con-sara-cy theories
Join your host, Sara Causey, at this after-hours spot to contemplate the things we're not supposed to know, not supposed to question. We'll probe the dark underbelly of the state, Corpo America, and all their various cronies, domestic and abroad. Are you ready?
Music by Oleg Kyrylkovv from Pixabay.
con-sara-cy theories
Episode 123: I went down the Dan & Betty Broderick rabbit hole
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What actually happened with Dan & Betty Broderick? Was anyone the obvious villain? Did any of the TV shows or movies tell the real story? 🤔
2:00 to 24:55: Current events. Peter Thiel is moving to Argentina. Yeah... Argentina. Exxon's CEO predicts high oil prices and scarcity. More people left of center are prepping.
25:00 to 2:23:00: The Dan, Betty, and Linda rabbit hole.
Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmbpJI-kcYA
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/18877590
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/18877590
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-argentina-billionaire-moving-abroad-2026-5
https://unherd.com/newsroom/peter-thiel-wont-find-a-safe-haven-in-argentina/?edition=us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Per%C3%B3n
https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Irregular-Army-Recruited-Neo-Nazis-Criminals/dp/1844678806
https://www.reddit.com/r/Divorce/comments/nr5kk7/feeling_sorry_for_betty_broderick_after_watching/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Broderick
https://www.amazon.com/Betty-Broderick-Telling-myself/dp/1511518626
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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT
My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th!
Transcription by Otter.ai. Please forgive any typos!
Sara Causey discusses her deep dive into the Dan and Betty Broderick case, questioning the simplistic narrative of a scorned wife. She reflects on her own reevaluation of the case as an adult and mentions her recent appearances on other podcasts. Causey also touches on current events, including Peter Thiel's move to Argentina, linking it to historical Nazi sympathies in the country. She critiques Thiel's motivations and the broader trend among the wealthy to seek safe havens. Causey then delves into the Broderick case, examining Betty's perspective through her book Telling on Myself, highlighting her troubled marriage and the complexities of their relationship. Betty's narrative details her tumultuous marriage to Dan, a lawyer with a penchant for manipulation and infidelity. Betty describes Dan's neglect, financial mismanagement, and abusive behavior, including a child abuse incident involving their daughter Kim. Despite their struggles, they had four children. Dan's infidelity with Linda, a secretary, escalated tensions, leading to Betty's mental breakdown and eventual murder of Dan and Linda. Betty's account highlights her feelings of betrayal and the financial and emotional toll of their dysfunctional relationship, culminating in her tragic actions.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Dan Broderick, Betty Broderick, murder, divorce, infidelity, mental health, legal proceedings, media portrayal, personal accounts, historical context, societal issues, prepping, energy crisis, Argentina, Nazi refugees., Betty Broderick, Dan Broderick, child abuse, legal manipulation, financial struggles, infidelity, divorce, mental health, legal battles, manipulation, abuse, family dynamics, legal system, financial instability, personal trauma.
Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.
Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I want to talk about how I recently went down the Dan and Betty Broderick rabbit hole, trying to figure out for myself as an adult what actually happened there. What's the story? Is there a clear cut victim? Is there a clear cut perpetrator? Is it as cut and dry as man and woman get married, it goes sour, they get a divorce, the first wife hates the new wife, and kaboom. Is it more complicated than that? Sometimes when an event occurs, and we are a child or a teenager at the time, when we go back and revisit the circumstances as an adult, a whole host of things become clearer to us later on in life than when we're kids, and so that was part of how I got pulled into studying this case. Before we get there, a couple of other notes we'll have to talk about current events, because wow, holy smokes. And then also a couple of housekeeping items. I was recently a guest myself on Zoe Routh's podcast, The Future of Leadership, where I talked about moral courage in leadership vis-a-vis lessons that we can learn from Dag Hammarskjold. If you didn't catch that, I'll drop a link to it in the write-up for this episode. And I was also recently a guest on the Okie Book Cast. The title of the episode is Sharing the Legacy of a Giant, and really, what I do is I talk about my work regarding Dag Hamd, as well as just the overall creative process, how I approach writing, research, the visual arts, etc. If you didn't catch that, I will also drop a link to it here in the write-up, and now on to current events. I recently recorded an episode about Peter Thiel's fascination with the Antichrist. Also, if you didn't catch that, I'll drop a link to it in the write-up for this episode. Please go back and check that out. As I said in that episode, it doesn't matter what you and I think. You may be sitting there thinking, well, there is no such person, that's a bunch of religious twaddle, and I don't believe in it. It doesn't matter when you have somebody who is a power broker going around the world talking about the antichrist, that should at least cause your eyebrow to raise and wonder what's actually going on here. In the episode, I also talk about how whenever Teal was a boy, he attended a German language school in Swag Atmund in South Africa, and that community was known at the time for its continued glorification of Nazism. Teal has also been affiliated with the far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin. If we go to his Wikipedia page, we find Jarvin has been described as a neo reactionary, neo-monarchist, and neo-feudalist who sees liberalism as creating a matrix-like totalitarian system and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno monarchy, he has defended the institution of slavery and has suggested that certain races may be more naturally inclined towards servitude than others. He has argued that whites have inherently higher IQs than black people and opposes US civil rights program. Jarvin is a notable figure in American conservativism, having influenced people such as Steve Bannon, JD Vance, Michael Anton, and Peter Thiel, so perhaps given these connections, to the surprise of no one, the news has recently come out that Peter Thiel is moving to Argentina. Is that not the perfect place for him to be going. My God, the more that history changes, the more it stays absolutely the same. As the cliche goes, it may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. On Business Insider, we read Peter Thiel's move to Argentina reflects a growing trend among billionaires seeking a plan B abroad. Peter Thiel appears to have found a new bug out spot. He isn't alone in looking beyond America's shores. The PayPal and Palantir co-founder and prominent libertarian has been spending more time in Argentina, The New York Times reported, where he has enrolled his children in school and has bought a home in one of Buenos Aires' wealthiest neighborhoods among the ultra wealthy, that fits a larger pattern. The rich are treating their lives in America like part of an investment portfolio, still worth betting on, but increasingly in need of a hedge. End quote.
There's a lot to unpack there, you know. A couple of things. Why are Richie riches saying that America is. Still, all right, but increasingly we need to have a bug out plan that should concern you. Number two, it's fucking Argentina. Jesus Christ, one of the commenters in the Business Insider article writes his first plan B was the US, as he's a German. His second plan B was New Zealand, where he bought citizenship, so he could build a bunker. His third plan B was Malta, where once again he bought himself citizenship to build another bunker. This is actually Teal's Plan D. He needs them, so he can stir up big trouble in the democracies, and then flee when the hell he creates breaks loose. He has no loyalty to any country, especially the US. End quote@unherd.com@unheard.com. we read Peter Thiel is known for making and landing counterintuitive bets, but relocating to Argentina his escape hatch from the risks of political turmoil in the developed world may be his most confounding wager yet. Is it not confounding? Countless Argentines, after all, have made precisely the opposite choice in recent decades, immigrating to Spain or to the US to escape the country's prolonged political dysfunction, but the country has gained a certain appeal to libertarian figures in the tech world since the rise to power of Javier Millet. Tyler Cowen, a libertarian guru at George Mason University, has also visited in recent years, and I hear that he has included others in the tech world to sample the pleasures of life in Buenos Aires. End quote. Yeah, okay. So let's think about this from a couple of different angles. Here you have the commenter saying, "Oh, this guy just goes places where he can buy citizenship and build a bunker. He's got bug out plans all over the planet. There's nothing special about Argentina. You have this unheard.com article saying, like, well, this is just a bet. It's a bet on Bitcoin, it's a bet on libertarianism. It's going to a place where perhaps the politics and the finances are more amenable to whatever it is he's wanting to do. And I'm like, it's Argentina. Okay, we've already talked about his roots in this German language school with authoritarian discipline