Transcript
This episode is brought to you by the Into the Impossible podcast hosted by my buddy Professor Brian Keating Into the Impossible podcast was recently ranked top 10 in both Apple and Spotify as science category. Brian's hosted fascinating people like Jim Simons, the world's smartest billionaire Interesting Flex, a mathematician who cracked codes for the government and then went on to found the most profitable hedge fund in history. Check out his live interview with Dr. Jessica Mayer, who could be the first woman to land on the Moon next year. These aren't dry, boring lectures like you probably slept through in college. Nope, Brian gets guests to open up, and he shares the vulnerable side of top performers who've had to battle biases and self-limiting beliefs like imposter syndrome. He does it all with his signature dad jokes in full on geekery that you might find irresistible. Binge into the Impossible podcast as you ponder super interesting ideas like whether or not we have free will or where aliens might have left relics for us to find in the Solar System, or whether there are millions of other universes that exist parallel to our own. And Brian's got a special offer for our listeners. He's going to send a free chunk of four billion year old space dust, a.k.a. a real meteorite sample, to the first hundred listeners in the USA who sign up for his newsletter at Brian Keating.com/ Jordan. Click the link below or search for Into the Impossible podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Before we start this show, I want to let you know it has some adult themes in it, so no kids in the car for this one. And if you leave the kids in the car and you still play the episode, don't blame me when they have nightmares. Now onto the show. Special thanks to Peloton for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show, I'd already planned to tell my sister because I was turning 16. I knew where my dad had hit the gun that he had bought. We we'd never had a gun before. My dad bought a gun after the first kidnapping. I knew where it was hidden. I had a plan. I would tell Susan if she didn't want to do the mission. I would kill her and then I'd kill myself. It was all planned out, but I had to finish the show at my theater camp first. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger on The Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the story's secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional former cult member drug trafficker, music mogul or astronaut. And each episode turns our guests wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. 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This episode contains graphic or at least super scary descriptions of child abuse, so maybe no little kids in the car for this one. The rest of the story is just kind of weird and bizarre and possibly actually important for children to hear. One in four children will be molested in their life, which is an astronomically huge number if you think about it and 97 percent of the time it's by a family member. In this particularly wild story, not only was the victim our guest today, Jan Broberg, targeted by a predator close to the family, but she was targeted in an especially aggressive and creepy way involving both of her parents and even the aliens. And yes, I said aliens. I'm going to let her tell the story. Here we go with Jan Broberg. Your story from when you were a little girl was with a predator that your family considered close to being blood relative. Tell us who this guy was. So he moved into our area with his wife and five children and their children matched all of us in age and we became dear friends. We met him at church. And so he owned a brand new furniture store in town. And he was like, in the paper, you know, new business owner, you know, moved here to Pocatello and and they lived just a couple about a block and a half away. You know, just up the street from where we lived. And so it was a natural friendship that happened between us, kids and his kids because we were the same age. He had three boys. We had three girls. Plus, he had a couple other kids and we became best friends and he made sure of that. And then he created special relationships, you know, with all of us. And he was like, the Pied Piper. Everybody loved him, you know, and he became my dad's best friend. And of course, he knew exactly how to manipulate everybody to keep them separate. In some ways, and then all together as a family and his family, you know, it was like our best friend. He was like your favorite uncle. When you say he did certain things to keep you guys separate. Did he have like secrets with each kid or something? What what was 20 20 hindsight? What, what was he doing? You know, it wasn't necessarily secret. It was just he would always give each individual a special compliment or, you know, you're awfully talented in this way or, oh, you look so pretty today and not necessarily within earshot of the rest of the family. He did that with me. He definitely did that with my mother. He would compliment my dad and in other ways about how wonderful he was in the business, in his flower shop, in his church and church colleagues. And he just had a way of making sure that everybody felt as if they were special and that it was important to have him be your friend, right? It was like he was the popular guy. You know, that definitely makes sense, right? Yeah. You want his approval and he set it up that way. Yeah, because that's a status gain for him, which gets compliance from other people, which is funny because I used to sort of teach these things as like dating concepts a million years ago. And it's like, OK, well, if you have a high status, you get the other people to follow you. It's a thing and it increases your status and your your ability to, let's say, get dates. And in this case, it's his ability to get people to do things that he wants. And you know, it's funny because in the book, and I assume this is conscious on your part, but I don't even know how many people would catch something like this. There are little signs that he's a predator, that you drop skillfully early in the book, for example, and tell me if I'm just reading into this too much in the first two pages, this guy, he comes over to take you horseback riding and he pops a vitamin in your mouth. And it's like most people would be like, whatever. But it's this is very subtle violation of physical boundaries that's wildly inappropriate, but in a very small way that he is using. And I assume there's a million little examples like this where he just pushes, pushes, pushes, and it's like, OK, are the parents going to do anything? No. Is she going to resist in any way? No. At least it really does seem like that was almost like a test. And then he does it. Does it does it. And then, of course, later on, we find out that he is, you know, spoiler alert, he's freaking drugging you and he probably told you was vitamins. Oh, definitely. And he had us all. He had a special doctor that he knew in Salt Lake and and he said, he's a really good allergist and the girls are always sick. We should have them get their allergy tests. So we did. We parents, you know, we're like, OK, let's get the girls allergy tested. And then all of a sudden we we have a little allergy pill, which is in a capsule form. And I remember the color was yellow and green, and we took those for a year before he was filling them with drugs. He was slow. It's the slow burn of a predator that could be patient. Now looking in hindsight, I know it's because he already had another little girl. He was abusing. So he didn't need to get there too fast. And then he had others that he was prepping before he was done with me. He had another woman who was a psychiatric nurse and her daughter, that he was prepping and becoming the mom's love interest and best friend and all to get to her nine year old. And that took three years there. And so that's the kind of predatory behavior or, you know, it's the slow cat in the willows. It's like looking for the perfect opportunity to strike, and that's that's what he did. He set up lots of people. And over time, yeah, it's really creepy because it's not this clumsy like, Hey, why don't you send your kids to my house for a sleepover? And you're like, That guy is creepy. Don't let Jan go over to his house. It's like he just made it so easy for everyone to trust him and everybody loved the guy. And then it's like, I'm surprised that when it came out, people weren't like him. No, it can't be. Or were they? Oh, totally. People were very much. He has people in our how could he be the guy? Exactly, exactly. And you know, you give it the, I guess, the 70s. It might have been a little bit. Different people were less aware. For sure, we didn't even know what a pedophile was, literally didn't know. No, literally didn't know. I mean, it was just not used yet that, you know, it's like saying mental health today. We didn't know anything like that. We called people, you know, crazy, right? You know, or whatever. But the point for me is that this is not an old story. This is a current story because it is one in four girls right now and one in six boys right now who are abused, molested or raped by someone they know, someone in their family, their congregation, their community, their school, their sports team. It's not a scary stranger. And until this really comes to our frontal awareness where we go, Oh my gosh, we have to make public policy changes. We have to put, you know, PSA commercials together that teach our five year old their body parts and that they're theirs. And they can call 9-1-1 and say, you know, daddy's penis is hurting me, and they can actually make a call because they can call of grandmas on the floor. They'll call 9-1-1 a four year old or call 9-1-1. They have no idea that they're being hurt, right? I mean, they know it hurts, but they don't know what to do about it. And who can they tell his? They're being rewarded and threatened at the same time? Well, let's go back to your story as well. How did this begin? You said he moved into the neighborhood. He he becomes the best friend. He's taking you horseback riding. But then suddenly he just kind of and I say suddenly because it it was sudden for your parents and for you, I guess. But he just takes you. Can you take us through this? Yeah. So we over three years, we are doing hundreds of activities with this family. We eat dinners, we do vacations. We I mean, they're our best friends. And then one afternoon after my piano lesson, he had arranged. So he said, and we had been there before. I have a, you know, this client, he needs furniture. I got to go measure the wall. He has a ranch. I'm out. I'm going to take Jan. I'll take her out there and go horseback riding. And I've been several times with him and with his older son, who was my age, who I had a crush on. And so I had been horseback riding before. This wasn't something unusual. The thing was my dad, about six months earlier, had started to kind of pull away like we do too much with this family. My dad's an identical twin. We have cousins that live farther away, but it's like a mile and a half. It's not that far. He's like, We need to spend more time with my, you know, we're just spending too much time with the birch tolls. Why do you think your dad started to pull back suddenly? Because it seems like that's out of nowhere. I mean, I don't suddenly go, you know, my best friend is wearing on me. Let's stop hanging out with him so much that he must have known something or felt something. He felt something for sure. He felt something. He felt his own guilt because he'd had that masturbation experience with Birch told in the car, OK, well, what way to spoil that one? You know, let's just go for it because I mean, I get asked all the time, you know, how did you forgive your parents? And I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm I'm so sick of this. I had wonderful parents. I had 12 perfect childhood years. I mean, I was never yelled at or spanked or told anything negative about myself. My parents were so complimentary. They were so supportive and we ate dinner together around our dinner table without any electronics. Mind you back in that time. And we talked and our parents listened to us. We had very good communication with our parents. Now, had we had a whole lot of talks about sex or body parts, no. But we guys were Mormons not not known for the open sex talk at the dinner table. Yeah, right. But yet if we'd have asked a question, our parents would have told us, Sure, it was very Middle America. Dad goes to work every day. Mom's a stay at home mom. We just had a really wonderful childhood. So when that master manipulator about two years into the relationship with my parents. And you can watch the series, you'll see exactly how it happened. If you watch the series on Peac**k, a friend of the family, you can understand it when you see it in the documentary, it feels like, Oh my gosh, these parents are so stupid. Well, it's because you're not getting the context right? Watch the series. You'll get the context of how this happens. People do things that they would otherwise never do because somebody is pulling the strings. Well, yeah. So they anyway, they end up in. They go to lunch and or a dinner. I think mom and us were out of town. We'd gone up to see my grandma and he says, Oh, I'm having problems in my marriage, which of course, had been an ongoing conversation for years, and I just am not attracted to her. And anyway, he goes down the whole the whole story and he says, Just help me out, brother, you know, just help me out. Brother calls him his brother. By this time, they're like brothers. And you know, unless a guy has never, you know, masturbated before, maybe it's would be shocking that something like this could happen. But I think most people have. I think most girls have. I think most of us have. So it might feel a little different in hindsight because you're looking at somebody that's in their 30s with a friend instead of in their teens. But looking back on that experience where my dad basically gave him my head. And job in the car. Not basically he gave him a hand job in the car. