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is no filter. I'm mea Friedman and I wanted to pop a little extra bonus episode into the feed this week because a lot of people have been talking about the new series called Fake that stars Asha Ketty, about a woman who falls in love with a con man, and today we wanted to bring you the true story of the woman in that series in an interview that I did with Stephanie Wood, who is played by Asher in Fake. I did this interview a couple of years
ago with Stephanie. She's in her late forties or she was when she decided to go on a date with a guy she met online. And she'd been online dating for a while and had found it pretty unsatisfying, as many people do. So when she met this guy called Joe, who is handsome and charming and seemingly different from the others, she fell for him. She felt pretty hard and pretty fast, and she had no idea that it would change the course of her life forever now. Stephanie is an award
winning journalist and an author. She's smart, she's experienced, and she does not stand for bullshit. But when she met Joe, all of that sort of fell away, because, as we know, love does funny things to the brain, and Joe turned out to be well, as the name suggests, a total fake. And fake also became the name of Stephanie's book, which is now the name of this new series on Paramount Plus. It stars Asha Ketty as Stephanie and David Wenham as Joe.
It's being hailed as a love and lies fueled thriller, and this is the true story behind it from the woman who lived it. Here's Stephanie Wood. Steph When you met Joe, what was your first contact like with him?
It was we met through online dating and we caught up for a drink at a bar in the city in Sydney. There were no sparks for me and I don't thin for either of us really, although who knows what he ever felt. I thought he was a little awkward. I thought he was a bit short, which he proved not to be. Must have been hunched and down in
that chair. He talked a lot about himself, and women are pretty used to men talking a lot about themselves and I sort of peppered the conversation with questions, which as a journalist you learned to do to keep conversations going. I think we were there for a couple of drinks and said goodbye, and I didn't imagine i'd see him again.
How long had you been online dating for and what's it like as a woman.
Yeah, I hadn't been doing it for a long time. I've not done a lot of it because I find it so awful.
Why is it awful?
Oh, I guess the caliber of men you're meeting. I'm sorry to say, I find it hugely awkward. The sort of walking into a space, a bar, a restaurant to meet someone that you've never ever set eyes on before, and you have no context for who they are. It's awkward. They're usually incredibly disappointing. I think a friend pushed me into it right back in about probably around two thousand and five, when i'd broken up with the guy I
thought I was going to marry. I think maybe it was just starting around then.
So you're in your thirties then, late thirties, yeah, late thirties. If you're a woman in your late thirties, what kind of men are on the apps.
Well, of course, it's widely variable. I was looking for intelligent guys, which I mean, is that okay? I mean, you know, I suppose I wanted someone who seemed to have a bit of wish about them and a bit of humor. I've never sort of had a physical checklist at all. If I were to be honest, I don't want someone who's short. But apart from that, I'm fairly open to, you know, physical imperfection.
Did you decide who to swipe left on and who to see?
Well, in those days it was a bit different. The tinder didn't exist, and I've only ever used hinder once in my life. It was just looking at what their interests were mainly, and their political leanings was important to me, I suppose, And how will they wrote?
Yeah, tell me about that, because I imagine as you.
Get more look at more and more profiles, you learn some some red flags and some green flags.
I wouldn't know about red and green flags. It's more about what you like and what you don't like.
I kind of more mean that like yeah, you go, oh yeah, I'm someone.
Who speaks intelligent, writes intelligently, and well without spelling mistakes.
High bar for a journalist.
Well, it is a high barb. But is that such a high bar for someone I don't know? Isn't that a fairly for an moderately intelligent person. Isn't that half decent writing skills? Like I don't know. Maybe I am too fussy about that.
I doubt yourself.
But you like what you like, you like what you like. That was always important, And I guess I was looking for compassion, someone who was thoughtful and compassionate and sincere.
Women in their.
Late thirties are notorious for scaring men because of the whole biological clo of course situation. Did you find that that was kind of a subtext in all the.
No, And this is incredibly weird. I imagine for women who are in their late thirties now to hear who was still looking. And I wrote an article for Good Weekend about this, probably in twenty sixteen. I think it was about not having had children. There was so little said back then about women's fertility. It really was. And I've googled, I've gone back through the archives of newspaper archives to see how much was written about women's fertility
and declining fertility, and very little was written. I think I was probably little and I wanted to have kids, but I was a little like I wasn't. I don't think I ever had a surging biological clock, which I know a lot of women do. I was concerned. I did want to have them, but I don't I think I thought I could still have them in my forties. And as I said, there was just not a lot written about it. So you weren't necessarily looking for the father of you, you know. I don't which a lot
of pressure was. Although the guy that I broke up with, who I had thought I might be with, he had some medical issues that could have affected his fertility, and we certainly had did talk to doctors about out what our chances might be. So it was obviously on my mind, but not in a panicked way, and I certainly would never have raised it. I don't think that was ever
my thought. I don't think I ever went to any of these dates, and there would have only been back then about four or five six states, and I don't think it was on my mind. I think on my mind was is this guy nice? Is this guy decent? Is he someone I could spend time with. There was one really nice guy, but I don't think he was very much into me, which is okay, devastating blow at the time, but you know, you move on from these things. Like there was one that I think probably ended that
period online dating for me. We met for coffee one afternoon. He wanted to tell me he wasn't particularly good looking man, and that was fine, but he wanted to tell me about his recent holiday to India where he had visited a tantric sex ashram. But it had to have STD tests on the way in, And I just sat there with my coffee in front of me, going in my head, are you serious? You really really want to tell me about this on our first date.
