Episode 6: Sarah’s Story

Content warning. This episode contains talk of addiction. If you were someone you know is struggling with addiction, there are resources in our show notes for today's episode. This episode will feature legal declarations given by Sarah and Charles Warren. The voice of Sarah is read by Kat Protano and the voice of Charles is read by Dylan Saunders.

I had struggled with drug and alcohol use since I was like younger, and I just, you know, I was really lost. We moved up to California and I had started using math.

In my head. Just really wasn't screw down street.

The first time I speak with Sarah Warren, she's in the car during an outing from rehab with her father Paul. He calls and puts Sarah on speaker. I asked her to start at the beginning.

I think because of my drug use and everything, Like, our family was fighting a lot and I just wanted I wanted out, and I thought running away would somehow fix it. I think I was just really kind of spiteful at the time, and I kind of wanted to, like, you know, like fuck you to my parents. I'm going to like do something really crazy, and I just like got a lot more than.

I bargained for, and there was a lot Sarah didn't bargain for, especially once she got involved with Carmen Puliafido, the dean of the medical school at USC. That relationship led to a cycle of drugs and rehab that had no end in sight. But now she's decided to talk on the record, so maybe there is a way out for her after all. My name is Paul Pringle and

I met Carmen Puliafido working as a prostitute. I had like a lady pimp at the time, who connected us through a website called Backpage that I was.

Not aware I was even on.

She had set up a profile and he had his own profile on that site, found mine and contacted who he.

Thought was me, but it was really this woman.

And then he came to a hotel room out in Branchio Cucamonga and met me there for the first time. That first night, we used meth together, we had sex. I got his number that night. I could tell he had money because he just didn't like hesitate to give me more when I asked for it, and usually that was something that people would argue about. So from then on he would contact me, not that lady, to come see and it just escalated really like quickly to where you know, he would take me out to dinner and

There came a time where he just.

He has such a big personality that it really turned me off and I had decided that I wasn't going to see him, and I stopped seeing for about two weeks.

But then she found herself in a dangerous situation. A man she met online invited her to fly to Portland, Oregon, but when she met him there, he frightened her. She didn't have the money to get home, and she was not going to call her parents for help.

I was desperate at the time, you know, and I just felt really unsafe at the situation, Like the man was not who he said he was, and like kind of turned violent, and I didn't know who to turn to. And I just I knew Carmen would be that he could have to fly me back out, and I knew he would be interested, and so I called him and he flew me back out to California and ended up putting me in the Hilton for a couple of months and then later.

Helping me get an apartment.

Juliafido paid Sarah's rent, he bought her clothes, paid for trips, and he bought her drugs.

Like if he brought me like a large supply of heroin, you know, that was like six hundreds, seven hundred dollars, But if he got like d that's like more expensive. Or if he brought like a stash of roxies, those are really expensive.

Roxies is a street name for a brand of voxy codone. Pulliafido doesn't seem concerned about the money. He has a surgery practice, not to mention his job as dean of the medical school. But he didn't let either of those get in the way of a good time.

His office was in like Beverly Hills, when he would most of the time come by after, but sometimes before. I remember one time that he was really late and he was telling me about how like a doctor like him always makes his patience wait at least four hours. So he was late to seeing a patient because he was getting high.

And well, the Fido didn't seem that concerned about keeping his two lives all that separate. He would sometimes bring Sarah to the Kech campus.

There were times he would set up doctor's appointments for me at USC. He just introduced me to all at first. He always says his niece, and I know it's like surprise, like this nineteen year old niece or twenty year old I've had we'se drugs like in the car. We were definitely both high. One time, I think it was like three am, and we like went to his office and had a lot of fun.

I mean like used.

Drugs in his office and raided the T shirts and stuff, uh, methamphetamines, ecstasy, GHB, sometimes ketamine, sometimes like MDMA. Sometimes I would always use heroin, and then later on he started using heroin too, pretty much anything.

And Sarah confirms what her mother had told me about pulling your FEEDO delivering drugs to her while she was in rehab.