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that was it. And when you see that scene, you know, with Jake Lacy and Colin Hanks in the Peac**k series, you really feel the weight of what my father then carried around because my dad was a very religious man and he knew it was wrong. And then on top of that, I think he started to feel like I got I got manipulated. I got I did something that I would not otherwise have done. And so I think from that point on is kind of my dad just pulling back like he spends too much time here with the Bert shows too much. We need our own space, our own time, our own family. I think it was a combination of guilt for what he had done. And then also just maybe it woke something up in him. He didn't think that he was after his daughter, but it is thought maybe he is gay and he's got a crush on him and some guy's trying to convince me to jerk him off. I think I might be like, Wait a minute, are we just are we just buddies? What's going on here? Right, exactly. You know, and I think that could have been part of it, too, because he had talked to my dad before that happened about, you know, wouldn't it be nice just to be bachelors and just let's go get a let's go get a pad. You know, these are all 70s words. Let's be bachelors and jerky each other off in the car. Like I thought, bachelors meant we play pickleball or something. I don't need this. All this has escalated way too quickly for me. Exactly. I know. And so I get that there's, you know, an uproar over that. But I also know the deep shame and guilt that my father felt for not having known more or seen him more in the right light. And I think that that part is really, really hard for me and my sister because we know the parents that we had. And it's it's hard because when people put the blame there, they take the blame off of the person who was responsible for all of the actions that were wrong. And that's the perpetrator. The predator. Sure. And so to me, he's the only bad guy and my son, of course. You know, of course, I totally understand that and I think people are blown away by this already. This is the part where they're like, what the actual book is going on here. And it doesn't end, folks. Not by a long shot. Oh no. OK. So he takes you horseback riding and then he just doesn't take you home. But you know, yeah, he drugs because I'm allergic to horses. OK, that was one of the tips that goes back to that vitamin thing. OK. So he gave me by saying it looked just like the thing I've been taken for over a year and I'd pop it in my mouth and the next thing I know, I wake up in the back of a moving motorhome. I knew it was moving and you could hear the rumble of the the motor, but I was strapped by my wrists and my ankles to the back bed of the night and there was a partition. You couldn't see who was driving and a and a box with a funny sounding, alien sounding voice woke me kind of out of that drug induced sleep. And it called me female companion. It is time for your mission to begin. And again, people start going, Oh my gosh, how could she be so stupid? Well, I was 12 and I was an innocent 12 because I was the oldest. I didn't have older siblings, you know, teaching me the ropes. And I was in a very bubble like community. I mean, I was probably 30 percent Mormon. And so my friends were. Everybody went to church. It's all I know. I had Presbyterian friends, a Methodist friends and Catholic friends and Greek Orthodox friends in little old Idaho. So the voices were coming from what a cassette tape recorder 20 20 hindsight or some kind of radio. It looked more like an intercom now that looking back on it because it was just like a little white, boxy thing with speaker, you know, with the little lines and the speaker behind it. But yeah, I'm sure that he was playing tapes or something that he had recorded. And back in the those three years where he was grooming the family, all of us, he took us to science fiction movies. We were watching I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched and Lost in Space. And The Twilight Zone on the weekends. Those were our shows, and we were going to see Planet of the Apes and other science fiction was a huge it was the beginning of the whole Roswell swell, or it was the middle of that. Yeah. And so there was a lot of talk in our newspapers. There would be UFO sightings and they'd had these little black and white pictures with this little desk. And he wasn't telling me, but I'm at the kitchen table, moms doing the dishes over here, dads in the newspaper, in the other room, and before he gets past the back door in the kitchen, he throws the newspaper on the table in front of me, and Karen and Susan were sitting there doing our homework. And he's like Maryann. There's been another UFO sighting. You know, it says to my mom. UFO sighting, he said. Is this the end of times? Is this the gathering of Israel? Is this the time when Jesus is coming again? Is this Armageddon? What is this all these? Well, he's throwing around words that you hear at church, right? You know, and we're we're nine and seven and five, you know. So you think he's programming you by like walking in and talking around you today, like? Aliens, they're real. So you're not like, what, what is this crap, this speaker playing? Now you're like, it's the aliens. Yeah, they're real and they're talking to me. And what are the what are these alien voices coming out of the intercom? What are they saying? They're saying female companion. It is time for your mission to begin. We will save our planet. It's like all these things about me being a special child that I will have a special child. Special child will save our planet. And it's all in this kind of staccato, broken English sort of way that it said in his high pitched sound. Very, very scary. For me, it was the scariest part of the whole thing. Even being raped by this man hundreds of times wasn't as scary as that voice. I'm not kidding. I'm sure. I mean, you're terrified. You're being talked to by aliens and you're 12 years old, 12 going on 10 right in terms of like, emotional, mature. Exactly. Yeah. And physical maturity. I didn't hit puberty till I was 17. Oh, so you were a young 12. So maybe even younger than 10? Maybe like on an eight? Yeah, eight or nine. So he's convinced you what that you're like a half alien and that you have to have a baby to save an alien planet is at the gist of this plot. Yeah. So basically, how that plot twist goes is that my father is not my real father. He's not my shop, my biological father. If we were using the right terms today, interesting little, little wedge that that particular detail drives between you and your dad, that he's not your real bio father. Exactly because you could've chosen your mom. But he didn't. He chose your dad. No, because he he was still grooming my mom. I think he knew my dad was going to. I think he he knew he was almost out of. What do you call that? Something nice? Yeah, he was on thin ice with my dad. And so he's still so my mother, whose name happens to be Mary. Oh, OK. Is my, my is the mother, my mother. But fathered by a being from their planet like their guy has fathered this child me through. Marry my mother. Just look, when you've acted out the Jesus story your whole life at Christmastime and you know who Mary is and who Joseph is with God, the father is, and how Mary got pregnant and had the baby. And that's what they do. He followed existing programming that you already had from church and just turned it into creepy aliens. Absolutely. You know, rape plot. Yeah, it's called inculcation. Yeah, yeah. You take a familiar thing. I can talk about brainwashing all day long and all the different terms, but that's in simplistic form. You take something very familiar to somebody, anybody. You can do this to adults, too, and you twist it just enough so that it's almost like there's a question mark, is it? Can this be this could be real. This could be true, you know, because that little twist plot has a whole body in something that you already know or you already believe in. Your confirmation bias is at work. All the things that we, you know, that I go around and try to help people understand. Well, right. Like, if you take somebody who's never heard the Jesus story and you say, So yeah, your dad's not your real dad. And then there's extraterrestrial being somehow impregnated your mom and had you and now you're a special afraid you'd be like, this makes no sense. You're insane, right? But if you believe another version of that same story where everybody has slightly different names and it's for a slightly different reason, you're like, Oh, this happens in other cases, and I just happen to be the chosen one now, which is why I'm a 12 year old girl in a motor home driving to white Mexico with a forty something year old father of five. I mean, that's 40. Yeah. Yikes. So if he takes you to Mexico somehow? And what's the plan from here? He wants to get me to South America. This is in hindsight, but the plan is just to, you know, do his his dirty work as long as he can. I don't know at what point he would have been sick of me because I know there were little girls before me and little girls after me, so I don't think I was going to hold his attention for, you know, much past those, those years, those tender years. So. But he was going to have me for as long as he could. And the interesting thing about me, at least from some of the other girls that I have now met and talked to that were his victims as well, is that he did have some kind of a super fascination with me because he never left me alone my whole life. So this story goes way past the 70s. And so I look back on that and I think what was it was he just did he just hate my father that he just wanted to continue to torment and torture our family anyway? So I think for him, it was just to get as far away as he could to have me to himself, leaving his own family or thinking that he would be able to coerce my parents into giving him permission to marry me right at age 12. So what is this creepy marriage guardianship idea that he has? Well, according to him and all of the phone calls that went back to, you know, his brother and one to my parents that got through with me and my sisters. And we have the FBI recordings of those, and some of those are actually in the series on the Peac**k. It's the actual voices of all of us. We'll link to the series. In the show notes, it's on Peac**k streaming, so people can find it if they want to. That's interesting that you have the actual recording. So what? But what is his his plan as to what like to extort your parents into letting you marry him so that he's not considered to be raping a child because he's legally married to you somehow in Mexico, even though you're 12? Yes. Is that? Yes, that's exactly it. I mean, you think about it and you put it together, you're like, How could a madman possibly think this could work? But he really, really did think it would work, and he actually had me married to him in Mexico. I was not present. Oh my God. He had. He paid some people, they had our names. I had a piece of paper. Well, I didn't have it. There was a piece of paper that said we were married. He also did that for me because I knew growing up that, you know, sex was supposed to be special and it for when you're married. So, you know, that's what I've been taught. And so I was like, Oh, this makes this OK. OK, OK, we're getting we're