't know if this is possible, and so I'm just constantly googling, and I think she was too, though I think she was also you know, doing her homework.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We do often deal with stories of people who are intimate partners or relationships that have been built over a number of years. This is about two strangers meeting. How did that affect you emotionally? Having your life completely upended? Like do you think about if I just didn't respond to that LinkedIn message? Like where does your mind go?
Yeah? You know, it depends when if you asked that question six months ago or even three months ago, and as opposed to now, I mean I've I've found the silver lining and all of this, but it certainly messed with me. I mean I lost a lot of trust and people. I mean I became very protective of my energy, which I needed to be more protective, but I almost
like overcompensated. But it's it's something where I struggled to function on a daily basis because I really felt, I mean very quickly, I realized this individual is looking to destroy me emotionally and render me useless, I mean, take me out of my ability to be able to function and work my jobs. And you know, it just felt very suffocating and this person also had time on their hands. I mean she was working around the clock. I'd get
emails just all throughout the day. And as people find out, she doesn't have a job, so she made this her full time job. And it was very suffocating. Yeah, it was just hard to go about my daily life when like, you have this happening in the background. And I mean a lot of us can relate to this if you have you know, someone that's you know, abusive, or somebody that has some news that they're like, I'm going to you know, share this news with like or they're threatening
you in some capacity. It's it's basically the thing that's on your mind at all times.
It's stress.
Yeah, it's just constantly weighing on you. So no matter what else you're doing in life, in any moment of silence, you just go right back into that box. You know that. I so hard, like tried to compartmentalize. I just pushed everything in. I'm like, I have to go about my life, but this box exists. But any moment of silence, you know, where things slow down in life, you just go right back into the box. You're like, I can't help this
because this is out of my control. Too. Yea, you know there's somebody on this other side that's plotting, and you don't know what their next move is going to be.
Have you like envisioned what life would be like when you're done dealing with Laura owens Sport?
Do you feel like it's always going to be there.
I'll be able to let go of a lot of anger. There's there's a lot of anger that's rooted in this, not only just at her, but within myself. And I have to give myself grace. But I do see obviously that this was all brought on part and partly of my own doing because of the actions I took. But even leading up to it, I mean, I was utilizing marijuana at the time to cope with the stress from the reality television experience that I just recently realized. I
still have not gotten over. I still harbor a lot of anger from that whole experience, And so there's parts of me that say, yeah, I mean, if you were able to have healed from these experiences, you wouldn't have found yourself back in this cycle. You wouldn't have subjected
yourself to this kind of energy. But you did. Because you're not healed to the degree where you wouldn't place your energy in a person like her, and you know that's that's something that I do understand, is like, hey, you could have avoided this, but ultimately you were what you were when you first met her, which was a damaged individual. Yeah.
One of the things that we do on Betrayal is every storyteller works with a mental health provider or a therapist life coach in each season to unpack a certain part of their story and a little bit of a preview for season five, as Soska is working with Jessica Baum. They do just specializes in amago therapy, which is really understanding,
like it's in her child work. And you know, when I met Soskia, she really wanted to unpack her childhood and really figure out what is her relationship with her self worth and how she understands love and validation that ultimately led her to My Club and Good And we hear those conversations in her therapy sessions. But it is really like it is important because as much as we can't control lour Owens, we can't control Mike clepen Goood.
All we can do is really a look internally at ourselves and say, it's not our fault, but how did I get here? And it's just a really fascinating conversation and it's worked to be done, and like to do that work and to have that perspective, you should be proud of yourself.
Yeah, and I appreciate that. I also just understand that. Yeah, I mean, my environment has obviously influenced me. And I've also went back into my childhood and I've seen why I've become the way that I have and why I take certain actions and subject myself to certain people. Maybe there was a lack of something in my childhood that I'm you know, seeking and there's certain things that I've uncovered.
But ultimately too, I think it's just as important in order to heal from that and overcome it, you have to accept accountability that while you were doing the best with what you could, you know you are still someone like you made decisions to put yourself in those in a position like that doesn't make it right, doesn't make it right that someone took advantage of me or anybody else.
But there is the Okay, Hey, I want to better myself, so I need to understand that, Like I found my way here, but I can also take myself out of it. I mean, we're all doing our best right, so there's no victim blaming that should be had. It's more just, Hey, I am a human being, for the better and for the worse. I've made decisions in my life. My environment's impacted me. But I also want to be a better human. So how can I make sure that I don't find
myself in this position again? You know what steps do I need to take to become stronger and more resilient and just have more self love because I believe that me with more self love again would have never interacted with somebody like her.
Yeah.
I think something too that's so interesting from my perspective is the way that his emotions have shifted over You've seen it, oh yeah, over the last nine months. It's you know, there's times where he's really angry, there's times where he's said there's times where he's willing to forgive, and then there's times where he's like, no, I'm actually really mad. So to see this rollercoaster of emotion over the past nine to ten months has been interesting from my perspective.
We talk about that a lot on Betrayal, about how progress is in a straight line, and like healing isn't linear, and sometimes you're just going around because you're meeting the experience a different phases of your own healing journey and your own like you're reading, you're engaging in certain books and podcasters and like material to better yourself, and so it makes you look at your experience in a different way. You know, you were talking about what are you reading right now?
Yeah, the artist's probably not the best of that show, but but like you're constantly you're trying to but you're working through your experience, and so it's going to bring up complicated feelings about different choices and the different fallout.