One rehab I actually got kicked out of because he later came back and brought me champagne and like dildo's and like xanax bars, and then like four am the next morning he brought like math and a torch. I think if I, like, had I not been kicked out of Creative Care, I probably would have gotten sober sooner.

You know.

However, like he found me like I was a prostitute just having sex with people for money. So in a way he kind of like took me out of that CD world and like put me into his own kind.

These stories of pull your FEETO enabling a recovering addict to relapse, these are the details that should force our editors to act. I asked Sarah to tell me what happened at the hotel Constance, the incident that was my starting point for this story.

So we were at the Hotel Constance, and we I had stayed there the night prior, you know, using like meth and heroin, and I also had.

Like taken a drug called GHB.

It was me and Carmen, and the night before there was like another mail escort.

There, a male escort for Sarah to have sex with so Puliafido could watch. According to Sarah, he's an avid voyeur.

I just took way too much.

He was on like like escort websites, like looking at male escorts to come in for us, and I was like getting ready. I was putting on makeup, and like right before I overdosed, he was just taking a lot of photos of me. I even have those photos now, and I can see in the photos that I was like starting to just heavily perspire, and then right before I overdosed, he was like trying to have sex with me. And then I think I just like passed out, and that's when I think he might have like left me

The fact that they had to move hotel rooms may have saved Sarah's life if they've been able to stay in the room. She thinks Pulliofido, a practicing doctor, would have let her sleep off her overdose and she may never have woken up again. Sarah also tells me that Pulliofido had made sure that the cops didn't find everything they had in the room.

I think the police found the drugs, well, they just found the math because Carmen, I guess, was able to hide the heroine, the bongs, some of the math, and the jeep. He hid it in the stairwell like a couple floors down in the stairwell, and when we went back to the hotel, we went got it.

Sarah and Carmen Pullliofido had gone back to the hotel. That's news to me. Devon Khan, the whistleblower who worked at the hotel Constance and who had first told me about what happened there, didn't have that detail. Sarah woke up six hours after her overdoes in the hospital. That same night, she and Puliofido returned to the hotel to continue their party in another room. It says something about pullio Fido's sense of his own invulnerability, even though the

After I woke up.

I was probably only in the hospital for like thirty minutes. They did a walk test and then they released me. I called Carmen and he came and picked me up, and we went back to the hotel and got another room, and when got the drugs out of the stairwell, he was just so proud of himself.

Sarah tells me that this is not the only time she ended up in the hospital after doing drugs given to her by Six months later, they're at the Balboa Bay Resort, a fancy waterfront hotel in Newport Beach.

He gave me all the drugs. He watched me use them, but then he left when I started spinning out. So this is like a meth overdose, or like technically it was like a meth psychosis, So like it's not an overdose, like you fall asleep, like I went insane, and I was on the roof yelling. I was talking with like aliens and demons, and the world was ending, and I was like very violent.

The hotel staff founder on the roof screaming. They called the cops, who came with paramedics.

The police came and I was trying to fight them and they had to.

Sit a me.

Sarah tells me there was someone else there that day, her sometimes boyfriend, a Huntington Beach DJ named Don Stokes. Stokes is seventeen years older than Sarah and, like her, struggling to beat a drug addiction. I ask Mary Anne and Paul Warren if they'll put me in touch with him, and they do. Don Stokes and I meet for lunch at a family restaurant in Huntington Beach. So when did you first start.

To struggle with.

Addiction?

I believe it was somewhere in my mid twenties.

I thought, in my eyes, like a cup of coffee in the morning, to some people, some folks can't function without that first cup of coffee. I would wake up, do a small amount of math, and continue onward.

With my day.

And so, how did you meet Sarah.

At one of my shows?

I showed up and she was living in a complex next door, and we started speaking and she says, you're a cowboy, Yes, you're honest, Yes you're self employed. Yes, these are not three traits that apparently women find together nowadays, and she couldn't believe it. I saw hers just learning and exploring life and being fun loving again. She was very young. I was in silver livings drugs. I was not using drugs.

Don was in a solber living program in Orange County after getting arrested for drugs. It was a condition of his parole. But he didn't stay for long after meeting Sarah Warren because along with Sarah came Carmen Puliofido.