structures, and the community being known for its glorification of Nazism. It's fucking Argentina. Whenever I saw the posting about this originally on social media, I don't even remember whose Facebook or Instagram it was. I was getting ready to get in the comment section and be like, oh, well, imagine that he's going to Argentina, but five or six people had already beaten me to it, and I thought, thank God, at least some people are awake enough to know that this isn't just, in my opinion, about finances or Bitcoin or Javier, whoever the fuck that's running the show down there, supposedly it's about something more than that, in my opinion. Okay, which could be wrong, just my theory, but I think it's a bit more than that. So, let's hop over to Wikipedia again, just for ease of use. We'll go to Juan Peron's page under the tab, Protection of Nazi war criminals. After World War Two, Argentina became a haven for Nazi war criminals with explicit protection from Peron, who even shortly before his death commented on the Nuremberg trials in Nuremberg. At that time, something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity. I became certain that the Argentine people also considered the Nuremberg process, a disgrace unworthy of the victors who behaved as if they hadn't been victorious. Now we realize that they, the allies, deserved to lose the war. You know that should, that should chill you to the bone. It absolutely should. Author Yuki Goni alleges that Axis power collaborators, including Pierre Day, met with Peron at Casa Rosada, the president's official executive mansion, and there were others, the Swiss chief of police and a Croatian priest, who also helped to organize the rat line to help the Nazis get out and get to Argentina, an investigation of 22,000 documents by the DAIA in 1997 discovered that the network was managed by Rodolfo Freud, who had an office in the Casa Rosada and was close to Ava Peron's brother, Juan Duarte.
According to Ronald Newton, Ludwig Freud, Rodolfo's father was probably the local representative of the Office Three Secret Service, headed by Von Ribbentrop, with probably more influence than the German ambassador Edmund von Thurman. He had met Perron in the 1930s and had contacts with Generals Juan Pistorini, Domingo Martinez, and Jose Molina, Ludwig Freud's house became the meeting place for Nazis and Argentine military officers supporting the Axis. In 1943 he traveled with Peron to Europe to attempt an arms deal with Germany. After the war, Ludwig Freud was. Investigated over his connection to possible looted Nazi art, cash, and precious metals on deposit at two Argentine banks, but on september 6, 1946 the Freud investigation was terminated by presidential decree, as in the United States Operation Paperclip. Argentina also welcomed displaced German scientists, such as Kurt Tank and Ronald Richter. Some of these refugees took important roles in Peronne's Argentina, such as the French collaborative Jacques de Mayhew, who became an ideologue of the Peronist movement before becoming mentor to a Roman Catholic nationalist group in the 1960s Belgian collaborationist Pierre Day became editor of a Peronist magazine, Rodolfo Freud, Ludwig's son, became Peron's chief of presidential intelligence in his first term. Peronne's biographer, Jill Hedges, wrote on Peron's attitude and actions regarding the Nazi immigration to Argentina. Unquestionably, the Peron government, like others elsewhere, received former Nazis after the war, not least in a bid to attract skilled scientists and technicians, Peron himself would describe this as good business, saying what cost us a plane ticket cost Germany millions of marks invested in training those scientists and technicians. Many also found their way to Argentina through the offices of the Vatican, and in some cases through the willingness of some Argentine diplomats in Europe to sell them Argentine passports. Later investigations in the 1990s would identify 180 Nazis and collaborators who entered Argentina after the war, of whom around 50 were identified as war criminals, notably including Adolf Eichmann and Joseph Mingela, with whom Perron had at least one conversation about his genetic experiments. This represented indifference rather than Nazi ideology on Peron or the government's part. End quote. Sure. Well, we, we can sit and debate that. We can split hairs about that if we want to. The bottom line is, Peron was quite friendly with the Nazis and allowed them a safe haven in his country under the tab Jewish and German communities of Argentina, we read the German Argentine community in Argentina is the third largest immigrant immigrant group in the country, after the ethnic Spanish and the Italians, and there seems to be this sort of excuse that well, Argentina also let Jewish people come there too, so he couldn't have been too anti-Semitic. Maybe it was all about the money, and he didn't care, so long as the person's money was green. He didn't care about what their ideology was. But I'm sick and fucking tired of that being used as a so-called excuse. Well, we couldn't let the science go to waste, we couldn't let the technical skills go to waste, we couldn't let all that money go to waste, yeah. You fucking can. Yes, you can. So, whatever Peter Thiel's motives might be for relocating to Argentina, it's just one of those things that makes you say, hmm, of all the places in the world where he could set up shop, I mean, it does just make you raise the old eyebrow and wonder. It also makes you wonder what the hell the Richie Riches are up to that Argentina has become the place to go now. If you're going to bug out and plan for something bad to happen in the United States, why are they picking Argentina as the bug out location now as a not unrelated segue, let's go over to Fox Business. Exxon chief warns of skyrocketing energy prices as shareholders approved plan to exit Blue State. The byline reads, Exxon shareholders approved a plan to move the company's legal home from New Jersey to Texas. I'll scroll down just a little bit speaking at the Bernstein conference in New York on Thursday, Chapman warned that crude oil prices could go as high as $160 per barrel in the coming weeks as dwindling reserve inventories finally bottom out. We're approaching unheard of inventory levels, he said. I mean, really, really low levels.