going to be married, OK? You know, because again, even though the body and the brain and the mental state of Little Jan has not caught up to reality and and truth, there are certain things that you know are right or wrong, according to your belief system. And then you, you have this guy who's going to make sure that you're OK with, you know, lay there so I can do my worst. You know, it's like, it's so interesting that there was enough of those kinds of things, too, which I think is how predators work. I think that's why it's so, so often almost impossible to to see it, because it's somebody that's already close to you, Jordan. It's not somebody that is sort of a friend or maybe an acquaintance. It's somebody in your sphere that's a friend, a family member, a trusted person in your life. And if you are not willing to take your inner eye and and go, something seems a little off. And then watch and then actually listen to the gut brain. You know, we got a brain up here. Sometimes it doesn't get to see what's actually happening on some subconscious gut brain level. And I just I have to tell people, if you think something's off, something's probably off. Don't dismiss it. Your secondary thought is that's the first kind of thought or the feeling. And then the next thought is, well, that's impossible. That guy got teacher of the year or, oh, that's impossible. She's like the best dance teacher in the whole community. She has, you know, students on Broadway or, Oh, that's impossible. That's Uncle Henry. Everybody loves him. That's your next thought is to dismiss your gut feeling. Don't do that. Stop doing that. Don't do that anymore, because you have to be able to watch long enough to actually see something that your brain brain can go, Oh, that's evidence. Mm hmm. So he goes, he takes you to Mexico and fake marries you. But then he somehow keeps you fooled, even though he gets arrested by Mexican police. How did he end up getting arrested by Mexican police? How did this whole thing sort of unravel for him in Mexico? So the FBI is working with they. What happens is they they find from a phone booth call that he made to his brother, who was a car salesman and told a car dealership he had called his brother. And that tape that phone was was bugged as well, eventually, because that's who he had called a couple of times before. So he put enough coinage in the machine that it can count the coins. And that's how they knew geographically where they thought he was in Mexico and what cities. Yeah, even back in the 70s, they had some pretty good, you know, ways of narrowing things down. What's really interesting about this is the way that they figured this out was some guy who knew the phone system really well. Listen to the call and heard how much money he put into the pay phone and then listened and said that was forty eight cents or whatever fifty cents. So he must be within this circle because 50 cents gets you another, whatever five minutes at this particular rate, which gets you to this. And when I was a kid, I could do the same thing, not with distance, because I didn't have those maps that the phone guy had, but I could identify the sound that coins made when they went into a payphone. I was listening to the call, and it's a really unique skill that you get from messing with the phone system for years at a time and having nothing better to do as I did when I was a kid. But this guy with this sort of kind of dumb skill ended up being the linchpin in finding a missing kid, which is really, really a fascinating thing. So when you put a coin into a payphone, it makes a sound. This guy was able to figure out what quarters dimes nickels sounded like. Count how many they were figure out using phone company maps, the distance that that was. And then they pinpointed people that he might know in that distance and figured out who he was calling, which is where from which is the so genius. It's amazing. Really, really amazing. He found the payphone that he called from like that is some Matlock level ish right there, right? Yeah, amazing credit to him. So credit to that guy for having like the most useless skill and putting it to. Action to rescue a missing child like these, never use that skill again, that guy. That's really true. And so that's how they honed in and pretty soon working with the federal these they they knew where the motor home was parked and he had moved around. We had moved, you know, deeper into Mexico and and one really early in the morning still dark outside. They just kicked the door down of the of the motor home and they came in full force. They grabbed him. They grabbed me, put us in this little car. I was sitting in the front seat between two federal eyes. He's in the back. I can see his eyeballs in the rearview mirror and I'm like, Oh, I can tell he's trying to tell me something like, Don't tell, don't tell. And then what happens is before my parents can get on a plane and come to Mexico and get me in those 48 hours or so while I'm in this little room in this Mexican, you know, it's one of those old, you know, like the big courtyard and the whole thing, and all the prison cells are kind of down below. He pays a guard off with his wedding ring, and he this one guard brings me down to his cell and in the cell of the Mexican prison, he tells me, he says, either the, you know, Zeta ends death row. The aliens had a name. You always want to personalize those people that you're trying to help save their planet. Of course, I just want people to know they had a name. Zeta and Zafira have come to me and have told me here in the cell, you know that we can't talk about these things, and if we talk about these things, then they'll vaporize us, which was already a threat. And that's basic. These things are what the sexual abuse and the fact that he's got this whole stupid plan that you have. You have his child, alien baby. Yes, have the child, the aliens themselves, the alien baby to save their planet, which of course, meant the stuff that was happening like the rape. All of that without saying those words. And then that we couldn't talk about the relaxing pills, which were just more of my vitamins where I was in and out of drug induced sleep. Most a lot of the time I was awake, but I was, you know, those and I couldn't that I could not have any relationship with any other males, including my father, that I was to save myself, which is so weird that little that last one is so frickin bizarre. Yeah. Like, that's just, Hey, I want to make sure that you're still isolated and I have this last power play, but also mostly like seventy five percent of his thing is, I don't want to get in trouble for raping this little girl. Did he ever excuse that he was planning on telling your parents and the FBI for why he brought you to Mexico? Obviously, you disclosing that he had had sexual intercourse with you would have really been a problem for him, but he must have had some other thing where he can say, Yeah, we were supposed to go to Mexico, and it's just all fine and cool. I mean, what was his plan? Oh, he had an answer for everything his plan was. If you would have let me marry Jan, then I could have come back to the, you know, the United States and not have been facing them, throwing me in jail forever. But if if I couldn't marry her, then the Mexican police were going to throw me in jail forever. I just had a depressive break and I just kept driving. Instead of instead of driving home, I drove towards the border and I ended up in Mexico and I she's driving me crazy. Of course I want to come home. I don't want anything to do with her and I just, you guys, you guys messed it all up by calling the police and the FBI. Yeah, blame my parents. So he throws the blame back on your parents for not letting him marry you as an excuse to get out of the situation that he put himself in because he supposedly had a depressive break which caused him to kidnap a 12 year old girl and drive her to Mexico. This is like the craziest mental gymnastics this guy goes through. Yeah. And you would think back on the 70s when you know, psychotherapy and therapeutic practice was just beginning. I mean, there weren't even child abuse laws in the early 1970s. Those were just getting passed federally. I mean, you talk about when rights came in the 70s for children, they didn't come until the late 70s where states were adopting. I mean, you couldn't beat your animals, but you could beat your kids. And it wasn't a crime. And I still say in twenty twenty three, we are still protecting the predator and not the children. There it is, still a family problem instead of a public problem. This is a criminal problem, and we are acting as if it's a family problem and we're just going to shut our eyes and just put our head in the sand and just not deal with it and just drives me crazy. That's what I'm trying to change. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Jan Broberg. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Text Expander. 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Now back to Jan Broberg. What is this guy's wife thinking all the time, you know, your guys are all family, friends, his wife and your mom was she? She must have been like, I'm really sorry. My husband is completely insane. He kidnapped your daughter or what was what happened? What was her reaction to this? Well, a lot of her reaction was she was also our best friend and had five children by this man. Yeah. And is a stay at home mom has no career. No. So I believe that a lot of her, you know, she was still at our house, all during the kidnapping. And the kids were they were our best friends, not just mine, but my two sisters, my god. So they, the kids are coming over and we're right there riding bikes and they're playing with my sisters because we're best friends and gals like, you know, Bob, he's so gregarious. He probably just. And she's the one that explained that Bob had been being treated for depression, which was a brand new word to everybody to. They're like, Well, what is it? It's called manic depression. And my mom's like, Well, what's manic depression while you're really hot? You know, Bob can be like the the life of the party and you're like that. And then he can just drop down where he's just like in this terrible state. And then she told my mom and dad about them trying to, you know, adopt this little girl out of Mexico, you know, and that he was so devastated when they went there. And mind you, people that are in our documentary are people that wrote them letters of recommendation to adopt a little 10 year old girl from Mexico. So, so now girls talking about that about, you know, he was just so devastated when he when we got there and the mother just wouldn't let her go the little girl, even though she was in abject poverty and we wanted to give her a nice home. So I don't think Gil knew, but I think she had a sense of something about how he he had always wanted to have. And they did have a little girl. Their last child was a little girl out of the five children. She was just a little two year old at this time, a baby when they moved in two or three by this time. So, you know, reiterating these stories about his depression and how much he wanted, he loved children and wanted to take care of, you know, his like. He took care of his little sister on the farm and his his stepdad made him sleep in the barn unless he was taking care of his little sister. And then he could sleep in the house. And you know, it's it's just it's that ball of yarn that's just all tied into some kind of, oh, so he's depressed. And why would he then don't call the police. Please don't call them. Please don't, you know, cause a big fuss. You know, he'll just be back and laughing his head off. Oh, I just, you know, I just thought I'd give you a trick. You all, you know, just kidnapped your daughter to Mexico. Just a big gag. Yeah, to her, it's not kidnapping at all crazy. And then he somehow convinces your family into signing affidavits, saying, OK, Jan was unharmed. He had permission to take you to Mexico. Drop the prosecution and the FBI and the prosecutor are like, What the hell are you doing signing this? Yes. Yes, more or less. You got that right. And so that way it really happened was his attorney drew up these papers, called my parents on the phone now. Mind you, my parents don't have an attorney. This happens by the state or the federal government. Yeah, your parents don't press charges. The state presses charges. That's right. So so the state's going to press charges and then there's going to be a messy trial. So this attorney for Burch told Calls. And she's a friend. She's bought flowers at my dad's store. She's our neighbor. She's also just lives a few blocks away from us. You know, my dad was a very, very loved and respected businessman in Pocatello. I had a