Welcome to Katie's crib a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. What advice would you give to a parent, like, if they suspect a friend of theirs has MVP, what would be an appropriate way to recognize and support them without overstepping any boundaries.
I understand how uncomfortable this is. I understand how terific it is to think that someone in your life is doing this. So I think we just all have to keep in mind, like what the stakes actually are. If this is happening, you have to report it. We always recommend to people that they report it to CPS and law enforcement because it is a matter for both of those entities. And as my colleague, Detective Weber always says, report it to both and hope that one of them knows what they're doing.
Hello, everybody, Welcome back to Katie's CRIBB. How'd you like that intro? You're getting a really chill Katie today, isn't that interesting? And I got a great night sleep last night. That's not the norm at all. I think it's like my body's in full on preparation because I'm about to embark on a whole bunch of days where I don't have any childcare support. Adam is super busy in pretzel Land. My parents aren't here, my nanny isn't here, et cetera, etc.
So it's like I'm in the calm before the shit storm. People. I'm really excited about today's episode. It's probably one of the most interesting Katie's Crib episodes we've ever done. I didn't know much about the topic. I've done a ton of research in prep all for our guest today, who goes by the name Andrea Dunlop. Andrea is amazing. She is an author, she is a consultant, She is a podcast host herself, and she is coming on the pod today to talk all about something called Munchausen by Proxy
and what her personal connection is to the topic. Her previous novels include Losing the Light, She Regrets Nothing, We Came here to Forget, Broken Bay, and her most recent one, Women Are the Fiercest Creatures. Andrea is the host, like I mentioned, of a true crime podcast called Nobody Should Believe Me, and the show is dedicated to stories about Munchausen by Proxy, and she talks about what her experience was like working closely with people that have been through
such a painful situation. She's also the co creator of Munchausen Support, which is a nonprofit dedicated to providing resources for frontline professionals, families, and survivors dealing with Munchausen by proxy. Andrea lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband and her two children, Fiona and Column Welcome to Katie's Crib. Andrea, Hi, Andrea Hi. It's such a pleasure to meet you.
Oh so nice to meet you too.
Thank you for sending me so many books. I'm so impressed by the amount of things you have written. Our listeners are all cut up in the know from our intro to today's episode of How Impressive You Are. Munchausen by proxy is something that a lot of people don't know about, other than like the things they might have seen in movies. You know a few storylines here and there. Can you explain to our audience what exactly Munchausen bi proxy is?
Yes, and thank you, Thank you so much for having me on, Katie. Is such a pleasure to be here with you. So munchhause On bi proxy is the criminal act of exaggerating, inducing, or fabricating illness in your child Munchausen, which is called the official DSM. That's basically when when someone does those same things themselves, so again exaggerating, inducing or fabricating an illness in yourself for the purposes of
sympathy and attention. Munchausen by proxy is the word I use the most because that's the one people are familiar with, if they're familiar with it at all, right, But then I think that also adds to a lot of the sort of confusion and mystery around the topic. They are pretty closely related. But of course, wow, Munchausen biproxy is especially important because it involves abuse of a child, whereas Munchausen does not.
And when you have Munchausen or Munchausen by proxy, do they know what they're doing or is it different case by case.
That's a great question, because it's a really important point. So Munchausen and Munchausen bi proxy are characterized by intentional deception, you know, in the case of parents, like there are some parents that may take their kid to the doctor
too much because they're anxious. Obviously, you and I are both moms, especially like first time moms those things are just in a different bucket, right, and much easier to deal with, because then if the mom just really needs some help, or even something really serious like postpartum psychosis,
then it's a question of okay, this needs help. They are not intentionally harming their children with these offenders, And again with those munch house and behaviors that we're talking about, they understand what they're doing, they understand right from wrong. In a criminal context, that's a really important distinction because I think that people get very caught up in these cases with what's going on mentally with the mother, and I think that's just because it's so hard to wrap
your head around this behavior. And I would argue that we should also be treating offenders when appropriate, But of course you always have to be looking out for the well being of the children. And so when you're doing these investigations into this, what they're looking for is again intentional deception, when someone is lying about what's in the previous record, or inventing things where their child has tested negative for something and then they go to another doctor
and say they tested positive for it. So that kind of thing god again very different than like someone seeking a second opinion, or someone who just has a child that has a medical a bit of medical mystery thing, right, I mean, of course that happens.