Well, at least did have the test?
Well you sure, we never got to check that out. Really, But the funniest thing about it was that he recommended I'm not I don't dabble in the share market. But at the end of that encounter he said, oh, I've got this great share tip for you. When I got home, I actually happened for a very rare moment, I had some money in my bank account. I thought, bargot, I'm just going to go and buy some of those shares and then they actually gent me a bit of money, which I've sold them since.
But he's self alighting on that very bad.
That was exactly exactly and I sort of was so amused by it as well.
What was it about Joe's dating profile that appealed to you?
Again, He's writing, He could write, and he could express himself. It was articulate. He seemed to have a love for the environment and nature, the things that are important to me, politics, the current affairs the world, and a curiosity and an interest in the world. And that came through really strongly on his dating profile.
In that first date. Did he tell you he had kids?
Yeah, so that the foundational story was that he'd been through a fairly ugly divorce. At some point, possibly second third date, he started to lead on that his ex wife was completely psycho and why wouldn't I believe that, You know, there are people out there who have mental health problems. He was Now in hindsight, I can see quite cruel about how he talked about her, but at
the time I took it on face value. He had custody one week on, one week off with his ex wife of two children and told me he lived in a harbourside house, that he'd a modest harbourside house in a well known suburb of Sydney that he'd built himself. And what he told me he was an architect or retired from architecture and had gone into private equity, and that he had a small sheep farm south south of Sydney.
Was he your age?
He was about three four years older.
Than me, and you were in your early forties by now.
I was, no. I was in my late forties by this stage. Yeah.
Did he ask much about you on that first day?
Not really.
Eventually.
I was getting a bit frustrated by that, because to me, that's a bit of a sign that someone's not particularly interested or has very inefficient communication skills. I've been a food and I'm not writing about food right now, but in my background I was a food writer and a restaurant critic. And he eventually asked me a little bit about that, and he made a comment that was probably the biggest red flag of that first date. He said, you must be very well connected, well, not especially, and
it's not something I seek out. I'd run for a mile from the opening of an envelope sort of thing, you know, it's just not who I am, my world. I find it tedious. I said, oh no, no, no, not at all, not at all. He then did this incredible backtrack and sort of reversal of position, which I can now see he often would do when he had said something that wasn't didn't meet with my approval. I suppose he said, oh no, I wouldn't like it if
you're well connected, because I'm very private. Even when I was an architect, I didn't like my work, our work, the firm's work being published. And in hindsight, I've got lots of architect friends and that's the holy grail, to get their work published in architectural magazines, and it's how you get business as well. So it was such a dumb thing for him to say. But I don't know
that you're analyzing as much at that point. You sort of your mind is so busy sizing them up, I suppose physically, and trying to think of things to say and trying to keep the conversation flowing without it becoming awkward that I send something wasn't quite right, but I moved on. You kind of have to to keep it going in a way.
How did that first unremarkable date turn into a second.
Well, i'd been single for quite a few years, and when you've been single for quite a few years, you start to hear things like, oh, you're too fussy. Women shouldn't be so picky, and I've been bored, Like I have a full, interesting life, but that's a fairly substantial part of life, and when it's not there, it's like, oh, here we go again, not another night. It would be
nice to be with someone. And so I wasn't expecting to hear from him, but he did email me and asked to help me out again, and I thought, oh, whatever, I'll go. And I think maybe what happens is that when someone starts to show interest in you, and it's quite clear that it's interest, your head does do a bit of a yes, three hundred and sixty degree degree turn, and it was like, oh my god, he's interested in me. Okay,
let's have another look at this. And I remember going to that second day and being quite beside myself with nerves, which I hadn't been on the first one, Like I was just a bit nervy on the first one, but the second one I was like, oh my god, he's interested in me, and it was like the moment he registered interest in me, all of a sudden, the game changed a bit, which is silly. It's so silly because
of something we do. It's something we do. We should be sizing up constantly for a long time, whether they're appropriate, suitable, honest, decent. But instead, I don't think it's uncommon. The moment someone's interested, it often changes the way you view the whole thing.
That's such an important insight, isn't it. And I think I think as women were conditioned, Oh if he likes me, yeah, I better be not grateful.
But oh yeah, no, no, yeah, gratitude, it's not that might well be the emotion. And I was never like the hottest girl at school or the one that had boys following me, So it had always been a bit exciting when a guy did express in me. And it wasn't as if it was uncommon, But it wasn't. It wasn't every minute of every day, as you know, in my twenties and thirties, when I was in the height of mind.
And it had been a while since, and it had been a.
While, so yeah, after a lot of disappointing dates and disappointing.