You can debate whether that's going to hit those really low levels in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you'll see prices shoot up. Prices have stayed low, Chapman posited, because of the release of strategic petroleum reserves by various nations. End quote. I am hearing predictions, whispers on the wind, if you will, of Carter-era gas shortages having to get your number or your code to only go to the gas station on certain days. There could be times where we're just out of gas. Energy prices, as well, far as heating and cooling your home, are going to go through the roof, which again, Who can be surprised by that? We all had to know that this bullshit war between the US and Israel and Iran was about something other than, oh, we can't allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, right? Sure, because that's all this is about. Wank, will we have anything that dire? I really don't know. I hope not. I pray not, but I. Know, as I like to say, it's better to be prepared than scared. You don't get paranoid, you don't panic, or turn into Chicken Little. You just think about, in the event that things took a downward spiral, what could I do for myself and my family? I can't control everything, I can't predict everything, but what are some reasonable steps that I could take, theoretically, for a long time, the notion of prepping and preppers, it's been associated with being right of center, whether you're talking about slightly right of center or far right of center, because you do have the doomsday preppers that are like, I'm just waiting for Armageddon, everything's going to get blown to hell. We're going to be in the tribulation, and until Jesus takes us back and raptures us out of here, it's going to be a complete nightmare. You're going to need to be in a bunker, you're going to need to be somewhere where you and your family can survive, because the antichrist is coming, which, you know, funny enough, is not that different from what Peter Thiel is telling people. And then you have people that are not quite as drastic as the doomsday folks that are like, well, the economy could collapse. I'm not saying that the entire world will be obliterated or the antichrist is coming, but we could have a societal collapse. You need to have your bug out bag, you need to know where you could go in the woods to survive, and they kind of picture things being like that movie, The Road, or the novel, and slash the movie The Road, and some of those folks feel like if the orange man is in office, he's going to take care of us, if somebody affiliated with MAGA is in office, it won't be so bad, like I remember during the Great Recession, there was a guy that I worked with that was legit terrified that Obama was the antichrist, and that we were all getting ready to go under martial law and be put into re-education camps, and basically half the country, at least, would be killed. He was legitimately scared that that was about to happen. Meanwhile, Obama was a continuation of Cheney Rumsfeld. I mean, it's not even worth saying Bush Cheney, because W was just a figurehead idiot. It was like, really, Cheney and Rumsfuck were the ones like, you can't say running the show, because if you're around here, around in these here parts, we know that the American president doesn't control jack shit anymore, but you get what I'm saying. He, it's like Obama was just a continuation of all that, the idea of him being, oh, he's the antichrist and he's going to kill all of us. Really, you weren't scared when it was Cheney Rums' fuck, so why are you scared now? Maybe we should have been scared all along, but you weren't scared whenever the white folks were in there. I mean, let's call a thing a thing. So, prepping has the tendency to be affiliated with being right of center, which I don't think is really fair in all cases. I think, at a bare minimum, you should have two to three weeks of provisions at any given time, because you just don't know - wildfire, hurricane, tornado, the types of weather events that can happen where you are.