How can you identify if someone has Munchausen by proxy? Is it just like it's like the intent is different.
I've become very convinced talking to experts that I think we should be aware of like the warning signs. And then also warning signs are not evidence. So the only way that you can determine whether or not abuse has occurred is to do an investigation that should be both a CPS investigation and a criminal investigation, because CPS and law enforcement, you know, they have two really different jobs. This is something I've learned a lot about that's actually
been really fascinating for me. I think for parents, like CPS is this sort.
Of looming that's child protective Service? Sorry, child Protective Service? No, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good.
So CPS's job is to determine whether or not a child is safe in the home, right, so not to determine whether or not a crime has been committed. Law enforcement is determining whether a crime has been committed. So child abuse is of course a crime, and so really the only way that you can figure out whether this has been committed is to have someone do a full
medical record review. So again looking for those discrepancies, those kinds of discrepancies that I mentioned, sort of someone going to a bunch of different doctors and telling those doctors different things. We see a lot of like parents interfering with tests.
This is wild. Yeah, and okay, I'm interrupting. Okay, So what are the things that so parents can fake something? They can like you said, go to one doctor, go to another doctor, lie and said something came out positive, that was negative. They're actually meddling with medical information.
So when you take your child to the pediatrician, what does that look like? You bring them in there and the pediatrician says, mom, what's going on with your child? Right?
Everything normal? We have normal peeps, We have normal poos.
How are they eating?
How are they eating?
How are they sleeping? Yeah? Are there any other problems? So I think that sometimes this gets mischaracterized as something that can only be pulled off by this sort of manipulative mastermind type of person, but in fact, it's unfortunately very easy to commit. So doctors and pediatricians are trained
to take the word of their patients. And that's as it should be, right because, of course, most parents would never lie to a doctor about what's going on with their child, especially some of these things we see in babies and younger children. It's just as simple as a mom going in and saying, oh, my child's just not
gaining weight and I don't know why. And then you have these progressive interventions of first they put them on one kind of feeding tube, and then they put them on a surgical feeding tube and have all of these interventions because they can't figure out why the child is not gaining weight. And then the reason the child is not gaining weight is because the mother is not feeding that child. But a doctor sitting in an office with a mother would never know that from a ten minute conversation.
That's the kind of thing that happens in these cases.
Wow, okay, tell us a little bit about your sister please, and your own personal relationship to Munchausen by proxy.
Yeah, So starting off with some very important disclaimers. My sister has not been charged with a crime. She has been investigated twice. We have not been in touch with each other for about twelve years now. My family and I fell out. She cut us out of her lives after the first investigation. So that is how I learned about this. That's where I come to it. I had these experiences with her before her children were born, where
she had some of these again Munchhaus and behaviors. Right. So, the most notable of being she had said she was pregnant with twins and lost them about six months in. I completely thought she was really pregnant and it, however, it all sort of unraveled. She did not lose that pregnancy when she said she did. It's very much our suspicion, collective suspicion that she was never pregnant at all. That was the most alarming instance of lying about something about
her health. There were others. She shaved part of her head in high school and said she was losing her hair, and so that pattern had been going on for a long time. It was just this thing that would come in and out a bit. And then after her first child was born, that's when we got really scared in because we had those fears. She really cut us out of her life.
What was she doing to her first kid that set off the alarms? Before you were cut out of her life, did you have personal experience of things that you saw that she was doing. Obviously she had a pattern growing up for whatever reason, and now she has a kid and it transfers on to this child.
Yeah, And of course, like I want to put all the caveats because I want to say first of all, that I do have a lot of documentation of a lot of things, So I'll just say that that first off. But yeah, I'm not a mental health professional. I'm not going to diagnose my sister with anything. I can only sort of say what we observed and what we were told. So her son was born a couple of months. Early premies are, I've come to learn, extremely common in these cases.