Them a lot of time on my own. A lot of guys that are not a lot of guys, but there were certainly a couple of guys who turned out to be really dishonest, And thankfully it never went beyond a couple few days. But then what odd guys who? One who proved it turned out to be married. I got the sense that he was estranged from his wife. Turns out they were still living together and, according to him, had an open relationship.
I wonder if she knew that.
I wonder if she knew it was an open relationship. And then another one who turned out to be living with a girlfriend and didn't tell me. Thankfully, they didn't go very far, and I was pretty upset when I discovered. But not it was not so I wasn't so embedded in the relationship that it was devastating. It was that devastating. I mean, it's I think they leave their little marks on you.
So Joe was clearly single and that was important.
Well, yes, on the face of it, Well, yes, as we thought at that time.
Now did things accelerate quite quickly?
No, we still did it around a bit. The third date nearly didn't happen because he made another strange comment that, in hindsight, I should have taken us another red flag. We were discussing which restaurant we should go to, and I said, do you want me to book and he said, yeah, that'd be good. You know, it'll be interesting to see how the waiters react to you if they recognize you. And again it was because I was a food critic, but I'd mostly been a food critic when I lived
in Melbourne. I hadn't done so much in Sydney, so I wasn't that well known here and that suited me. Fine. If you've ever been recognized by my waiter or a chef and a restaurant who thinks they're going to get a good review or they can get some benefit out of it, it's awful.
It's awkward.
Yeah, it's horrible, and I don't like that. And I got really crossed with him and I just slammed. We were emailing at that stage. We hadn't got to the point of having comfortable phone calls. Of course, email opens up all sorts of ways of both disemb and manipulating the conversation, and if we'd been talking on the phone, I might have perhaps picked up things better, but I just flung an angry response at him and said, you know, you've misunderstood me. That's not who I am at all.
And then he somehow in another email a few days later, I said, so, I suppose we're not going out Saturday night then, and I said, no, I'm going away actually now, and he said, I really stuffed up. That wasn't what I meant at all. And now, damn it, I can't find an email he sent me because I've kept most of them, but it was like, damn, I wanted to remember what he'd said, but he convinced me yet again that I'd misunderstood what his intentions were about that now
or his interest in the waiters recognition. And so we eventually had a third date, and I think again it was the fact he was interested in me was making my bells ring.
How soon did you go away for the weekend?
That was after our fourth date. So we had fourth date where we kissed, and then he said, you know it takes message that night, I'd like to go away with you for the weekend.
To seal the deal.
Yeah, to seal the deal as it is as it was.
I don't want to cry about that, but I do want to ask was the sex great?
Oh God, no one's asking me that yet, And it's like, I don't want to talk about this. It was great because I hadn't had it for so long. I don't think guys get this that women just don't go on single Women aren't out there every night having casual sex, certainly not the ones I know. He was warm and loving in hindsight, very selfish. I won't say more than that, but at the time I was loving it.
And I ask that not just because I'm voyeuristic and strange, but because when the sex is good in a relationship or that hadn't been sex for a while, that can be confusing as well for a woman. Yeah, that hard experience where that can change my brain chemistry and think, oh I.
Really like you, And it's like, yeah, no, that was just good sex. It's doesn't mean you're a good.
Person, or doesn't mean it was good enough that I think it was turning my head and altering my chemistry. And in fact, as I write in Fake, our brain chemistry when we're in completely changes.
You use a norweg is it a noruig model?
Skept and I don't pronounce that properly, I know, but it's the heady period of love where you're completely tied in knots with love and besides yourself and can't think straight.
Quite bonkers, quite nuts.
And there are scientific it's just almost a pop culture words as I understand it in Norway, there are scientific reasons for it. The ancient part of our brain, the limits system, is surging with neurotransmitters and hormones because this is fundamental to our biology. Isn't it to mate and to reproduce. It's so fundamental. And also it's fundamental to want to attach to somebody because that's how we survive in the wild, you know, in primitive primal, it's very primal.
How much time did you spend together in those early times.
I would see in probably two or three days or every fortnight, which of course is not much. But I was under the impression you had the children on the other week. I felt as if I was in the very delicate situation that he'd talked about the children being very fragile and him being very fragile as a result of the divorce, And I thought, you know, I can't go in like a bullet at gate here. I can't demand to meet the children. That's not right. You know,
I've got to be sympathetic to this situation. And if I do get demanding and so I must meet your children and I must see your house, I could just ruin everything.
Had you dated a guy with kids before?
No? Never, never. I mean my instinct was go gently, go very very gently.
So you didn't meet his kids at first? Did you meet each other's friends?
He met a few of my friends, but not for a while. A couple of times he stood me out when there were events. I was going to a Christmas party at a journalist friend's home and he was meant to join me. Funny thing he didn't come. He didn't there was an excuse. And this pattern started very early,
the cancelations early, probably within oh three months. I mean there was a period there where I actually went to the States for five weeks for work, and so it was all a bit truncated and remote distance relationship for a little while while I was away. But we sort of started to go out seriously, probably end of August twenty fourteen. But by November he was starting to cancel on me.
What sort of reasons would he get, Oh, the.