You'd want to be prepared for that, so that yourself and your family can survive at least for that two to three week period of time. If you're without ability to get to a grocery store, to a gas station, whatever, you would need to have certain things laid away. I just think that's being smart, and it has nothing to do with politics. You can even say it's about weather and so-called acts of God. But one of the things that I'm noticing, and the reason why I'm bringing this up, particularly as it relates to this Exxon CEO saying, like, hey, things could get pretty rough this summer, I am noticing more and more people who are left of center becoming preppers, whether that is slightly left of center or way left of center. I really am seeing more left wing people saying, I thought that the preppers on the right wing were a bunch of idiots and crazies. Now I don't, and that should tell you something about the state of the union, when people on the left wing are like, "Hey, I used to look at those people and I thought they were ignorant hillbillies and I thought that they were crazy, now I don't. I think you do have certain segments of the population that have figured out we're in a shitstorm now. I don't sit here and claim that there's been some great awakening. There's been some mass awakening. Everybody's awake now because of the Teffrey Tepsteen files, and they're willing to take the country back. They're tired of these billionaires and PDF files and perverts and creeps, and they're really going to do something about it. No, they're not. They'll just go go to the polls and vote harder and hope it all works out right, because if that changed anything, we wouldn't be allowed to do it. It's kind of like how companies, you know, somebody will go on strike, a group will get together and go on strike, and eventually they'll acquiesce somewhat, and then they. Next thing you know, they're having layoffs, because it's like you wouldn't be allowed to have a strike if that really worked either. And so, as I always say, just like Dennis Miller would always say, this is just my opinion, and it could be wrong, but I think you do have people left of center who are starting to, if not completely wake up, they're starting to look around and say we might be in a bit of trouble here. The country might be moving in a direction that's really fucking scary, and we need to pay attention to that, instead of assuming that all preppers are mega ideologues who suck on the teat of the orange man. Maybe we should pay attention to the idea of having some degree of self-sufficiency, just in case the shit really does hit the fan, maybe not to the degree of the road, you know, or some dystopian sci-fi novel. But what if things got pretty rough earlier? I watched the Chris Hedges show, and Matt Kennard was on. He had this hair, he has this book, Irregular Army: How the US military recruited neo-Nazis, gang members, and criminals to fight the war on terror. Straight away, I went to Kindle and bought a copy of the book for myself, started reading through it. I also have sent an email to Matt. I would love to get him on the show as a guest. I would love to do an episode about this, even if, for whatever reason, he doesn't want to come on. I will still, at some point, talk about the book if he declines to be a guest, but I really hope that he agrees to, because we need to talk about this. How the US military recruited neo-Nazis, gang members, and criminals to fight the war on the T word. I think I may have said it earlier, but I better, I better not say it too much, or we might get pulled off. And one of the things that on the Chris Hedges show, they were talking about is how this war on the T word gives way to what we have now, what's going on in the country now, and it's fascinating, and it's terrifying.
And so I do think that you have people who are waking up to this reality, and instead of sitting back saying, well, anybody who preps left or right of center is crazy, I just think that without paranoia, without panic, it would behoove anybody to say, well, it can't be that everybody is sensing the same thing and they're sensing it wrong, something is going on, something is amiss, and it doesn't feel good. The economy sucks ass, unless you are in the top 1% This economy sucks ass. It's as bad as I've ever seen it, for as long as I've ever seen it. When you look at the inflation, weren't we promised that inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump was going to go down? It hasn't. Weren't we promised that we wouldn't have these perma wars where nobody even knows what the fuck is going on? And look, we're still in this combat situation with Iran, and nobody even really knows why, other than the superficial bullshit excuse of we can't allow them to have a nuclear weapon. This is all very, very fishy. And then Exxon warning this, the CEO of Exxon warning people that this summer the shit could hit the fan as far as the oil reserves and the price of oil, and maybe an energy crisis brewing. It's getting a little bit spooky out there, not to panic, not to become Chicken Little, but just to pay attention and say you have Peter Thiel relocating to Argentina, of all the fucking goddamn places to go. Other billionaires are following suit, because that's not creepy. The Exxon CEO is warning about some real energy crisis possibilities this summer. People left of center have finally woken up to the idea of prepping. They no longer see prepping as something that ignorant, toothless hillbillies do. We have this book by Matt Kennard about how the US military has used neo-Nazis, gang members, and criminals. I'm thinking back to the mini series I did about Operation Gladio, and how the US government may not have money for starving children, for people that can't pay for health care, for homeless veterans that serve this country. And then came back home and got shit upon. Oh, but we had plenty of goddamn money for the Butcher of Leone and the Black Prince. I just I don't give you advice. I don't tell you what to do and what not to do. You're an adult, you have to do what's best for yourself and your family. If it were me, I would say don't get paranoid, but pay attention, be ready to pivot quickly. If AI takes your career, if your company goes under, if the inflation does not come out of the market, and then on top of that, we have gas prices that are insanely high, heating and cooling bills that are insanely high this year. Do you have a game plan about how you're going to handle that? It's food for thought. Now, I will take a sip of water, and we will at last go down. On the rabbit hole of Dan and Betty Broderick.