I first met Carmen three four days later after I met Sarah. She introduced him to me and was very elusive regarding who he was.

He was a friend, is what I was told.

I had no idea that he was supplementing her lifestyle by taking care of the rant, by taking care of a number of superfluous amenities, I'll call it less amenities.

Does that include the drugs.

The drugs were just present, whether they came from her, whether they came from him, whether I brought something.

To the table, because I had.

Broken my own promise to myself at that point in time and started dabbling once again, even behind the backs of those that trusted me from the Sober Living.

At first, Puliafido tried to get rid of the new guy. He threatened to cut off Sarah's drugs and rent money if he didn't dumped on Stokes, but Sarah ignored him, so Pulliofido changed course, inviting don to join them for their parties, like the one at the ball Bola Bay Resort that ended with Sarah on the roof.

I had been told that Sarah was going to be going into a treatment program of some type, and the date came where she was going to be going in. She said, okay, I'm going to be staying down in Newport. We're going to go get a hotel for a week, and you're welcome to come down. I've asked Carmen and he said okay. So I informed the management at Sober Living that I was going to be staying elsewhere for the night and got a haul passed basically for the day,

I got very, very high, very quick.

At which point in time, Sarah starts getting louder and louder, and I said, I'm on probation at this juncture, Okay, I need you to rain it in a bit, otherwise I'm going to have to leave because you're causing a disturbance. And she's laughing uncontrollably and just slipping further and further into this different person.

She wasn't talking to me anymore.

She was talking to herself, to other voices in her head. She starts yelling about how much meth is in the room. I said, I cannot be here for this. I got up, put my clothes on, and headed out the door, called for a ride, and stood on the corner of PCHM and the street at Balboa waiting for my ride for.

Well over twenty five thirty minutes.

In that span, I saw no less than a half dozen police units roll in to take Sarah inticustody as she was on the balcony and running through the hotel wearing nothing but a bathrobe.

Screaming about all the method fetamines.

In the room that night, going back to the sober living that I had told him I was going to be staying elsewhere, climbing onto the top rack of a bunk bed and being spun out like nobody's business.

Obviously, I couldn't.

Sleep, but to lay there shaking and going, my God, I hope she's okay. I was very concerned for her health, for her mental well being, for her legal wellbeing as well in that scenario, because again she was being taken into custody.

She was released the next day. Finally I get her on the phone.

She said, I'm really truly sorry about putting you in that scenario myself. Had I been there when the police arrived, I would have gone to prison for six years because I was on probation. I was being kicked out of this sober living because I obviously tested dirty after that night. So I stayed for a few days in Sarah's old apartment and then literally packed up a couple bags and headed to the Phoenix House. In fact, I was informed while I was there, like Carmen was paying for my

Don saw this as pulledio Fido doing him a favor, but I'm not so sure. Don has seen a lot and Nadan had a lot to lose. Don talked paying for a storage and it would be a small price to pay for Don stokes silence.

I was facing jail time.

And I needed to get this community service or this community labor done. So I broke it off as much like fun, and I use fun very loosely as everything was. Having him like touched me and having to be intimate with him was by far the hardest aspect of all this because I'm not attracted to him, you know, And you know, I loved that lifestyle, but I also really like hated it because it felt like he was really obsessed with me and he really couldn't understand why I wanted like other people.

And not him.

Right before I went into rehab for this final time, we were talking about looking at houses and stuff.

I knew that I just was unhappy, and I knew he had to get out of my life for me to get sober. I went into.

Detox November ninth of twenty sixteen, and that's the last.

Time I saw him. Well, I take that back.

He came to my community labor one day and I saw him from afar. But I, like, you know, told my supervisor that, like, I do not want to see this man, and like you need to tell him to leave.

Sarah's out of rehab almost five months sober and wants to tell her story, and she encourages her teenage brother to talk to me too. I heard a little about Puliafido's involvement with Charles Warren from his mother, Mary Anne, but Charles has a lot more to say. Again. These are his words from an official transcript read by an actor.

My initial encounter with doctor Carmen Puliaffido would be about the age, at approximately the age seventeen. My sister had invited me over to one of the many apartments that she had gotten over the course of time that she had spent with him.