Most insane reasons. He'd been poisoned by sheep drench. He was in his loo, his duney on a hill on the farm where he just had a shack, which is apparently why I never got to see it, vomiting, he was terribly ill. He had a tooth infection. These are all not in chronological order. These are the sort of excuses that unfolded over the sort of fifteen month period we were together. A truck carrying his sheep had tipped over and there was chaos and carnage. His dog had
been bitten by snake. His son had been running around a friend's pool and fallen over and been concussed. His daughter had asked me his daughter had fallen out of a tree and damage to collar.
Bo.
Yeah, a lot of bad luck.
He had a lot of bad luck. I mean, I started to get incredibly at my suffer anxiety, as so many people do. This made me so anxious it was hard to separate whether there was instinct about something not being right or it was just my anxiety. You know, people say, oh, you should follow your instinct, but when you're anxious, so true, what's instinct? What's anxiety. I couldn't tell. I was so keen to try and make it work.
At some point in the relationship, maybe six months, and he'd said it sold the little farm with the shack, and he was now looking to invest in a much much larger property, and he started to talk about this specific property. I think what happens in relationships is it's not just the person that you're in love with, it's the idea of the future that you're going to have
together that you fall in love with. A love affair is about not just the person that you're in love with, but about the future that you've fallen in love with, or the idea of this future you might have together. And so he was looking at investing in this big property. It was such a spread, such a pile that it was on sotherby is real estate website. So it existed. Oh, it totally valid, absolute existed. I mean the detail that he talked about, the sale, the negotiations, the neighbors, the
people he was vying with to get it. He talked about constantly going down there and having meetings with the owner to discuss what would be included in the sale and what wouldn't. There were council problems, and there were water rights. The detail was immense, and eventually he took me to see it. And it was not the sort of place that you arrive at on a Saturday morning and wander around and then leave, you know, without an invitation.
It was an appointment only style, large multi bedroom, multi living area, a huge estate, and we went there and met the owners and we walked around and the wife took me on this tour and said, oh, I do hope he gets it. I do hope Joe gets it. I don't know what's going on, but I hope he gets it.
So is he wealthy?
Well, that's what I had been. He'd led me to believe. We never did anything lavish. But I also, I mean, I'm not design a handbag kind of person. And so he drove a beat up old land Rover Defender. He didn't wear particularly special clothes, and I just took that to be someone who had money but was understated and didn't care about the trappings of wealth, which I really
liked that approach. He'd pay for meals, and with my restaurant habit, we went out for dinner quite often, and sometimes I'd pay, but I think probably he paid more than I did. He tipped taxi drivers, we'd go it for breakfast. He took me away three times to country cottages. Again nothing lavish, but he paid. I'd say he spent at least three, four or five thousand dollars through the course of the relationship on me.
Did he ever ask you for money? Never?
Never?
And he gave me presents. He gave me pearls, He gave me opals. I make jewelry, and he gave me these opals. He gave me these little Victorian antique silver, beautifully engraved trinkets. There were never signs of great wealth. But he told me he was very sheepishly one day, as though he were almost embarrassed by it. He said,
I've got a lot of money. I've got a disgusting amount of money, he said, And he sounded as though he was really embarrassed about it, and as though he were letting me into that secret slowly because it'd come to start to trust me. The idea of an understated multimillionaire is kind of nice. Yeah, yeah, I like that. I thought that was a really nice quality, that the money didn't really matter that much. It was. There were other things that were more important.
Like you well as the future. Together in the future was like I imagine.
You in the kitchen of the of Happy Valley, and which study would you like? The one down the corridor from mine or the one next to mine? Very sexy, enticing, kind of hints at what the future might be.
That's very seductive for women.
It's like that talking about the future, even perhaps before you're thinking of it or allowing it.
Yeah, I wouldn't have allowed. He was the one to introduce the future, not me, because I was too cautious to do so. I probably was the first to say I love you and he said no, no, too soon, and then I pulled right back. But he was starting to paint these pictures that I embedded in my own brain and started to fantasize over. We all do that, don't we. You know, we start to imagine that beautiful, glorious thing lying ahead. I'm going to be lying, I said.
If I said that the money didn't matter, I'm a journalist in an industry that is absolutely going down the toilet. I took a redundancy from Fairfax Media two years ago and quite frankly, I will probably never have another staff position and never get the benefits of superinnuation or any of the things that a staff position brings. And I don't honestly know how. You know, as a journalist you make your living these days particular, j Young is sort of writing I like to do, which takes a lot
of time and is dense and research heavy. So yeah, it was this relationship promises me him and I'm in love with him. It promises me a farming future, which I'd always found appealing idea of, you know, growing vegetables and having animals, and I'll be able to write and not worry about how much I pay my way through life. So the money was important in that way for me.
More of my conversation with Stephanie after this shortbreak tell me about him meeting your family.
He stood me up for the first time. He was meant to come for a family barbecue at my place and just didn't show up. And it was only it was my mother and my brother and his family, so.
He didn't show up.
I know, and I should have been, well, you, I'm so close to my family that I didn't feel embarrassed, and we're close. I didn't feel embarrassed, but I was. I went into a complete state of anxiety and just bulled up on the couch.