Just a reminder, Sara's award-winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn is available on Amazon. Her next nonfiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29. To learn more about her other works, please visit Sara causey.com. Now, back to the show.
So, this adventure, or misadventure, maybe I should say, started as so many of them do for me nowadays. I'd been busy editing and proofreading some of my own work, and that's just a daunting challenge, because you have to look at everything, you have to make all of these teeny tiny micro decisions about every word, every bit of punctuation, every turn of phrase, and ooh, at the end of the evening, my brain was like oatmeal. I laid down on the couch, turned on Amazon Prime, because I hadn't looked at it in a while, and I wanted to see what movies they had added. I was planning to watch, like a rom-com or a silly comedy, maybe an action-adventure movie, and I saw that they had added a woman scorned, and then also her final fury, which were TV movies that came out in 1992 about Betty Broderick, and I was like, oh my god, haven't seen those movies or even thought about them in years. So I turned on a woman scorned, watched that one that night, and then the next night came back for a double helping with her final fury, but back in 92 when those movies came out, I remember watching them with my mom, and a lot of people watched them because there was so much curiosity about what actually happened in this fucked up love triangle between Dan and Betty, and then Linda, and it wasn't to the same degree as like back in the 80s, whenever Geraldo did Al Capone's vault, that really was for some of y'all young bloods that weren't around back then, that that was must-see TV. You have to remember, we didn't have the internet, we didn't have social media, TV was huge as part of your entertainment source, and when Geraldo told everybody that we might find corpses, old cars, relics from Prohibition, bags of money, jewelry, etc. people were like, "Holy shit, this is going to be a once in a lifetime event. And then it was a giant nothing burger, but people would call, I remember, like, for the whole week leading up to that episode, people would call the house, "Hey, don't forget, don't forget, don't, we better watch, don't forget. So it was like everybody was huddled around the TV watching that night, and then that, that basically consigned Geraldo to do shock jock talk show crap, because it was like, yeah, Al Capone's vault was also the biggest bust in American history, but even though it wasn't popular to that level, a lot of people watched these movies back in 1992 and there was so much curiosity about what's the real story here, so I laid down on the couch and watched a woman scorn, and then I came back for her final theory, and here are my thoughts about those TV movies, particularly watching them later as an adult. Betty is portrayed as being a bitch on wheels, but honestly, nobody in the story, except for the kids. You do feel sorry for the kids, but really, nobody in those movies cuts a sympathetic figure. It's basically like three people that all seem like buttholes. Now, those are characters in the movie, not the people in real life, but the characters, the way that they're portrayed in the in the little mini series TV movies, there, it's not flattering for anyone, like there's an opening scene where they're at a ski lodge or something, and Betty's acting prissy and throwing a fit and screaming about why don't we just get a divorce, and the kids are mouthing along with her and miming her and making fun of her, like this is something that happens all the time. She picks a fight with Dan in front of her own kids yells and screams, berates him, emasculates him in front of them, and it ends with a shouting fight of why don't we just get a divorce. So, from the get-go, it's sort of like Betty is being portrayed as an asshole. There's, of course, the famous scene where Betty takes all of Dan's clothes, puts them out in the backyard, lights them on fire, so that he can watch his clothing burn. The scene where she goes to the office to try to have a birthday, a romantic birthday lunch with Dan, but he's gone, so is Linda.