Now I will say too that, like anything that I mentioned, whether it's eating issues, premies, cistic fibrosis, just because we see a lot of them in these cases does not mean that we should be looking upon parents who have premies.
Yeah, like, oh my gosh, you were a premature labor correct prox.
It's not a causal relationship that way. In fact, doctor Mark Feldman, who's one of the top experts in the country who I've gotten really close with. He has a book, Dying to Be Ill, that profiles a bunch of people who have much house and munch as of by proxy, and he had a couple of perpetrators actually tell him how they induced premature labor. He was born premature and then had this failure to thrive thing happening. He was
just having trouble gaining weight. We were concerned because it was progressing towards getting a GET tube, which is the surgically placed tube. My parents went to my family doctor, who had been our family doctor for like one hundred years, and really at that point, we didn't know anything. We didn't know the definition of this. We didn't know this was really a thing. Just was like a bad gut feeling, specifically because of the previous fake pregnancy and all that
sort of lead up. And so she was the one who gave us that term, and she suggested that my mom speak to my sisters, her son's pediatrician. My mom went and did that, and we didn't know what was going to happen after that. What happened was CPS did an emergency removal. We did not know CPS was going
to be called. You don't know if you've never had until you know a golement, right, if you've never been in that situation where like CPS gets called, then you have no idea what to expect, and it was very scary, and we really tried to sort of like maintain that contact with her, and my parents were just beside themselves. They didn't know what to do. That investigation really came to nothing. There was a CPS investigation, the state did not make any attempts to take custody of her children.
It sort of just fizzled out.
Did he end up getting the tube? Did it go down that track?
I believe not. Unfortunately, CPS revealed to my sister that my mother had made that call, which they're not supposed to do. You're supposed to be able to anonymously report to CPS. And again, of course she didn't report to CPS. She talked to the doctor. They revealed that information to it. So it put sort of an immediate division in my family of I can't believe you would ever think I would do this, And if you're not with me, you're against then you're dead to me, right, Yes, exactly exactly.
You mentioned in a previous interview in Vanity Fair that your nephew the one we're speaking of. I'm assuming it's this one, not her second child spent years suffering from a series of medical ailments. So if you've been out of touch, have you been able to find out anything since then? How did you find out that there was a CPS investigation a second time that she definitely was in charge all of that.
We found out about the second investigation because a police detective called us. So that was several years ago, and that was with her daughter. That investigation went from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty. Law enforcement was not involved for the first time, so the second time, law enforcement was involved.
When law enforcement gets involved in a case like this, one of the things they do is all of these collateral interviews, right, So they're looking to talk to family members, talk to the school teachers, any medical professionals treating the child, anything like that. Obviously, we did not have information about her daughter because we had never met her daughter, but we'd heard things here and there over the years. She's not in touch with anyone from my extended family anymore.
She's out of touch with all of her friends that she grew up with. But we did find out things here and there that she put on social media. She had another baby that was born very premature and did not make it. She posted a picture of that on social media, so we heard about that. Her daughter, than the one that she was investigated for, was born again very premature, so I think at about twenty four weeks, which, having been through a pregnancy, you'll know, that's very little so early.
That's like six months right right at the sort of right at the is it a viable pregnancy at all?
Yeah? Oh wow. The hospital that was treating her daughter posted like something on their care page about her, and a relative sent it to us. But really, we got this call from this police detective and then again they're not able to tell you that much about the investigation, but we just filled him in on our previous concerns and some of these previous events. Also, my sister was in the media, so she called up a reporter who was doing a series on what he has characterized as
falsely accused mothers. I sort of know bits and pieces I get, I guess is the answer.
Wow, And we just really don't know if your niece or nephew are thriving, if they're okay, if they're safe. My goodness, Now in your work, since this has so personally affected you, and your family because of her disease, which I guess she's never been technically diagnosed.