What reason did he give?
He didn't. I couldn't get him, I couldn't find him. It was just before Christmas twenty fourteen. And I should have left him then. I should have said no, no one treats me like that. But I didn't have enough self esteem. I didn't have the resources to do that. I felt so immersed and entrenched in the relationship by that stage, and in love. And the next day I rang him or texted him, and he made some He said, oh, his daughter had asthma, and oh, yeah, that was a
really bad thing to do. I'm sorry, and I sort of Over Christmas, I went to Queensland to my mom's. I started to prepare myself for the relationship beang over. I actually did a really good job of it. I stopped thinking about him, I stopped you clutching my phone looking for messages. But he kept texting me. He drew he drew you back in, he drew me back in, and so when I got back and then he arrived at my place with a string of pearls, and I
was forgiven. Yeah, I was forgiven. Stupidly in hindsight, But what about meeting his kids. That happened maybe six seven months after I'd first met him, and it felt like a huge milestone in the relationship. I mean, I think, you know, if he's willing to introduce he talked about breaking the bubble. I want to break the bubble between my life and your life, you know, I want you to meet my kids. And I just felt like soaring. I was jubilant. And I met them one night at
a Thaire restaurant. It was excruciating. They were very quiet and shy. God knows how many other women he'd introduced them to and they had to go through this or deal with I was nervous trying to make conversation with just becoming a teenage girl and her younger brother, and it was very difficult. At one stage, I think, I mean, I was blundering around with the conversation and I think I said to the girl, is it hard to remember to pack all the things that you need when you
move between mum and Dad's place? I mean, terrible question, awful question. What was I thinking? But I felt like it was blundering around. But he very quickly wrapped up the night after that. My suspicion now is that he felt that we were getting into dangerous territory, where as I discovered much later kids had spent for a little time with him. This is here's the spoiler alert. He didn't live in the house on the harbor. His ex wife did.
Still, well, I was going to ask you, did you ever go to his house?
No? I didn't ever go to his house. And that was eventually what made me leave the relationship, because he canceled two nights in a row on me when I was meant to be going to the house, and I thought, this is I can't do this anymore. I was in such a mess by that stage. The excuses for not going to the house were They kept evolving. So initially it was I mean for the first say, five months, I didn't even ask because I thought too soon, too soon, And I was.
One we spent time at your house?
Well, yeah, we spent time in my apartment. I think my biggest fears were he may not be that into me, maybe there's another woman. Like the scale of what I discovered about him afterwards, I could never have imagined. I didn't know that these people really existed.
You're an investigative journalist. The first thing I would have thought you would have done is google him.
Well I did. I did google him, and I found that certain planks of his story were very true. He was the grandson of a very well known Sydney businessman who'd started a major Australian company, and there's no question about that. As a fact, he had lived in this I saw his driver's license with the address of this house,
this harb Aside address. I saw it. When I researched the book, I came to discover some really interesting cognitive science, some work that well well not on cognitive science principles, and one of them is thing called anchoring, whereby you place importance in some facts at the expense of other facts.
So I anchored my beliefs about him and my belief in him, the fact his story was true, in the fact that while his grandfather is X. I've seen his driver's license, so he must live there and let other things slip on by.
You wrote lists, didn't you?
Oh?
Yeah?
I wrote list to try and calm myself down.
Like what would you write down?
I was trying to steal my anxiety, and I thought maybe if I could rationally put things down in writing. I'd calm myself down. I'd write reasons why he's not lying to me, reasons why I shouldn't be worried, reasons why the fact he didn't turn up on the weekend shouldn't bother me. And when I look back at those lists, they are all things he said to me. I'm envisiting you with gray hair, I love you completely, I et cet. There were all things he said. They were not actions.
They had seen a dog that he said was them.
Oh yeah, I knew the dog existed.
And there was such detail in his excuses exactly, and they were quite elaborate, weren't they was never just like I can't come. It's sort of you talk about it them unfolding in three acts.
Yeah, yeah, in the most incredibly detailed way.
Would they so well?
For example, this weekend that he said he was his dog had been bitten by a snake. He was meant to come to my apartment on a Friday night and have dinner with me. Come up. He was down at the farm and he was meant to be coming up. And around about four in the afternoon, I got the text saying I can't find my dog, then another, and I replied to each of them with concern or questions, and then another one an hour or two later. Founder were at the vet. I'm not sure she's going to
make it. She's been bitten by a snake with the vet, thinks. Then silence for the rest of the night, nothing till the next morning, but then a text very early the next morning saying, I think I'll be able to come up to town. We think, well, she'll make it now, there won't be any point in mess staying here with her. I'll come up, you know, I'll be there for lunch. Then a few hours later, I've actually got a friend who's a vet in another town and he's coming to
look at her. And there were slight contradictions, but I wasn't seeing the contradictions because in the morning you're saying we think she's going to make it. Well, then if she's going to make it, why do you need to bring another vet? Like I can see all of these contradictions now. The text went on all weekend with updates and no, I'm not.
Going to come confusing like being bombarded with details and bombarded.