The last thing I want to say about the betrayal, but I think the audience is really going to relate to, is your journey with the justice system, because this is something that we cover a lot. You know, I deal with storytellers that you know, despite fear, despite being in a really dangerous situation, they couldn't get a protection from abuse. They really had to fight tooth and nail to get
any acknowledgment from the court system. And so what is complicated about your story as someone who's actually being able to navigate the criminal justice system pretty seamlessly in ways that our storytellers actually struggle to, which is going to be really hard for some of our listeners to listen to. But it's fascinating. What is it like to be in a courtroom like in the scene that you were just telling me about. It's a serious place, serious people. Yeah,
but what are we even talking about here? There's not even a real pregnancy. It's absurd.
Yeah, like that duality is mind beat.
Yeah. I had a little level of confidence early on, probably because watching so much law and order growing up. So I, as people found out, early on, I had so much confidence that I self represented, which I didn't do for too long, but I showed up with my glasses and my tucked in shirt and my briefcase and yeah, but I ultimately thought, hey, look like this is a ridiculous claim, and I'm the one that's telling the truth. I mean, all I have to do is just speak
my truth. So I did have a level of confidence, which again I would also say based on like I played you know, d you want Division one football, I was on the batchlock, I was in high stress environments, so to me, I had a level of comfort and confidence going into the courtroom and truth on my side. That being said, I realized very quickly that I could not keep up with the jargon, you know, the court jargon that I was like, oh wait, I'm over here raising hand. I'm like, I don't even know if I
can I speak? Can I not? It was a surreal experience, and obviously I really I was like, look, I have to take this seriously because I could get caught up in a technicality even though I'm telling the truth, I could get caught up on some technicality where she could end up then you know, winning, right.
And it's a really.
Hard lesson to learn, especially about our justice system. That's sometimes the last thing that matters is actually the truth.
Right. They have again, like there's technicalities here and there, and you start seeing these arguments be brought up, like by her counsel, where I'm like, that's ridiculous, but they're just trying to stick on one little exception and it's like, but that could blow the whole thing up. I like, you have to if you have one little hole in the argument, they can just blow that up and then say then just say the rest of it is no
longer usable, And that is what really I realized. I'm like, this is actually very like you have to be so specific and you you really can't have any flaws and your arguments, and so I'm obviously I have legal representation and now, and that's helped out a lot. And I got that, you know, because of the privilege that I've had of being on reality television and being a celebrity to some degree. Most people don't have that luxury. If I wasn't a celebrity, I wouldn't have had the support.
And obviously the previous victims they did not have that support. I think that is something that rightfully has agitated some people. They go, this is you know, lucky for you, I mean, because I wish I could have had support, and I'm very blessed for that, but it is unfortunate that if you have some level of status, you have a better
chance of navigating the court system. I think there are a lot of victims out there that are afraid because they don't have the financial resources, they don't have the legal representation, and it can be a very scary thing when you go in front of a judge and you know, you don't know what words to say, and all sudden you're up against someone's legal counsel that has money, and
they just start hammering you with these technicalities. And yeah, I mean again, I've watched the previous victims get run out of court because she had more money, more resources.
Has she bankrupted any of them like you could have easily?
Yeah, well she's I mean she's cost them thousands of thousand of dollars. We're talking sixty eighty thousand dollars. That's just money that's gone poof. And so yeah, I mean, maybe not bankrupted them, but has financially harmed them. I mean that's money that could have been, you know, put anywhere else.
They both have children, so I was gonna say, like a college, And that was That's a conversation that I had with one of the other victims was do I want to fight this or do I want to use this money for my kids futures? And that was a really hard conversation.
Yeah, what do you guys want the Betrayal audience to know about your show?
I would like the Betrayal audience to know that the story is got the similar elements of the Betrayal show. It's got the manipulation, the fraud, the deception, all of those things. But as I've been working on this project, I think the best part has been meeting and connecting with all of the people who have lived it. I think Clayton and I have talked for probably over thirty
hours on tape. I've really gotten to know Clayton, I've really gotten to know some of the other victims, and hearing their stories and seeing what they've been through has
been really eye opening. And also, you know, a lot of times you think it's just one victim, and you know it affected Clayton's life, but it's the collateral damage of everyone that's involved and the wave of destruction that goes along with it that is really the most impactful part to me, because you can see how one woman's choices really affect so many people.
Yeah, and the piggyback off that I would say I think with this story really highlights is the power of community, and I hope it inspires those that listen to find their own communities and understand that nothing should be fought alone. You know, individuals that go through something similar a lot
of times they carry a lot of shame. And I was certainly in that same position, and I remember when it first went public, I was like, this is going to ruin me, and actually it going public was the greatest thing that ever happened because there was an army of people that were willing to rally around me. But I didn't necessarily even need an army. It would have just you know, having two or three people in my corner,
I mean, makes all the difference. So I think we all are fighting our own battles, and a lot of times, you know, people that are listening to these true crime series, I think a lot of people they're able to sympathize. They've went through they know someone who's went through something similar, they've experienced it. This story, I really think it just highlights the power of that community in that anyone that's going through something similar knows of someone going through something similar.
Keep in mind how powerful your support can be for somebody and help them get through a dark time.
Yeah, well, thank you so much for being here today and sharing a little bit about your story.
Where can people get your podcasts?
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, anywhere you listen to podcasts, and a five star rating goes a long way. So new episodes every Thursday