And he, you know, he was just surprising character.

He is a sixty five year old guy that partied like harder than I had ever seen anybody my age party. He took methamphetamine to a whole another level. He would go to liquor stores and bring me with him buy kegs of beer.

My first encounter was when he was providing me with.

Nitrous oxide and other substances such as marijuana xanax.

There was ecstasy involved, and there was also heroin.

Again, Polifido didn't bother to keep the two sides of his life apart. He would sometimes be partying with seventeen year old Charles Warren, what would still take work calls.

He would answer calls and then he'd be like, all right, this girl really wants to suck my dick. Be quiet, so I'm going to answer this. And I went to his office as well.

I was taken down to the bookstore by his secretary, who was an Asian woman, and she seemed equally as scared of me as she seemed of Carmen, which really made me uncomfortable.

Every time I saw him.

If I was home alone at the house and I wanted something, I could call him up and he would send a package that's filled with alcohol.

Even ecstasy at the time. If I was asking for.

It, and definitely marijuana. He would give it to an uber driver and say it's important medical supplies or it's important school supplies that need to get there, immediately send it over from Pasadena to me. He had like a metal box that he would keep drugs in. There's a felt wining and he keeps his emergency dash of math under the felt lining. So you can go in there with a knife and prop up the felt lining and get under there, and there will be meth under there. It's guaranteed.

What I hear from Charles Ward makes for the most damning allegations against Pulliafido yet, since Charles was a minor when Pulliafido first gave him drugs. Devon Maharaj, the editor in chief of the La Times, had told me he was quote open to more reporting when he killed the first Pulliafido story. I didn't believe that, but either way, this is more reporting. Now. The team and I go

As sort of a sort of king pong back and forth of adding detailed, adding explanations, taking some things out that they thought, you know, we might not need restructuring here and there. It was a very contentious process.

Reporter Sarah Pargini.

Any journalist, any reporter or editor could tell you that at times, especially when it comes to an investigation, the editing process isn't always fun, but it was the first time in my experience where.

It wasn't just.

The sort of standard back and forth editing process of like maybe you get a little bit angry at the editor, or the editor might think like you are not seeing clearly on something, and you sort of have a little bit of a bicker about that. It was just an actually contentious process that was upsetting.

Shelby tells us his story is at the final stage of lawyering for publication, but days pass with still no word from Shelby's boss Mark. I'm so frustrated that I tell the Times legal counsel that if the story is killed again, I'll complain to HR. Not long after that, Mark tells me to come to his office. I've never seen him so angry. He slaps his desk and jabs his fingers at me. The newsroom handles its own problems, he says, we do not involve HR. It seems like

Suddenly it's being kind of diverted to this other editor who has just arrived, has no idea how we've gotten to this point, and it felt like a delay tactic. Frankly, the edits came back in increments, and there were edits, there were questions, there were requests to tighten certain sentences or cut or move, but we address those really quickly. I mean almost within hours of getting the edits. We immediately turned it around and it's like back into that very slow waiting period.

Reporter Adam Lmar is dumbfounded by this new editor's judgments about the story.

He took the draft and he basically threw it out and suggested his own draft that he thought would be better to publish. And we looked at it and we just thought it was not publishable, that it wasn't up to the standards of the La Times. There were certain things that were that just right off the bat didn't make sense. He wanted to take Sarah Warren off the record. Sarah Warren was on the record, cooperative source, our most

You have this kind of bulletproof, well reported story that has taken a lot of resources sitting in the queue where you're like, what the hell is going on? Step reading out the public health concerns, the public interest concerns of like, well, he's still seeing patients, Sarah one's still trying to deal with her drug addiction. The sources are pressing for progress, and it waits I can't convey how each day it goes unpublished intensifies the frustrations and takers of this team of people.

The back and forth with Mark Duvison and editor Matt doy goes on for months. I noticed that the story won't run during the La Times Festival of Books, which is hosted by USC. It doesn't run during USC's May commencement ceremonies. I hear for my longtime confidential source at USC, a person I call Tommy Trojan. He tells me that there are rumblings among Nikias's lieutenants about an embarrassing story that might be coming, but not until after the end

So we kind of had to comb through this draft to see, well, what has been cut. There were a couple of key cuts that were like, Wow, we don't I don't think we can let this pass. One of them was the whistle blower. There was a whistle blower who had called the USC president's off.