I think the effect the details had was simply to reassure me of the truth of the story. Why would you? It just seems so real. The vet friend arrived, they went back to his town with the dog. They had not seen each other for a long time. Their friendship had been a casualty of the divorce. Now they were catching up, and it was really good that they were catching up becoming friends again. So he's going to stay there the night, see tomorrow, I see you tomorrow morning.
And then finally I saw him late on the Sunday. But the text went all weekend and kept putting off his arrival time.
You must have thought you were going crazy.
Oh I did, I did.
Did you know the term gas lighting?
No?
Well, no, I didn't believe it or not, But I mean, I think that's This conversation about gas lighting is really only maybe I'm dreaming. I don't know. Maybe it was out there, but I don't think we talked about relationships like this.
No, gas lighting is quite new.
When I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, I didn't know that term until many years later, when I looked back and I went, oh, that's what it was.
I wish i'd have read an article about that, because yes, you think, oh, this is just me.
This is just the very specific dynamics of this relationship. And what you describe is so familiar to anyone who's been involved with a guy who's either a liar or a psychopath or an emotionally abusive.
You start doubting yourself.
Yeah, you don't think, oh, this guy's a dick and cut them loose, because even though it's from the outside, people look at you and go, what are you doing?
But no one on my outside was saying that. On my outside, even your therapist, even my therapist who I love, and I do not blame her for this for a moment, because she wasn't in the middle of the relationship. I could in an hour session every couple of weeks or every week. I couldn't tell her everything that was going on. I can't remember what I missed to tell her. She
wasn't seeing red flag. She kept on saying, a man with a difficult ex wife, two children, a farm, business interests, property development is going to have a complex, complex life, and it's so different from your life. I'm not seeing red flags.
Steph.
Did you find yourself protecting his image from other people by not telling people everything about how many times you cancel.
Or I'm pretty open. So I was probably telling my friends the truth.
At what point did they say the.
Only one did? Most of my friends would go One friend said, stop being a weirdo, you know, until you've got a concrete evidence that he's lying, Stop being a weirdo. And my brother and sister in LAWA would say, you're going to ruin it. Relax, you're going to ruin it. There was one heterosexual friend, a guy who was then he's another phenomena for women of a certain age, my age and even younger. By this stage, I was in my late forties and he was in his mid forties,
but he was seeing women who were in their early thirties. So, you know, even though it's only about two or three younger years younger than me, I was never, you know, a rare single man in his mid forties. He was separated with a young daughter as well. But I don't think he ever looked at, you know, would look at a woman my age with an eye to thinking I was, because there is you know, he's going out with thirty year olds.
That's important to understand because that's the context for which someone who does show an interest in you and not a twenty eight year old. That's really flattering, and there is a level of gratitude for that appreciation of that.
Yeah, yeah, and that's very real.
Absolutely. But this one heterosexual friend, I think he knew me just from a very few things I said. He said, he was cynical. He didn't even need to ask me many questions. He didn't really. We sat in one night at a sushi bar when I was and I pulled my anxieties out to him and he said, yeah, yeah, when are you going to let this finish? When are you going to finish this?
How long had it been?
Oh? That was probably a seven months or so into the relationship. And he was ultimately the one that said you've got to end this. And he was the one that sort of picked me up and fed me I hadn't been eating at the very end, and said, you've got to end this. This is ridiculous.
How did you end it?
I email my ex and said, I don't know what sort of hollow man you are, but you're a hollow man. And I put my finger on it because now I can understand the psychology of what I was, what I'd been dealing with, which I didn't until I left the relationship. Oh he's a hollow man and I put my finger on it, and that email when I broke up with him before knew anything.
So what happened after you decided to end it?
Because you worked at Fairfax at the time, you were sitting next to one of Australia's leading investigative journalists, the extraordinary Kate mcclearmon, who said, who's brought down entire state governments through her investigative reporting? That would have been like just something she could have done before breakfast, exactly one of my tea.
No, it was actually another colleague and another great colleague and Davies who now works the Guardian, who said to me, let's do some searches on him. And this is probably around seven months into the relationship, and I was expressing anxieties to her about it and I said, oh, no, no, no, no,
this is a love affair. This isn't I mean, I've done my preliminary googles, and I knew the sort of searches that we could do, title deed searches to see what he owned, if he indeed was this multimillionaire, whether he owned the house that he lived in, bankruptcy searches, and about social media. He didn't have a very big social media. He had a Twitter account. It was pretty.
Typical for a man.
That's not a red flag. Oh that's not a red flag at all, and very little online about him. But just as I said before, you know enough to reassure me that his grandfather was who he said, and that he had had an architectural practice at one point. But I said to Anne Davies, I said, no, this isn't this is not a story. This is a love affair. And of course that wasn't really the real reason. I mean, it was part of it. I didn't want to be a snoop, but I couldn't better look at what the
truth was. And that's not uncommon. It's called wilful blindness in psychological terms. And it's the same phenomena as the person that goes to tan on sun beds whose doctor says you shouldn't do that, that's going to give you cancer, or smokers, and it's the same phenomena. You turn your eyes away from what you fear, what you don't want to know about. It's not it's not convenient and convenient
to look at it, and I was being wilfully blind. Sure, there was a part of me that didn't want to snoop and felt that was a betrayal, But it was more about I don't want to look, I can't look. I can't look.