Well, yeah, and I do. I do want to make sure to put that caveat in now. Like everything I'm saying, this is information that's in the public record, it's accessible. No one gets diagnosed with Munchausen by proxy in the absence of being charged with a crime. Right. So even the famous case of our era, the Deiti Blanchard case, right, the Gypsy Rose case, the only one anyone's heard of, if they have heard of this at all, she was never charged with a crime, and she was never diagnosed
with Munchausen by proxy. Right, So it's not something that someone goes I'm having these tris now. I wish it was. I wish it was right where if someone was having right thoughts, having intrusive thoughts, they could go and seek help. Even another pretty famous modern era case is the Lacy Spears case. And she unfortunately killed her little boy, and she was sitting in prison for it and still said she didn't do it. It's not something where people take accountability for it.
Like, you're not going you're not seeking to be diagnosed, you're not seeking to be fixed, or you think nothing's wrong and that this is normal.
Correct, it's characterized by deception.
What has surprised you the most from the stories you've heard in learning from other MBP survivors.
Yeah, certainly the similarities and the patterns are very strong. So a lot of the feeding issues. Also a lot of seizure disorders, allegedly so seizures that no one else is witnessing. It's just an incredibly strong pattern. So I think that has been very surprising to think, like, oh, you have this very weird case if you look at it in isolation, but then if you look at it next to a bunch of other cases, they sort of
all look the same. And then I think the revelation that most of the experts that I've talked to have said, this is probably about as common as any other form of child abuse. Not every other family on the block. We all know somebody who we all have some sort of tangential experience with, like childhood sex abuse, right like, very few of us are going to go through our
life never meeting someone that was the survivor. And it's the same with this and that that's what the experts believe, and certainly my anecdotal experience having had the podcast out and hearing from a lot of people would lead me to believe that is true.
Also, wow, when you look back, is it like memento where you're like, you look back on her life and what she was like as a child, and you were like, oh my god, Like this has always been there. There was Munchausen.
I don't really. There's certainly things like once we were teenagers, like that thing with the hair and then the pregnancies, but I had a really nice childhood with her, like and that's one of the hardest things to square. And it was really beautiful for me to get to meet Hope you bar as siblings because we had a lot of those same experiences where we just think my relationship with this person ended in a really sad way. But I still have all of these memories of them growing
up and they were a part of my family. I think of it at this point as like a death, yeah, yeah, yeah, And so it's very hard to reconcile. Though this is a long time ago that this happened, there was a really long time that I was grieving losing that relationship. That's still hard some days.
The cases that you've quoted talked about so far in this episode. Do you think you could run us through quick?
Yeah? So the Hope You bar case is the one that we profiled in season one of my podcasts. We interviewed her, which was that was a very fascinating experience to sit down with her. So she is a woman who spent ten years in prison for abuse of her youngest child. The charges related to taking blood out of her daughter via a central line that was one that involved a fake cystic fibrosis diagnosis, and she poisoned her daughter.
So that yeah, these cases are very disturbing, but the good news is in that one her daughter, I believe just recently turned eighteen. Her and her other two kids, they have a great dad and wonderful supportive family. So they, as far as I know, are really thriving and did really well. And I think that is a that's a good story. That's a story of an intervention that went in a positive direction. Well. Yeah, the other case that I mentioned Lacey Spears, that was someone who killed her
four year old little boy via salt poisoning. She did spend some time in prison. I believe she's out now, and I believe her family stuck by her. It's very interesting to me to see how which way the family goes in a lot of these cases, because I've seen a lot of family members that do stand by the perpetrator and say she could never do this, she would never do this, regardless of what evidence is put in
front of them. I think that's something I've really learned in this process is that, like, people don't make decisions about what they believe based on evidence the way that we think they do right.
No, they make but on how they feel right exactly.
Their emotional truth. And like emotional is very strong, and like the resistance to the idea that a mother could do this, especially a mother who seems loving and loving is not acting in any way that seems psychologically abnormal. It's very disturbing to think that you could just have this like lovely, nice mom next door, and then she's
doing this in her secret life. The other case that is one that probably more people know about than any other one is the Dede Blanchard case, which was fictionalized on that show The Act, and then there's also a great HBO documentary.
Pole were obsessed with it.