The whistleblower is Devon Cohn.

He was cut from the draft, which was really disheartening because this is the only indication that we had that US soon knew that PULLI Fido was in the presence of a young woman who'd overdose, and I'm telling him that was being taken out, which was something that we couldn't really allow that to happen. We emailed Mark and we said we have some concerns about this draft in terms of holding USC accountable. We outlined maybe some other concerns, and we asked to have a meeting.

The reporting team. Harriet, Sarah, Adam, Matt and me all agree that this is one cut too far. That Devon Cohn has to stay in the story. Harriet Ryan, we.

All worked in a part of the La Times old newsroom that was called Baja. The newsrooms arranged like California, and so when you get far away from the city desk and the big offices, you get into Baja and then Cabo like way out in the in the end of the building, and so we all worked out there and so we could talk over our cubicles and stuff, but we were going down to meet with the big bosses. We would walk down this like long quarter that went past all of our colleagues to the big glass offices.

Adam l. Mark.

We talk about the whistleblower and how he's being cut. Mark just kept saying, well, you don't have a second corroborating source. It was not This is really important fact to holding USC accountable in this story. This is an indication that USC knew what was going on. How do we beef this up or how do we make this even stronger? It was just not for me to cut it. You don't have a secondary source. We just we just

It just got more and more intense, to the point where I remember being told to stop shouting. Paul and I had had such scarring experiences with the management that we're just like we're ready to go, like we're ready to fight at any point because of what we've seen in the past. It was just clear like they were going to try to take this guy out, and like, you take him out, you're taking out the accountability of USC.

It was a surreal moment. Why would do we care whether this is already going to be the worst day of Max nicky's' his life. What is the implication of that that we should ease up on USC because it's already going to be a bad day for them. Up to then and since then, I've never heard anyone say on an investigative story about a powerful institution, you know what, guys, this is already going to be the worst day of

Our investigation is filled with bad facts about Puliafido, about the leadership of USC. We have bad facts confirmed in court records, through videos and photos, in nine to one one recordings with witnesses, and on the record interviews. But it seems like our editors want to get rid of the one bad fact that looks the worst for USC.

I have a sense of just like blood rushing in my ears, so so frustrated and I not knowing what I want to scream or burst into tears that this thing was happening again. When I think about the class on Marx Walls, I just picture it just sort of like pulse, like the rage and frustration in that room.

It was a turning point.

I just remember saying, Okay, if that's your decision, we need to go talk because we're gonna decide what we're going to do. And that's code for we're taking our names off the story. That's a huge deal because they're not going to run the story without our names.

The meeting has left all of us more determined to restore Devon Khan to the story, determined to get the story into the paper.

There was no way for the story not to be run.

These bad facts have to see the light of day. Dave On Maharaj, Mark Duvson, and Matt Doig deny that they did anything wrong in their handling of the USC investigation, and they maintained that any negative betrayal of their actions is false. Next time on Fallen Angels, our fight to publish reaches a boiling point. At the LA Times, she was just like.

Real aggressively, let's go, let's get to the bottom of this.

And here was like a person power saying like, okay, that's not okay.

Nobody should speak to you the way, but.

Our sources are starting to lose faith at the time.

Why hey man, I've given you everything I could possibly give you.

What is it?

And we discovered that Sarah Warren is not alone.

Door was like, oh, this is my friend, Carmen.

I mean, in a million years looking at this man, I would never have believed he was the dean of USC Medical.

It's insane.

My parents started contacting the police about what was going on.

That's next time on Fallen Angels. Fallen Angels, The Story of California Corruption is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with Best Case Studios. I'm Paul Pringle. This show is based on my book Bad City, Peril and Power in the City of Angels. Fallen Angels was written by Isabel Evans, Adam pink and Brent Katz. Isabel Evans is our producer. Brent Katz is co producer. Associate producers are