What made you decide to start looking a little?
Well, after I dumped him. After I dumped him, and then my curiosity was like insatiable. I had to know what I'd encountered and can I keep some of the secrets. From what I discovered, I discovered that he wasn't who he said he was at all, that he was bankrupt, that he didn't live in the house that his ex wife did. That in fact, I think he had no fixed address. I think he moved, possibly between women. I think there was some suggestion that he squatted on boats
on the harbor. Apparently there are any number of empty boats on the Sydney Harbor. Owners don't visit very often. I discovered he'd been with another woman from the very first day of our relationship. I discovered that he didn't have the custody of the children that he claimed he had, that there was no farm, and ultimately I discovered that he had been just simply a meddler in the Happy Valley purchase. Had presented himself as a buyer, but he
had no money to buy it. And I eventually heard from the person that did buy it, who says he spent much much more money on the property than he should have because of Joe's meddling in the sale. So he fooled lots of other people as well, in business as well. It wasn't just me. He's a very clever con artist, really, But the thing is about it, it's so weird. The benefits were so few for him. Really, he didn't get I don't think he's got money out
of his corn artistry. And I think what he got out of me and the other women that he's been involved with is an audience for his grand stories, which at the time I didn't see were grand stories. I just thought he's a busy man trying to buy a property and he wants to talk all about it. Now I can see it was just self grandizement. It was him going, look at me, look at me, I'm so successful.
And I allowed him to help build his facade around the hollow shell by listening to him, and I suppose clapping, you know, I was the audience.
Did you reach out to the woman he'd been with through your relationship? How did you find her?
So her social media? I found evidence of her on social media, and eventually, long time, long time afterwards, I did reach chat to her.
How did you discover that they'd been together through that time?
That her social media revealed just endless photographs and on both Facebook and Instagram that all the dog the day that his dog had been bitten by a snake, he was in fact at a resort in the Hunter Valley with her, playing board games and drinking wine at various wineries and swimming in a swimming pool in between sending me text messages telling me about his dying dog, which presumably was it a vet hotel or a pet hotel somewhere. Her Facebook and Instagram gave me all the evidence I
needed to see the pattern of lies. And once I knew the pattern of lies in that he had been lying to me at that level about her, about about what he'd been doing, I could see that clearly the lies didn't stop there, that this was a much bigger scale.
I must have been devastating.
It's funny, you know, I think it helped me start it began, and my recovery, it was like, how can I be surprised by it? That's the like I know that. The night that I sat there, I was on the phone to a girlfriend in Melbourne as I went through his Facebook, her Facebook, this woman's, other woman's Facebook, and Instagram. It was devastating and stunning, but not surprising. And I can't explain why I wasn't like something had to be up and I came to see that by the end.
But was there a relief in learning that you weren't crazy?
The relief came mostly not so long after that, when I started to google the words pathological liar and boyfriend. And once I'd done that, this whole world opened up to me, and it was pop psychology rather than medical psychiatry, but it revealed so much to me about who he was and why he was the way he was, and the existence of these sorts of people out there, narcissistic
people with personality disorders most likely. And the Internet, if you've ever been, once you've started to google, it's like a rabbit hole. There's so much out there too, so many people telling their stories about these people. There are
so many of them out there. It's terrifying. And after my original Good Weekend article, I got so many emails from people saying that happened to me, similar story, and they're just gobsmacking, like women who've tried to commit suicide after these relationships have ended and losing every scaic of money that they've ever earned, and that the husband somehow or the ex boyfriend or partner taking everything, turning children against them, and I should also women are capable of
this behavior too. It's not just men. I've certainly heard from many more women than men, which is probably a symptom of the fact that women tell their stories more readily than men do. But I've heard from men to and one woman who I interviewed for my book who had a bad relation She's an American woman lives in Florida. She had a bad relationship with, funnily enough, an Australian sports person who'd gone to Florida to play in his sport. She now has this sort of account lean life coaching
kind of service that she promotes through Instagram. Mainly, she says she gets fifty percent men contacting her about bad women in their lives. That's the only stat I can really offer, because this is not researched, and I don't know how you would ever actually research it. Because I've also got to be aware that a proportion of the people who contacted me after the original article and also after the book in the last couple of weeks, I've got dozens more. I think you've got to be aware
that some of them might just be aggrieved. They might have blown out of proportion what their claims about their ex are. They're pissed off, they're unhappy, they've broken up. So I think you've got to set aside a few of those and go, that's a fair point. You know, you can't take everyone as fact. And I don't know how you to ever research the troop without going into these relationships in such detail. How do you ever prove the truth of them?
People feel so stupid, yep.
And if they tell one line that doesn't work, they move on to the next line. Yeah, and they can. They the most incredibly intricate stories, and they tell one lie after another, and you can see there are contradictions. But well I could see there were contradictions in his stories, and that bothered me. But yeah, I was just immersed in it, and I so much wanted it to work.