Yes, Joey King, Yeah, purcha shark Cat played TV Blanchard, and so that is that is a very wild case. That is one in which the victim actually conspired with an internet boyfriend to murder her mother. Gipsy is in jail, I think for maybe like one more year and then she will be out on parole. But that sort of has an extra element of wildness because of the murder.
Wow, how has your personal experience with your sister and munch House in my proxy influenced you in raising your own children?
Yeah, that's a great question. There was a long period of my life where I didn't want to think about any of those events that had happened. Like there was a couple of years after that first investigation when it became very clear that I was not going to get to see my nephew grow up. Where I just couldn't even be in the room with a small child, you know.
So it's so painful. My life carried on. I published, I got married, I got pregnant, And it really was around the time that I got pregnant that I started working on my novel and realized, like, oh, I think everyone who becomes a parent, whatever your most difficult thing in your family is like it will come back up.
Yeah, sure, And so.
For sure that came up for me. And I think it's been really interesting because the bulk of the time that I've been working on the novel, the podcast, and this nonfiction book. Some days I think what am I doing? This is insane, like I've you know, through two pregnancies now in postpartum periods. But in fact it has been
cathartic and rewarding in a lot of ways. Every time I talk about what actually happened in my family, that's always hard, but I think talking to other people who've been through it, giving people a voice to like come on the show and talk about their experiences, getting some of these experts on the air, and just getting that there, that information out.
It's huge.
Yeah. I think one of the things that the situation within my family has really made me feel very helpless. I don't think the system worked as it should have worked. That is a very frustrating and helpless feeling. So I think like feeling like I could do a little something for the sort of overall cause or talk help make up.
Oh you're doing a lot of something. Tell us about the nonprofit you co founded called Munchausen Support.
Back in twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty one, I first started meeting with this committee that's part of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, which is just a big umbrella organization that has nurses and teachers and CPS workers and all kinds of people that just have anything to do with child abuse. And so they have a Munchausen Biproxy Committee, which is just a dedicated group
of professionals that works and shares resources. I'm now a member of that committee and one of my sort of functions on that committee was to try and help translate some of this kind of out of this very academic
sphere that it lives in. And so one of the first things I did was work with doctor Mark Feldman, who oversaw everything I did on this site, to create munch House and Support dot com, which is just an online resource where you can find like warning signs and information for therapists, information for teachers, for doctors, for CPS workers, for law enforcement. That's just making some of that really accessible.
That's awesome.
And then we're building on that work now and with one of my colleagues, b Yorker, who's incredible. She was, she's been like she was a nurse for thirty years. She's a lawyer, she was a professor of law. She's an incredible background in this. And she and our colleague Joe, who is a survivor themselves, are working on these survivor support groups and we actually have them for family members
as well. And then we're also working on just getting some more trainings out there talking to I've talked to a couple of people actually got in touch because of the podcast, getting some trainings at their hospital. Even doctors often don't know that much about this, which is sucks. Yeah, yeah, it's you would want everyone like.
To know so that there so if there's any red flags or Spidey sense that's going off, we have to protect the child.
Yeah, And unfortunately, in a lot of these situations, doctors really get vilified. I'm sure that is what happened in the media coverage of my sister's case, that they made it sound like this doctor was like out of line somehow to be reporting abuse, which is just insane. I mean, obviously, like in every state in the country, doctors are mandated reporters. People should be reporting. But I always worry that kind of media coverage is going to have a chilling effect.
I think it would be insane to think that it wouldn't.
Wow, how old your kids now?
My daughter is four and a half and my son is ten months old, so they're very Oh.
My god, there's so little. Okay, so we are no way shape for near the time yet where you'll have to be. Have you thought at all about if they ever asked about your sister or cousin on that side, like what that would be Like, I have.
Thought about that, and for now that's just a can I'm kicking down the road.
Yeah, yeah, you're got there.
We are years away. You're years away. I think that it'll just be a matter of, like any difficult thing, just finding age appropriate ways to to explain that so that it doesn't sound too scary. But it's like kids don't actually they think about who's there, they know who's.
They're never going to know her. It's going to be a.
Long time down the road before they start thinking about, oh, did you ever have a sister or anything like that. Yeah, I think it all.