flower shop. He was there for the weddings and there for the funerals. He knew people he had been, you know, so he knew her right and they go down to her office. They don't know. They shouldn't go. They don't have anybody advising them. They've never been in trouble. They've never had a speeding ticket. They've never been in a courtroom. Never had an attorney for any reason, except some friends. You know, so they go down to talk to her because she's going to she has a solution. So we don't have to have a messy trial, and she shows him these papers and they're both like, Well, that's it's not true. I mean, we didn't give him permission to take Jen to Mexico. We don't think he hurt her, she said. You know, we've had her checked out by a doctor and and and the doctor says she looks OK. And of course, they don't have all the cool toys the doctors have today. They don't have. Right? Well, they don't have rape kits, right? They just she didn't have bruises on her face, so she's fine. That's kind of that kind of thing. Exactly. That's exactly right. And then she says, so if you don't sign these papers that say that you gave him permission is, you know, your dear friend, you don't think anything happened. You don't think he would have hurt her, which is true. They didn't think that she said he. Then he's going to. Then we're going to have to bring out the part that you're unfit parents and. Bob had a sexual experience with Bert Shold with B, and we're going to bring all of this out, we're going to have to tell the press all these things about what terrible parents you are and my mom and dad are just sitting there. You know, my mom's kind of looking at my dad, who's never really told her explicitly what happened with her child in the car. Just that, oh, you know, it was kid's stuff and I went and repented. And I like, I'll never forgive myself, but don't. It's over. That was, you know, it was one time Maryann or two times I don't know what it was, but it doesn't matter. He he knew how to manipulate them, even when he wasn't in the room. And so that attorney tried to get them to sign by threatening them, and they did sign those papers. And then, of course, everybody at the, you know, Pete Welch and all the state, everybody is like, Why did you do that? So then they retracted their signatures. This is the part that is not in the documentary. It is in the series and it's in the book, right? But it's not in the documentary that went viral, so people don't know that they actually three days later, there's a newspaper article in the paper that retracts what the article in the paper had been a few days earlier that, oh, Broberg say that he didn't hurt her and that he had their permission. Three days later, there's an article that says they've retracted those statements. They said they were coerced to sign those papers. The trial is going to go forward. So that's how the whole story goes. Yeah, what's wild to me is the predator later gets back in the good graces of the family and the way that he does. This is, and I'm trying not to be judge here because you've had enough of that in your life, but not of my dad and out of your dad. He never is in the good graces. He's never let back up. A second hand job was whether this was the final straw. I say that with love because your parents do seem like lovely people, which was a kind of their downfall, right? Because they were so nice that they just they are. It was like they were so understanding that their brain kind of fell out of their head when it comes to this particular situation. Yeah, like a lot of people who have been groomed and it's somebody in their family, that's why most people who have a predator, that's a close close friend or a family member never get prosecuted. They never go to jail. Yeah, they just keep showing up at the potato salad, at your family reunion. Right? Well, it makes sense because it's so tricky, right? Like either it's either what you're going to cause a huge stink in the family or Aunt Edna is going to be mad when you throw her kid in jail and that's going to be a whole thing. Or it's going to be. How did you let this guy do all of this over such a long time to your daughter? This is your situation. How did you let this guy do so many bad things to your family? And the answer is, well, because we would look like idiots if we put a stop to it. Yeah, but look how you look like now. Yeah. Well, 20 20 hindsight now we realize we were wrong, but it's too late. So he gets back in the good graces of your mom and he even tells your mom, and this is so manipulative that it makes me just want to scream. He tells your mom, Oh, I really wanted to be with you. I took Jan instead, because you're such a good wife. You dear too faithful to your husband. It's just an insane thing to to say. Literally insane. But he's playing to your mother's emotions, to her insecurities, to the fact that their relationship was a little bit rocky. And she's your mom's all like, Oh, he really loved me, you know, that's why he did all this, and it's like, Oh, she's manipulating you. Like, you just want to tear your hair out when you hear and see this in the series in the book right? And he set that up for those three years before he ever took me. He's telling mom, Oh my gosh, Maryann, your legs. Oh my gosh, Mary, and this dinner? Oh my goodness, Maryann. Of course, you know, basically for the most part in private moments when he comes to pick us all up for school because he's on his way to the furniture store. This the school is right on the way. So he has kids are in the car. We jump in his car. He'd been doing that for years and my dad's gone to work. My dad makes us mush and toast and then leaves and goes to work earlier than our school time. And so he's gone. So Hershel has this opportunity to walk in the back door and say, it's a great day again, like our brothers get to school and to say something to my mom in private while she's cleaning up breakfast. He just had that in spades. Many other people around our community were like, Well, he's so handsome and he's so nice. And oh, he came over and did this for me. Oh, he came over and painted my fan. So he came over and did fix my car. Oh, he came over, brought us some furniture at wholesale. We weren't the only people that he did these kinds of things where he looked like a good guy. And all the while he's planting these little, these little attractions, these little flirtations. So, yeah, interesting. Well, he switches to trying to convince your mom that she was the one he wanted the whole time it was taking you was all some big plan to get closer to her. I mean, he's such a manipulator, but it also he kind of had easy, willing victims that were naive to the point of what now would looks like to the rest of us like negligence, right? Yeah, I can see how people would feel that way. I can understand it. But what I but what I really wish people could do is go, what is the one thing in my life that I've done in secret? That I wish I hadn't done. How did I get there and then retract all the steps before they actually did that? Most people don't pull the trigger on idea number one on day one of that one flirtation or attraction. A friend of mine who used to frankly do heroin said, You don't start with heroin man. And I'm like, Oh, that's a good point. You just you don't start with heroin. Generally, you start with something else or meth. Right, right. You work your way up the ladder. And so in this weird, ironic twist, your mom ends up speaking to the predator and spending the night with him in the same motor home where he had kidnapped you and tied you to the bed, which is so just poetically gross in so many ways. Yeah, it is. And the predators wife and I just I'm not going to call him Bob because he's a garbage person and he doesn't deserve a name. The Predator's wife, and because he is the same name as somebody is your dad. So it's confusing. But the Predator's wife keeps inviting the kids over for overnight visits and pursuing the friendship. These people seem absolutely shameless and continue to be manipulative. And frankly, Gail, the wife, right? She just seems like an accomplice. I think now in nowadays, we would say we would look at somebody like her and we would say, you are not only negligent or grossly negligent, you are an accessory to this. You know, you're an accomplice to this. I do fault her for that. However, you kind of can't decide if she's bad, right? You know her actions are bad, but you're like, Does she just want to pretend her husband is not a sexually deranged predator who's going after their friends and her friend's kids? And so she's acting as if nothing is wrong as opposed to being a willing malignant accomplice, et cetera. Does that distinction make sense because she seems like a person who just wants to bury her head in the sand, even though this is also horrible versus being like, Oh, raping kids is OK? Yeah, and I think you have to also, I think that distinction is very good, and I think it's very apropos to so many people today who are living with a predator. And on some level they know it. And on another level, they cannot see it because they cannot let it be true, right, and undo their whole life. It would undo their whole life. And what would I do next? How would I? How would I make a living? I mean, I interview on my own podcast show Survivors of Sexual Assault, and it's almost always if it was somebody in their home, it's because their mother basically said, Well, I need him. You know, I'm sorry your stepfather's doing this, or you'll get over it, or you'll get through it. I need him. Or if they know. And then more common than that is. Well, I think you've made something up, honey. I think that, you know, oh, there's blood on your panties. Where did that come from? Well, you know, blah blah blah. And oh, honey, I think you've got that mixed up it or you gaslighting or we don't talk like that. We don't talk about things like that. You know, like they're on their high horse of, you know, their righteousness or whatever like that can't be possible because, you know, this is my grandpa. You know, this is my father. This is your grandpa. Don't say things like that. And it's real. It's true the child is being beaten, molested or raped and people, they will not see it because they can't. It's too awful. Can you imagine if it's your father? Can you imagine if it's your brother, you have to take your closest people and go? How hard would it be for me to believe it? How hard would it be for me to actually wrap my head around it? And and I think that was the case. And first of all, you have a doctor saying nothing happened. You have Jan who say nothing happened. Like nothing like that gross. No, of course not. Because of course, I have the mission, the pills. I'm being watched by the aliens. They're still there. So you have all these people around you to to. I mean, we're all protecting the predator, right on some level. It's so crazy how he set that up. You're all protecting him. And the FBI is like, Let us arrest this guy. Like, No. Right? And all the while he's sneaking into your room at night, which is so brazen. Yeah. And playing the alien voice intercom tape thing and telling you to call and meet him. I mean, he just has no fear of consequences from the sound of it. Yep, that's exactly right. All through this next year and a half, I'm home. I mean, it's just a constant. I get a note from somebody at school that I don't know, and it says, go to, you know, center street to the phone booth right there, you know? And I ride my bike after school. I mean, I'm not even driving a car. I mean, I'm only 12. I'm still 12 and 12 and 13, so it's so f**ked up. 10. Yeah, it really is. And I'll tell you what, that's why that's the most common age of abuse and rape of children is age nine to about age 13 or 14. If you knew the numbers, you would just want to go throw up immediately in your toilet. It is so insane by an older, maybe a 20 something, you know, or even an 18, 19, 20, but clear up into the into the 70s and 80s. I mean, most perpetrators, pedophiles who are criminals and I know not all act on it, but those that. Are they say that they offend between 30 and 70 children over? Oh my God, that's such a high number. That's all these FBI statistics. Oh my God, that's awful. I did not know that. That's so awful. I really I had never thought about the same predator going after that many kids. I thought it would just be like the one they have access to in their house or next door. Yeah. Oh my gosh, that's really that's going to be pure nightmare. The fact that people like this exist at all is terrifying. Really, it is. It is. It truly is. OK, so the alien voice is now telling you that if the Predator goes to jail, then you're going to get assigned another male companion who's basically it. Basically, the