More of my conversation with the real life Bertie Bell Stephanie Wood after this break, when your original Good Weekend piece came out, our mutual friend of Meilily Lester, was your editor on that story, and it was absolutely stunning and so powerful.
And everybody was talking about it.
I can see the cover of The Good Weekend in my mind's eye when I think about it. It came out on the Saturday, and on the Sunday I had lunch actually with a number of journalist girlfriends, and.
We were all saying, who is this guy?
We need to find out who this guy is? I imagine because you gave a lot a number of details, you were careful you didn't use his name. But did people recognize him and contact.
You family members? Some of his family did.
What did they say?
They made comments about the fact it wasn't the first time they'd heard these stories.
Did they feel bad? Yeah, they did, I suppose reaching out to you. They weren't defending him. Put it that way, they weren't defending What about Joe himself.
I heard from him. Yes, after that original Good Weekend article, I got a couple of very odd messages that were really disconnected from reality. He talked about how he was with an inner new relationship there. It was sort of an apology, but it wasn't an apology. It's very difficult to describe just how weird the emails are. They're literate, the punctuation and grammar is right, but there's a nonsequential nature to them as sort of a discombobulating kind of
effect to them. And as I talk about in the book, it's it was really disturbing for a while, but then I started to laugh and I heard things that he was saying about me, which were, I'm if I don't take my medication, I do some strange things. Last night, I stole money from my mother to buy my apartment. I am a lesbian. It just doesn't tell this to I hear it through a guy through a sauce.
Yet, And have you stayed or did you when you reached out to the woman he was having their relationship with, was she angry? Was she still with him at the time? How did that conversation unfold?
It was a really really terrifying moment when I reached out to her, because I didn't know whether they were in a relationship or not. And as I detail on the book, it was there were a lot of light bulb moments as we talked about was she open to talking to you? It's very open to talking to Had she ended the relationship?
Maybe she had. She made a funny comment about a whiteboard.
Yeah, when we started to compare stories, she said, you know, he must have had a whiteboard. And I got a picture in my head of him with different colored market pens and biting his lip and looking at his whiteboard and different columns. And I was blue when she was red. And he'd compared the stories of how he was lying to each of us, and he lied to us differently. There were different lies. There were things that he said
to me that he never said to her. He had a different name for his ex wife, for her that he told to her to me out like and who knows why? Who knows why?
A lot of stuff to keep straight.
A lot of cut stuff to keep straight. And as a lot of people said to me, why why would you put yourself through that? The exhausting nature of that juggling act. It's just insane. Stephanie, how do you date again after Joe? I don't know me I really don't know. Will anyone want to date me? I don't know.
Shut up, look at you gorgeous and smart and oh well, I mean kind and brilliant.
You're very sweet. People might be scared that I might write about them, and I don't think anyone's ever going to, you know, come up to the standard of Joe in terms I think. And I think I'm done with writing about my personal life. I'd never wanted to write about my personal life, and it's just unfolded that I have, and it's ridiculous. They're the stories that get the most traction, and I right now want to pull away from doing personal stories completely. I never want to write another one.
But as I say that, I know that they're the stories that make a difference in people's lives. I feel I get so many people saying, thank you, your book is my bible. Now you've saved my life. I understand what happened now, and that's enormously gratifying. You know, we don't live long in this world, and not many of us can actually make a difference. And so as I say I don't want to write more personal essays, I can see their power and how important they can be.
But as for dating, I don't know. I just don't know, Like, how do you have an online date with someone? Now? Even if you're optimistic enough to think that there's someone online that might be half decent, what do you say to them when they ask? What do you do?
Yeah?
I write books about fakes that I meet online? What do I say?
And I think they'd be fascinating?
And also I think, and I don't want to make a big deal about this, but I feel a bit awkward about it. You know, once you have some sort of profile, I don't know, dating online it feels weird to me.
I've got a friend who is who writes about sex. She's a sex kind of advice giver. But that would be hard to date.
That would be really hard to date. Imagine taking that on board.
And she's just got married recently in her what would she be, late fifties probably yeah her. Thank you for writing this book. I wish I could have read it a lot of years ago. I hope that a lot of women do read it.
I hope a lot of young women do yes to stop them before they start a pattern of bad relationships, and to show them that they're worthy of great love from the beginning, and if someone's not giving it to them, you walk away, and that to be single is often almost always better than being in a bad relationship.
You can see why this story was just crying out to be an on screen thriller. And what's really wild is that this happened to Stephanie quite a few years ago when online dating was actually online, that is, before the apps even and as you heard, she never even got into the Tinder and the bumbles and the hinges. So it's crazy to think about the cat fishing and the fraud that can go on now when there's AI in so many new ways that liars can manipulate and
cover their tracks. And really that's why this story and now this series is really important, because this could have ended up in a much worse situation for Stephanie than it did. Women get hurt by men they meet online or on the apps. They get hurt emotionally, they get hurt financially, and sometimes tragically, they get hurt physically. And that's why Stephanie really wanted to tell her story.
So if you're out there.
Dating now, navigating the world of the apps, stay safe, follow your instincts, research your dates like you're a journalist or a detective, and if something in you says this guy seems too good to be true, maybe he is.
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