You know, what advice would you give to a parent, like if they suspect a friend of theirs has MVP. What would be an appropriate way to recognize and support them without overstepping any boundaries.
It's really hard, and I can't tell you the number of messages I've gotten or like people that will just pull me aside when they see me in real life. I always want people to remember, I understand how uncomfortable this is. I understand how horrific it is to think that someone in your life is doing this. So I think we just all have to keep in mind, like what the stakes actually are. If this is happening, you
have to report it. We always recommend to people that they report it to CPS and law enforcement because it is a matter for both of those entities. And as my colleague, Detective Weberre always says, report it to both and hope that one of them knows what they're doing. It may go nowhere, but you have to report it
because then at least it will be documented. Right in the second season, and we did some stuff about what does it look like when something looks suspicious and it doesn't turn out to be abuse, right, Like, sometimes more than one kid in a family has a bunch of weird health stuff and they realize it's like a genetic thing. But it's like the only thing that can determine that
is an investigation. And certainly if a whole bunch of suspicions are piling up over the years and for multiple different things, then that certainly that's going to be germane to an investigation whenever one happens.
Everyone listening. If you have any questions that you can always go to munchausendsupport dot com. You can listen to Andrea's podcast, which is so so brilliantly called Nobody Should Believe Me. Andrew has tons of books and in closing, I just want to know Sinjovi a youngin lighthearted question, what's one registry item you couldn't live without?
Oh my gosh, I think that are like our number one thing. So I know you've done. I've listened to several of your episodes on breastfeeding. Breastfeeding Oh my god, couldn't do it. The first one could do it throughout through in the chale after four months with my second one, so.
Mine, well done, not any of it. Who cares, It's all insane, truly, do.
What you want, do what you want. But I so we have we have had formula with both babies, the baby bread Oh my god, what a miracle. Do you know what a baby Bresa is? Oh?
Yeah, you know, like Breza is an amazing It makes the formula for you and keeps it up right, touch a button, correct the correct machine. They're shaking up fucking powders and mixes and all this. It does it all for you. So the baby Breza, which is spelled b r easysy A.
Yes.
And as you're coming upon your little ones first birthday. At the time of this recording, you're older ones fifth birthday.
She will be five in October.
Yeah, what advice would you like to give your children as they get closer to their next birthdays?
Oh my gosh, I don't know. I just think they're the most wonderful little people. I just I think it's so funny, seem like they're so cool.
Well, you're doing the right thing, which is I've got nothing to teach you. You've got everything to teach me.
Yeah, you know. I just I think, like, you know, the thing that we just always try and emphasize. I know this sounds cheesy, but like we're really just trying to like be kind. That's the most important thing. Like how you treat other people as the thing that matters the most. It's quite a wild world that we're all sending our kids into.
I think everyone listening to this podcast would agree. And I hope that we're all instilling that in our kids.
So that's like our only hope.
I know it's so lame, but I'm like, can we please try to make the world a better place because we done fucked up.
I will always be proud of my kids. Whatever else they do, achieve, don't achieve, whatever, as long as they're like good to other people, You're like, just be like, be good to the people in your life.
Ye test, Yeah, and last question, finish this sentence. Parenthood is a wild ride, truly. Thank you so much, Andrea Dunlop for coming on Katie's Crib. I really appreciate you opening up our eyes and our ears and our experiences to this horrible thing that has so closely affected you
and your family. Please everyone listen to Andrew's podcast, Her Books Her, My gosh, You've so much going on, and I can't believe almost fell over when you were like, here's all the books I've written in the podcast I host and everything I do, and I have a ten month old and a freaking almost five year old. Bravadio, I don't.
Necessarily recommend it. I got a whole bunch of deals went through right after I got pregnant. That is not the timing I would have missed.
Wow, good for you. Thank you so much for coming on Katie's Crib. It was a real pleasure and I learned a ton today.
Thank you, Thank you, Katie.
Thank you guys so much for listening to today's episode. I want to hear from you. Let's chat questions, comments, concerns. Let me know. You can always find me at Katie'scrib at Shondaland dot com. Katie's Crib is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Oh my st