aliens say, Hey, if Predator goes to jail, another guy is going to start raping you that you don't even know. That's right, and that's scarier than this guy because you trust him and you like him. Yeah, he's like my favorite uncle. But now, over this period of this year and a half between, you know, after the first kidnapping, now all of the things that he's implanted during those 45 days, I was missing and the jail cell and then all of that, like, I'm supposed to be in love with him. I'm supposed to be married to him. I'm supposed to because there's this mission. But it's also that psychological thing that's happening in a little tween brain, which is why that age group is so at risk. We just don't have a blueprint for being like, Oh, this is f**king crazy and makes no sense and I'm being manipulated. You're like, Oh, I guess this is what love and relationships are, because this is my first one. Exactly. That's exactly right. That's that tender thing that they that they, you know, screw with. Literally, that messes with you in so many ways for the rest of your life and you and you work hard at it. And that's my whole thing. You can move forward. I can only imagine, like your patterns for adult relationships had to have been super, super screwed up as a result of this, right? Yeah, they were. I was married four times. They were screwed up. Yeah. Oh gosh. Definitely. Yeah. The divide and conquer routine. We didn't really talk about this, but your mom is taking you to meet him in your moms, essentially working with him against the wishes of your dad. Divide and conquer routine was so effective, and it looks like from my perspective, and it looks like also you would agree with this just based on what you wrote in the book. This guy had the affair with your mom and did the weird stuff with your dad simply to get leverage over each of your parents and drive wedges between everyone in the family, right? Like, he didn't love your mom. He just wanted her to have an affair with him, so he could be like, Don't make me tell everyone that you slept with me in the motorhome because everyone at church will find out your reputation screwed like it was just leverage with this guy. It totally was. It was so calculated and so absolutely premeditated. And when you really look at that and the blackmail that he then used that for, it really is just incredibly criminal of, you know, any person to do things like this. And then at the same time, to already be grooming the next victim, to already be grooming the next woman and her daughter at the end of this year and a half in between the two kidnappings going back in time now and seeing all of the other reports of other girls and other things that came out after me. And you look at the timeline now and you're like, How did he juggle it all? Yeah, yeah. Full time job. The amount of crazy that this is. It really does boggle the mind because you mentioned he builds this game center and invites you to take a job there over the summer. And you think the parents are like, of course you're not going, which is the first reaction. But right, of course. And my dad is constantly at odds with me and I'm having no relationship with him. We went from this loving relationship to like, I wouldn't even let him hug me or touch me or anything. And I'm always in a fight because I'm always trying to stage that I'm an I'm an adult and I'm independent, and I want to be with Burt shold, and this is who I'm going to go and I'm going to be with. And my dad is like, You're 13 til now I'm 13 and you're not doing any of these things. And and now, Burt told and his wife have separated. They've moved away from Pocatello. Now they live in a different. They live in Utah instead of Idaho, and now they've separated. And now he goes up to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and builds this fun center and invites me. Now I'm turning 14. So now it's been, you know, almost a year and a half, two years almost. So I go up there, he sends me the money he gets, gets me a ticket, basically gives me a wad of cash. I take a taxi to the airport. My mom and dad are like, You're not going, you can't go work there. You're not, you can't be around him. He's forbidden from being around you. He can't even be in the same county as you. That's not, you know, they have no idea that he's been in my bedroom, that he's, you know, that all happened. He hasn't served his time in jail. He's now finally been through the process that he actually is going to go serve his big 15 days in jail. You know that which makes you crazy, too. Yeah, he got 15 days in jail. I didn't mention. And that was crazy, I mean, they must've just looked at this kind of child predatory behavior in a totally different way. In the 70s. Oh, definitely. Definitely there. Again, like I said, there were just barely any child abuse laws, period. So they're just grappling with, well, did they let her go or, well, I don't know. Maybe she is in love with them. I don't know what they're. I don't know what the judge was thinking, but for time served and blah blah blah went from a five year sentence down to 15 days. OK, so but he hasn't done that yet. He hasn't gone to serve that time yet. That's coming up in September. I fly up there. My mother raced to the airport behind me, and my little sister had broken her arm. Karen's like, she went in a taxi. I don't know. It honked and she ran and she laughed, and I wrapped up my sister's little broken arm in a dish towel. And then my mom is like, Get in the car and she races to the airport and I'm already in the tiny little, you know, it's a tiny little airport and there's no rules. You know, back then, you know, and she's running. She's trying to grab me. I've already gone through the door. I just hold up the money. I'm like, I can do whatever I want, like, I'm going, Yes, I can. And I've already gone through the thing. I've given my ticket and I've gotten through the little door and then you have to walk down on the tarmac to go onto the little plane. I mean, it's, you know, it's a tiny airport in Pocatello, Idaho, and I get on the plane and I fly to Jackson Hole and he's not there to pick me up. Somebody else from the fun center picks me up. So I think he was there in the airport and I think he was watching to make sure I got on that plane and then he raced back in his own car. Oh my God. And so I'm at the front center for a few days. Of course, my parents are calling an attorney. Anyway, his attorney or somebody, it was a different person, but has called him and said, You have got to get her home because now you're going to violate your parole and you're going to get sent to jail for five years instead of 15 days. Get her home. So I have my birthday. And that's the very last day of July. And then he takes me all the rest of the way home. There's a whole party with his family and the whole thing he has of all their all of the family. You know, all my friends, you know, his oldest son, who I have a crush on. Still, even though I'm being raped by his father, I'm still crushing on his oldest son. And you know, and his wife, everybody's having a birthday party for Jan, and then he takes me home to Pocatello and he drops me off with a new sewing machine and all these gifts. And my dad meets him, and it was painful anyway. And so I get in the parking lot of the Mini Dome, the big football stadium in Pocatello at ISU. I know State University, that's where they meet, and Bert Show gets all the stuff out of the car. And as my dad gets out to take it, he's like, You can't keep this stuff. And he takes off and he leaves. And I'm like, Yes, I can call mine. I just have a bratty 14 year old. And then literally two weeks later, I crawl out my bedroom window. I stage a huge fight with my parents. I pack a backpack. I tell them I'm running away because I can't. You know, I write the letter exactly as it was dictated to me by Birch told. I write it in my handwriting. Doesn't sound like me. I misspell words. I write it exactly. I copied it, basically. And I'm a straight-A student. I don't misspell words and I leave it and I leave the backpack. I packed it as if I was going to take it with me, and then I crawl out my bedroom window and he's right there on my street, in a car, and he takes me a second time right there to help me out my window and has the car parked and we drive in the dark down the street. I remember that that there were no headlights on the car. And he takes me to California and he puts me with a family that he's convinced or that he knew. Maybe he knew as a good guy, I don't know if he knew them or found them through the Catholic girls school that he enrolled me in. But at school hadn't started yet. And so I stayed with this family for the first, maybe 10 days, maybe 15, maybe two weeks. And that was when he went back to serve his sentence of 15 days in jail. And he's already kidnapped me the second time and leaves me with a family who they think he's a CIA agent, right? My mother's been killed in Lebanon. The whole thing. He's such a master of disguise. He enrolls you in this private Catholic boarding school to hide you. And he tells the boarding school this ridiculous story about him being a CIA agent and your mom getting killed in Lebanon. The fact that people believed what Birch told what the Predator said like, Oh, OK, well, that sounds pretty dire. CIA agent who definitely not kidnapping a girl and bring her to another place will take care of this girl without asking any questions. It's just people just believe whatever crap came out of this guy's house. If somebody tells you now in 2023, you would immediately call the police. PIN the guy down in your office. And these morons just believe everything that comes. You'd be like, this guy is a little girl. He says he's a CIA agent that their mom was killed in Lebanon. Come down here. He's obviously mentally ill, and we don't know where he got the girl, right? That's what your reaction would be now and back then they're like, Oh, we'll hide this child for you. Yeah, except that he had papers that I was jammed, that I was Janis Kobler. He had a birth certificate made he. He was, you know, this guy, Tobler Yatta. I mean, he did all the stuff. I mean, he did all the like, make the driver's license and do the birth certificate and all the things to enroll her in school. And and then, of course, Jan is an actress. That's what I've been doing since I was six. I can act like my mother's died in Lebanon and like, I'm a Catholic. I'll learn the prayers, I'll learn the rosary. I did it. I, you know, in a day because I'm I'm on both levels. One, I'm scared to death, but I'm also important. I have a mission. We have to have this baby. We have to save a dying planet, right? You know, I might have been naive and my parents might have been me, but we weren't stupid people. We were just unaware that anything like this. And I think those nuns at the Catholic Girl School were totally unaware that somebody could do so. It was like outside he looked like my father. Yeah, he looked like a CIA agent. He'd get on a, you know, sorry, I've got to go make a phone call. I got a call called Jerry back. You know, Jerry Ford. I mean, that's the kind of thing it really is the fodder of great movie making. But my story's all real. It's all true. Yeah, it's like this guy took everything to the aunt's degree in manipulation and and brainwashing techniques and skills. And I've studied, you know, a lot of different ways that people are brainwashed and partly as if you can. If you can isolate someone and control their food and their water, and when they can go to the bathroom, you can pretty much convince them of anything with the right mechanism. Mm-Hmm. You can. You can change a person's way of thinking quickly. You really can. And the sympathetic investigators, they get a hold of the Predators phone book or his phone bill. Somehow, they're like shady means, right? And they realize he's getting collect calls from different pay phones in a certain area and they triangulate the schools in that area, which is also quite brilliant on its way. And they figure out where you are. I would imagine the school's reaction was quite intense. When they when the FBI or any of the investigators came and said, Do you have this girl who's being kidnapped? They must have been like, Oh my God, we've helped this guy do this. Yeah, yeah. In fact, a couple of the sisters, the nuns came in the next trial that happens after this. I was there in the school for almost three months. I was missing in early August until Thanksgiving. It was right around that time, which is exactly the same time period that I was missing two years earlier. So this is like with a two year span in between. And those nuns came and testified, but it took three visits from law enforcement and a private investigator and then the FBI for them to believe that they were the real people, not him, because that's like that first teacher. You always hear that be the first teacher for your kids. You want him to learn about sex from you because if they learn it from somebody else, they'll learn it. Whatever way is taught to them first, like, that's the real way. It's like a first impression of any kind, right? The first impression. And they totally thought that what he had told them is that people might come in looking for my daughter, but they're pretending to be the police or whatever, because if they can get a hold of her and torture her, then they know they can get to me because I would never let anything happen to her. So just call me immediately if anyone comes looking for her because I'm high level, you know, and that's so it took three times that they actually had to come before they had all the newspaper articles. I mean, I've been in every newspaper, you know, it's not like we have the internet, but we had the newspapers across the country looking for me the first time in his face and my face or in these newspapers, and they're like, OK, yeah, that little girl is here. But her name is Janice Tobler, not Jan Broberg, right? And that's how it happened, you know, and unfolded. And yes, I was taken home after. And again, then I didn't talk to my parents at all for days and weeks and months. It was the worst of the worst time for my mom and dad is after the second time. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Jan Broberg. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Peloton. Trying a new workout is like learning a new skill. It can be overwhelming, and the uncertainty can be a major barrier to actually getting started. Peloton's approach to convenience is very helpful for people who are looking to take on a new fitness skill or routine. Everything is designed to be as simple and streamlined as possible. From the easy to use touchscreen interface to the wide range of class options and personalized recommendations, you can access a variety of live and on demand classes, including cycling, running strength. Now there's an incredible rower, which I really enjoy, all from the comfort of your own home. Rowing is great as a full body workout, which means you'll be engaging multiple muscle groups at once, including your legs, core arms and back. 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And of course, he ends up arrested and your family business burns down, which is, you know, not a coincidence. So this psychopath, which really is what he is, I mean, he's just a very focused predator psychopath pedophile. Yeah, he is just he's really intent on hurting your family as much as possible. Yeah, that's true. So he pays two guys that he's in the holding cell, basically a holding cell with two arsonists that are in for arson. This is, you know, early on within months of this of me coming home in late November. This is in February of the following year that right there, like few months later and those those two guys that are only in there for jail for a few months get out and they do exactly what he paid them to do. And both neither of them actually ever received any of the money. But but they both they went to jail. He didn't. They knew it was him. They told that it was him that told them how to do it, where to go in the flower shop, to go down in the basement where they had kept all the wrapping paper and all the supplies, all the, you know, wooden flowers, you know, the pods and the things that would burn catch on fire and boxes of all of it. And that's where they started the fire. And it not only destroyed my father's flower shop, it destroyed the whole city block of Pocatello. There were like 12 businesses in that block, and they all it doesn't even exist. The building has been torn to the ground because of the fire. It's so wild. I mean, any poisons your dogs on what two separate occasions he sends people to your school at home to try and kidnap you again, like just random people he's enrolled into is whatever fantasy or on their part, on the payroll. And I know at one point you you're going to this theater camp or whatever and your plan was to kill yourself and kill your sister so that she didn't then have to sleep with him to complete the mission, right? Because was his yes, part of his leverage was if you don't complete it, your sister is going to have to do it and you didn't want him to hurt your sister. Is that accurate? Exactly, yes. His there were all sorts of threats. My my sister, Karen would go blind if I did something wrong. My father would be killed or removed. My little sister would be taken in my stead. She would be the my sister, Susan. So yeah, he had a threat for everybody and they were coming from the aliens. Of course not from him, of course, because he loves my family. He loves me. I would never do that. But those aliens, they'll definitely, yeah, those aliens would do that. And you know, he said, you just have to know that your mom and dad are standing in the way of the mission. So you've just got to be very, very focused here because we got to do this. What we can save this planet before your 16th birthday will. Now I've had my 16th birthday while I'm at the theater camp two years later, so now I'm turning 16. I was turning 14 and kidnapped the second time right after that. Now I'm turning 16 at the theater camp. I'm supposed to get together with him. I'm supposed to see him. I'm out of town for five weeks, but there's other kids assigned to you. You have to have a buddy all the time when you're on campus and going to class to cla*s. Mm hmm. So my 16th birthday comes and goes. I haven't been able to see him hook up with him, whatever you want to call it. I'm now driving. I have a car, but I don't have it at the theater count. My parents took me and came to pick me up to see the show. That's it's at the end. It's a big show that the kids do well during that week, right after my birthday, I'm 16 and I'm not vaporized yet, and basically I will get little notes. While they've given us a little bit more time, he still is trying to hook up with me. He's living in Salt Lake at this point. This camp is in Provo at BYU and I'm a week away from the performance and the end of the camp. And in that week, my dogs get poisoned and my mom calls my mom and dad call me every night at the same time because you know it's a phone on the wall who operates payphone and they tell me my dogs are sick and that they are at the vet and had had like little convulsions or something. I know that it's my fault. I know it's because this boy at the theater camp, you know who bought me this ice cream cone because he was in front of me and I knew he liked me. But I I didn't know what to do. He'd already bought it, and I ran to my dorm room and I'm crying and my roommate's like, What's wrong with you? So you think that since the boy was nice to you, you're going to get vaporized by? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So when the dogs were poisoned and mom called and we had that conversation and I started crying and she was like, I'm like, Oh, it's my fault. Everything is my fault. Just no, it's my fault. Because I think I might. I might be vaporized that night. I might not ever have anything else to say to her. And I've hardly spoken to my dad now for like four years, practically three years. It's been just a really it's been hard and I feel that I carrying the weight of a world on my shoulders, literally this other planet. And. My dogs are sick, and maybe they're going to die because I did something wrong and I hang up the phone and I just cry myself to sleep. And, you know, after I go, of course, to my rehearsal that night and then I come up with cry myself to sleep, very dedicated to my craft. And the next morning? Not typical. I get the, you know, the resident comes in, says, you have a phone call, it's your mom. And that was not usual. And so I, I go, Oh, no, something terrible happened to somebody in my family. But she called, she said, I just felt I should call you again. This is listening to your gut. Moms and dads. I thought I should call you to tell you that the dogs are home and they're doing OK and and you were so upset and it's not your fault that they got sick, I think maybe it, maybe I fed him something bad, but they're OK. They're doing OK. I just want you to know they're going to be fine. And at that moment, it was the first time Jordan in like four years, almost to the day of my first kidnapping because this is this is early August, and I was taken in October that I had a thought, Oh my gosh, the dogs aren't dead because I'd already planned to tell my sister because I was turning 16. I knew where my dad had hit the gun that he had bought. We'd never had a gun before. My dad bought a gun after the first kidnapping. I knew where it was hidden. I had a plan. I would tell Susan if she didn't want to do the mission. I would kill her and that I'd kill myself. It was all planned out, but I had to finish the show at my theater camp first. And that moment of going, what if? What if this isn't real? What if those voices? What if they aren't real? What if this is a made up thing? What if I killed Susan and myself? I can't do that until I know it's real. The second thought after I'd hung up the phone with mom is, I'm just kidding. I'll do whatever you tell me to do. I know you can read my mind in my thoughts. I don't know why I thought that. I know that you're real and you're watching me and I'll do everything you say. That was my second thought. But I'd had the first thought and I had never had a thought like that in all those years. So I go back to my theater camp, my mom and dad come to pick me up. We do the performance. It's awesome. I go home, I start school and here comes September and I'm testing the waters and I'm talking to boys at school for the first time. I'm 16 years old. I barely. I accepted that date to go to a dance with a group. But the cousin of my one of my dear friends, my dear friend Jan Hall at the time had a cousin in town and she set me up to go to this dance. Jan, you're 16 now. It's OK to go on a date. It's OK and I accept it. You know, I hadn't done any of that and I got home from that date. It was late and it was dark, but the porch light was on as it always was. I walked in the front door after saying goodnight to that boy and into my house, and right in the inside of my front door is where my dad's easy chair sits and our living room is to the right and his easy chair is right there, kind of almost by the door. And the the first words I heard, I didn't know he was sitting there was like, Oh, Danny and I barely talked to my dad. I've treated my dad like s**t. I it's been so hard and so awful. And he goes, Johnny, how was it? Did you have a good time? And I sat on the arm of his easy chair and I said, I did. I had a really good time dad. Are you OK? And dad's like, Oh, of course, I'm fine. And I actually kind of put my head down and I gave him a little kiss on his forehead. Now I had given him no affection for years. And I walked back to my bedroom past Susan's room. She was asleep. Mom was in bed and I didn't sleep downstairs anymore. I couldn't sleep in my bedroom. Down there I was. I didn't like it, and I just made them move me up into the den and there was a bed in the den and I went back to the den and just laid in my gunny sack dress. My platform shoes on the bed, looking at the ceiling and thinking Nobody's died, nobody's dead. Is this real or is this not real? And then over the next couple of weeks is when I really started to go, OK. Still, nobody's dead. Nobody's blind, right? And that was my sister. Yeah, my sister, my best friend Caroline Hanson at the time, one night at a sleepover at our house. They started to ask questions. They'd found some notes and letters that I had kept in a pillow on this blue velvet hanging chair that Birch told had built for me when he built the wall in our bedroom downstairs to make two rooms out of our great big giant room where we slept together. And then my back back bedroom would have the two windows, of course, that I had crawled out of. They found some letters from him. Some of those notes, those love notes. And they were like, What is this who say to Xetra? One of them said that. And I just screamed, I'm like, You can't know that you're going to get hurt. You're going to get hurt. And then because I was still trying to make, I wasn't for sure, but they drew it out of me. They they got it out of me. It was the scariest day of either of their lives or said, we've never seen anything like it. It was like watching The Exorcist happened on the floor as you clawed the floor and sobbed and screamed and then clawed the floor and told more little bits and pieces. And all night we were up all night. And that's how it how it came out the first time. Gosh, when you're manipulated like this from such a young age, how do you learn to trust other people ever again, especially since the predator was so close to you and to in close to your whole family? Well, it's a process for sure. And that's what I spend my work and my time doing. Now I have an online community and we basically come together as survivors of assault and abuse, and we talk about things like this. I think it's. By getting, you know, some good therapists in your life, I think you also have to know that every person that comes into your life is not a predator. You have to believe it on a on a brain level. You have to reprogram your neuro system. You have to do the exercises that actually fix the brain. That you're light in your brain for fear of being abused has been turned on. It is like a huge spotlight in your brain. Yeah, you're hyper vigilant, so you have to learn and do certain things that are neurological, whether you do EMDR therapy. I think everyone should do that. I think they should have a good therapist, somebody to talk to. I think you have to find maybe one or two people that will actually believe you. So my foundation, the Jan Broberg Foundation and our online community is set on the tenets of We believe you. We don't blame you. We won't judge you. You are safe here. And when people have a safe place to come and talk through what's happened to them, tell their story like I have many times throughout these years. My intention was to help others, and now I'm finally able to do that in a in a concrete way. I'm developing and I have a 12-Step. Basically, it's like a 12-Step program. And if you can imagine AA and Al-Anon, the people that are traumatized through addiction and alcohol usually were traumatized in some sort of abusive way in their childhood. Before that, almost always. Not always, but almost always before somebody cuts, before somebody is anorexic, before somebody starts drinking, before somebody is shooting that heroin in their arm. They've had some kind of an abuse as a child, and they're self-medicating. And so our intention with revival's our online community is to bring together people that really need a group. They need an AA, they need a place for sexual assault survivors to to gather, to know they're safe, they're believed and to be able to tell their stories. Step one telling getting it outside of the body so that you can look at it and examine it. That's step one in coming to trust others again. But you have to get it out of you. You can't just pretend cancer doesn't exist and that you're going to be OK. You have to actually do the chemotherapy. You actually have to do something right. That's kind of what I what I work on now is in helping other people actually come together in a safe place where they're believed so that they can do step one through Sept. 12. And I have basically a program that I that I'm trying to, you know, get out there into the universe so that people can have happy relationships and trusting relationships and loving relationships with themselves. First, because the person you hate the most is yourself, which is completely misplaced. It happened to you. You were a kid. You were a child. You're a tween, a young person with not a fully developed brain. And yet we carry the shame. We carry the blame. So that has to be uprooted and and examined and pulled out. It's like a weed. Shame is like this weed that you got to pull over and over again throughout your life when you've been through abuse. It's just it just lives for whatever reason. It's such a shameful experience. It lives in, you know, so we do a lot of those kind of things. We work with memory experts and we work with therapists. Like you said, they're not your therapist, but we work with therapists. Just like, you know, your introduction in your podcast is like, Don't think that this is therapeutic? That's my thing. It's like AA. They don't claim to be giving you therapy, but you come to a place where others understand where you've been, and there's great things that can happen in that space. When you make commitments to yourself and you go through those steps to actually do that thing to trust Broberg ends up stalking you and your family actually for years and years and years. How are you finally rid of this guy? Because the authorities just they're basically putting him in jail for a few weeks or few months, and he gets out and he's back to his old tricks. Right? He's back to his old tricks. He found me in college. He found me when I took my first job as a performer at Disney World. He found me and all these places. And you know, that's where my son was born, my son, who, you know, talk about it in generational trauma. My son has also struggled with the trauma of my abuse. It is. It has passed through our DNA if we don't know how to address it sooner and faster. And that's why I hope people will try to address it. Not in their I mean, address it in your 40s and 50s and 60s that that's when you're strong enough to get there. But if you can address it in your 20s, you know before you have children, it will help because my sons also struggled with addiction. And it's been, you know, it's been a rough road to have for different, you know, his father, my first husband and then three other father figures in his life and have them ripped away from him. And he suffered a lot of loss because of my abuse and what's happened to me. So to get back to your story, he did. Continue to contact me throughout my life in my college days. When I took my first job before my son was born and then my son was born in Orlando, Florida, in that period of time, he got a hold of me. And then later, as I started to speak out about my story and my mom and I, she interviewed me and she wrote a book called Stolen Innocence. He showed up at a conference that I was giving to a thousand women and their daughters on this very story and this subject. That's crazy. A lot of nerve. Yeah, a lot of nerve. I mean, we had just published the book and, you know, didn't sell nearly enough copies to cover the costs, but we were trying to get the story out and the message out and and he came to a conference and ended up after having, contact me, you know, a dozen times throughout my adult life in various ways. There he was again at the campus where I'm giving a speech and the police are there and they're, you know, that's how I was on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer and being interviewed again about this story long before I had a documentary or another book that was the full story and long before I had the series. I've been speaking out and speaking my story because I knew that others would be emboldened to tell theirs for all these years. But he I now know I know two girls before me that were molested and raped by him, and I know four girls after me that were molested and raped. And there's many others, I'm sure I don't know. So when those statistics by the FBI people go, well, that can't be true. I'm like, Oh, it's absolutely true. And again, clear into the 2000s. So it wasn't because, oh, now we know what you know pedophiles are. It's because manipulators are really, really crafty and smart, and they're con men and con artists, and you don't see it coming. They're catfishing you. How did this end with him? So after he showed up at this conference where I was speaking, he was arrested because he had brandished a firearm. Well, at one of the people outside on the campus and that that he, the guy that he pointed the gun at and had these papers he was trying to hand out. And we knew his current wife was in the conference because he had made threats to the university. Like, you shouldn't have her talk. She's made this up this story. And they went ahead with it, and we knew his wife was there because one of her daughters had stepped forward and said, Well, he was. He was doing the worst to us and we ran away and she was actually at the conference. And you could identify the woman who gave me life. She wouldn't even call her mother at the time. I don't know if she's come together at this point, but anyway, so we knew she was there. So the police were there and the campus police. And when he brandished the firearm, the guy knew exactly what it was ditched the gun in a McDonald's garbage can outside, and they eventually found it. And so he was tried and he was convicted, and it took almost two years. I mean, this didn't happen overnight. Again, everything goes so slow and people are like, Oh my gosh. So during that time, because I had no idea that he was only living an hour away from where I was speaking at this conference, and he'd seen my picture on a poster and he knew there was a book and he had threatened my mother at her workplace in Idaho. My mother had become a social worker. She went back to college after all of her daughters graduated from college, became a social worker and he was putting flyers on all of her worker's cars and all around. Pocatello This is in the 2000s. I mean, this is years later. And basically, he was convicted on three felony charges and two misdemeanors. Nothing to do with raping little girls but having a firearm. He was a registered sex offender, hadn't registered a bunch of things like that. He was found guilty again, and then he was released because he was going to be sentenced a month later. It was the holidays and he had a heart condition, so he was released into the care of the Nevada police to take him to his home. And he lived in Nevada in Logan Dale, Nevada. And as he crossed over the border, he was in his own truck with the police escort. He took off and as the Utah police were passing them on to the Nevada police and he went up into a campground in the hills and he took a bottle of pills and and washed it down with a bottle of Kahlua well and killed himself. I don't think he meant to die. I think he just he wrote these little tiny suicide notes to his kids. I feel sorry for all of them. That's what I can't imagine having this person as your father. Oh, you think you think he did it for attention and just ended up dying? I do because he tried before, which I know because the district attorney called me before it was public knowledge that he had died. He said We found these little short two or three sentence suicide notes that, well, everybody's against me. Once again, I'm being wrongly accused, you know? Oh my gosh, I didn't even write anything about other people like pure psychopath, narcissistic predator. This guy didn't have an honest bone in his. Oh, I I know you touched on this a little bit earlier, and most people, they hear the stories from when you were a kid because that's the dramatic true crime stuff. But how is this all affected you as an adult? You mentioned you had four marriages that it affected your relationship pattern. But I'm curious, like, what about in terms of raising your own children? I know your son, Austin. He's a show fan. I know he's mentioned that these events have affected him personally and deeply as well. Yeah. And I think that that's something that when they talk about intergenerational trauma and how that trauma that lives in your body, if you don't know how to shut it off, if you don't know how to have a trusting relationship or a good relationship and you're maybe not looking for love in all the right places and you're you missed out on all that natural development. You didn't get to have that as a 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 year old. You have Arrested Development. There are things you didn't get to learn because you weren't there, you know, you were in a different state. And so I, as an adult now feel like I have finally maybe crossed some bridges that I didn't know about in my 20s and 30s that I have slowly learned more and more. I've read a lot of books. I listen to a lot of podcasts myself. I listen to books on tape quite a bit, and I also had the advantage of having some like Oprah. She would say the real words back in the day when we never talked about these things, and that was like a huge thing and one of the things that doesn't have anything to do with, you know, saying the right words. But it has to do with a thing that she taught on one of her shows about a gratitude journal. And it's something that really resonated with me, and it was something that I grew up with in my home. My father was a person that always had a funny saying or just a nice saying. But you know it was. He'd say, I'm in a funny voice so that they we would all remember them, and they were like the mantra of our life, like every day is a bonus. Or, you know, two things I love you in the Gospels, true? Or, you know, he'd say, you know, thanks a million. Wish I had it. You know, he'd say these things that always stuck in our minds like, you know, the glass really is half full, not empty gratitude and attitude. They're directly related. And those sorts of sayings and that little gratitude journal idea from Oprah literally has saved my life. And so it's one of my steps in the program that I've created. It's it's really understanding if you can change your your traumatic experience from something that is your drama and your story that affects you in a negative way into something that is positive and that you can be grateful for. You really know at that point like, I'm grateful, even as weird as it might sound that I had these experiences because of who I am today, and they do form who we are. I don't have to be grateful a person doesn't have to like the person, but I had to forgive the person in order for me to move forward. So letting go of certain things and moving forward with my life, knowing I am the creator of my life and my reality and my every day, every minute of my life is hugely empowering if I can help a million other survivors know that. Mm-Hmm. And do that, then my what I went through was worth it if I can help. Two billion There's two billion survivors of sexual assault and abuse that are walking the planet today. Right now, two billion around the globe, just based on the numbers, right? Just based on the numbers, the stats. So if I were able to help a fraction of those people at least know that they aren't to blame that their story. It matters and that they can move on from their story into a life that they can create and and love. And even if it's not perfect, my life was not perfect. Like you said, I've been married four times. I've been through, you know, first told, coming back into my life. I've been through my son like, you were talking about that generational trauma, who? It didn't start with heroin, but it's where it is, where it ended. And so to go through those years, those many years and knowing that part of that was just never having security in his life. I want to help other people find that sooner. How can you find yourself your empowerment, your security, your trust, your love? That's the right, the good kind of love that you have to work on with another person that isn't harmful to you, that isn't harming your loved ones. Those are the things that I believe are robbed from children of physical, mental, emotional and especially sexual abuse. And so that's sort of what happens. In going through those marriages, I've I've gained and lost, you know, stepdaughters and. And people that I wanted in my life, but my own suffering or my own trauma got in the way, you know, because of choices that I made and and they weren't healthy choices. And I think if I can help somebody avoid some of the aftermath of abuse, then that might, you know, make it all worth worthwhile. I guess that's how I pictured it. So writing my, you know, the book that I have and and doing the podcast that I do on survivor stories and on experts in the field, I try to to get with people that talk about the neuroscience of the brain that talk about, you know, how can you change your ever present voice of negativity in your head? How do you change it? How do you quiet it? How do you make it go? There are things you can do to actually make a huge impact and change your life. And that's what I want to do for people. And so that's the kind of thing that I work on now. But yeah, it's affected my family members. It absolutely has. It's affected my relationships with various people. But almost always I've been able to come back around to having those relationships be healed to a degree. I'm very curious. You know, you've got the series on Peac**k. It's doing well. You have the series on Netflix that did really well. There must have been fallout from this because, you know, when you see Netflix, if you don't give it a second thought, what you think is a lot of these idiots letting their daughter get abuse. These are terrible people. They were probably in on it. What a bunch of knuckleheads. I would imagine that this is. And talking with Austin, your son has let me know. Like, I spoke with him on the phone and he's like, you know, one of the reasons he wanted me to interview you is because he's he knows how I do my interviews. But also I said, you know, I just I have such a hard time blaming your parents because even though they're just naive to the point where I want to smack them, they're not evil people. Yeah, but it's very hard to come to that conclusion. You really have to sit there and think about it and weigh all the evidence because they look like total negligent morons. When you and I'm sorry, these are your parents, but they look so bad at the series because they let you be abused by this guy and they will themselves be abused by this guy. Yeah. And I guess there is a point where every person has to come to that willingly to say, OK, I did not see something that I think I should have seen. I think, right? And my parents have definitely come to that point that they've apologized to me and tried to make it up to me in as many ways as they could, and to then also take all of the mistakes that they made forward to the whole world so that people could, you know, put them under a microscope and and and say such awful things about them was incredibly brave because most of us don't tell our worst things. You know, they most of us don't tell the time when we got conned out of $200000. Most of us don't tell the time that, oh yeah, I left, that I actually did suffer basically an abuse or a rape because I I did these things. I was drunk. Or, you know, whatever we think is our worst moment of not seeing the con artists have not seen the predator behind the narcissistic, you know, smile that got us to marry them. And then we don't often tell about our affairs. You know, oh, I had an affair. We don't talk about things on our worst days. We don't. And my parents did. And so for me, I just all I can say to everyone is that most people are naive with the people closest to them. So I guess that's what I have to say about. Yes. Naive. Yes. Yes, maybe you know, it can look that that way. But when somebody spends three years grooming you into being their best friend? You don't see it coming, you don't see it. Jan Broberg, thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate it, Jordan. You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Amanda Katarzyna, who was raised in a cult and later sex and labor trafficked. The women were trained to be insanely submissive, like you could never say no to any man. And then the men were trained in a very military way. These people are well armed and well trained, and it's a whole group that thinks that the world is evil and they need to repopulate the world with their people to bring the Kingdom of God. When you turn 13 in that culture, you're an adult. So to be 13 years old, being courted by men twice my age, three times my age to see if I would make a good wife, it was just kind of outrageous. So I moved to California to go to school, and I start training in May and my trafficker was there. He was actually one of my boxing coaches. Then he's like, You know, I like you. And so now we're dating. So that's my first adult relationship. He's twice my age at this point. And then he would always pick me up to his cabin on the mountain, which was really far away from everybody else. No phone service, isolation, and it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted to do to me, they could go, Oops, you accidentally got gang raped. That was very common going to go train. And then all of a sudden, now that you thought 12 rounds, now you're going to be raped, a girl ran a red light in my truck. So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, Hey, I was just had a car accident, he said. Is your face stop? And I'm like, No. He said, Well, you're still capable, then something isn't right here. This isn't who I want to be. This isn't what I want. And it was like I was coming out of water. I had this moment of clarity and I knew something wasn't right, and I knew this wasn't what I wanted, and I knew I needed to act fast in order to get out of that situation because I knew I'd get sucked back in. To hear how she escaped her dire situation, check out episode 631 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. What a story, I mean, I remember seeing this on Netflix, and I if you haven't heard this before, I think the question that's probably on your mind is how could her parents let this happen over and over again? How could they be so naive? Well, conservative way of life, really restrictive religious community. The sky was also an expert abuser, expert manipulator. Nobody ever talked about this sort of thing in that community at that time. And all the weird alien story is used to manipulate the secret hidden cassette player. I mean, this guy really did go kind of above and beyond. And remember, the parents were groomed to this guy was a successful father of five, not some random creep. He really managed to weasel his way into the church community to the family. And dang, if it wasn't just so clear that there is no mental health care or counseling or child abuse laws back then, wow, we I just it's staggering to think what went on and just was lightly frowned upon. If anything, I mean, just absolutely wild. I'm thinking this predator was likely a high functioning psychopath and of course, a pedophile. Few people have that level of focus when it comes to harassing one particular person or family. And I know he had other victims, but man, this guy really expended a ton of energy with this. As a father, I really related mostly to the father in this story. And there were times where I just had to pause the audio book because the pain that he went through, being unable to protect his kids at losing his wife, his relationships falling apart, all as a result of this predator because he was a good person and because he trusted other people. It's really just heartbreaking. I know that there's just no way that this guy ever forgave himself for any of this, because I don't think I would, and I don't think I have to say this to you all listeners here of The Jordan Harbinger Show. But I'm going to say it because I know that this family, the bro Briggs had a ton of problems after the Netflix documentary aired. Don't troll these people. They're all victims. They've had enough. I know Jan is really tough, but at the same time, I know they put up with a lot of blame. Like I said, when this Netflix thing came out and it was just, it's really shameful. People went after them really hard. And I know you guys are a lovely, caring bunch because I see the emails in my inbox, but the reminder never hurts. And you know, I'll also say it is really easy to blame other people and say, Well, this had never happened to me. I would never be this dumb. I would never be this naive. I would have done something differently. We do this because it makes us feel superior and it makes us feel immune to the types of influence that these people were victims of. And you might be right, maybe you wouldn't fall for this. But I think it's much easier to say that than to put yourselves in the shoes of other people. And that's what I think we should do here on this show is try to put ourselves in their shoes with their life experience and see if we really would have made different decisions. Maybe we would have. But then again, maybe not. Big thank you to Jan Broberg. All things Jen will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger dot com. Our chat bot is that Jordan Harbinger dot com. You can search for anything in any show, any feedback Friday, any promo code for any sponsor. Jordan Harbinger.com/ A.I. transcripts in the show notes videos on YouTube advertisers deals discount codes. All ways to support the show are going to be over at Jordan Harbinger RT.com Slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using software systems, tiny habits, the same stuff that I use every single day. That's our six minute networking course. And that course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com/ course, I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. Build relationships before you need them and many of the guests on the show subscribe and or contribute to the course. Hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jenn Harbinger, Jess Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Molly Ocampo, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others the fee for this show as you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who needs to hear the story or would, maybe I hate to say get a kick out of this story, but just find it is fascinating because I did, or you did share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time. Special thanks to Peloton for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. 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