She waits and waits, and he never shows up, and she further realizes there's big trouble here. There's another scene where Dan gives Betty a ring for Christmas, and she looks at it like this is a piece of shit, and he and he's like, well, it's, it's expensive. Well, I wanted a certain ring, you didn't get me the certain ring that I wanted. Well, this one didn't cost any less than the other one, and I. Liked it better. Oh, well, you liked it better. If it didn't cost any less, then you should have just gotten me the goddamn ring that I wanted. If it's not what I want, it's a piece of shit, and that she like throws the ring across the room and stomps off as the kids look sad, and it's just like, oh, mother has ruined another Christmas, even though Dan is somewhat characterized as the poor put-upon husband who's married to a shrew, he's no prize pony in this series either. He's really portrayed as the old pervert, the old letch who turns 40, can't handle it, assumes that his best days are behind him, so he hires a secretary who can't even type anything, and starts having sex with her. There's a scene where he comes home with the classic midlife crisis mobile of the red sports car, parks it in the driveway, and Betty's like, well, I hope this makes you happy, Dan, because it seems like nothing else is gonna maybe this will do the trick, and then stomps off, and it's like, wow, okay, so of all the ways that you could try to help your husband get through some emotional problems, that's probably not the way to do it. In this mini series, Linda is more or less portrayed as a frump a dump. She has a short, what I would personally call unflattering haircut, and she always seems to wear clothes that are two sizes too big, so it's like every effort is made to steer clear of the idea that maybe Linda was a home wrecker, maybe she saw a wealthy guy and thought I'm going to get mines, and then went for it. No, in this mini series, she's very much portrayed as mousy, I'm just mousy, I just, you know, I just happened to be the, the younger woman that fell in love with a rich, hot, successful guy, and like, I wear baggy clothes, and I have a short, masculine hairstyle, and it just, I had no idea what I was doing, so to me, like, this mini series is like it seems like they were pushing a fairly clear message of even if Dan and Linda were not the greatest or coolest people on earth, Betty was hell on fucking wheels, and that becomes even clearer when we get to part two, which is her final fury. There are scenes of her acting like an aristocrat, like she's holding court in jail. There's a scene where she tells one of the prison guards, for example, that she needs to go to the infirmary. They ask if she's sick, and she's like, "No, but I've got court tomorrow, I need to get my hair did, I need to get my roots done, I can't go into court just looking any old way. And they're like, "Betty, the infirmary is for sick people, it's not a hair salon for you, so it really portrays Betty as being delusional and narcissistic, like she - the first trial results in a hung jury and the second trial results in a conviction, but while she's in jail, it's kind of like she thinks that she's a shamed aristocrat who's been detained in the Bastille, and that everybody else is beneath her and needs to wait on her hand and foot. To me, that seems hyperbolic. It may not be. I don't know this woman I went and was never around her, but it seems hyperbolic, and it seems to me that they're pushing a certain message now. Fast forward in time to 2020 the drama series Dirty John expands beyond Dirty John and becomes Dirty John, the Betty Broderick story. I watched this series back in 2020 when it was on the USA Network, and then I rewatched it again.
I bought the episodes specifically so I could go down this rabbit hole again, and it's a completely different experience watching Christian Slater as Dan and Amanda Pete as Betty Broderick. Completely different experience with Dirty John than what you get in those old Meredith Baxter Bernie TV movies from 1992 There is, for example, a Reddit thread on the divorce section where someone has written 'Feeling Sorry for Betty Broderick' after watching the Netflix drama 'Dirty John Betty. This person writes, 'I know it's a dramatization and she did some crazy stuff, but how she was gaslighted might make anyone go crazy. Bottom line is, I do feel sorry for her, because so many women who put their exes through school, which allowed them to become rich and successful, do drop their wives for younger models, as in cars. She did get royally screwed by him, which really did add insult to injury. I wish they would release her from prison. Another person responds, I had to turn this show off because it gave me major PTSD from the first half hour I watched it, Betty had her moments of being delusional, but so many things reminded me of my current situation. The type of gaslighting men do this shit to unassuming, but also not completely innocent women either, are unbelievably evil. Somebody else writes, yeah, but she was also diagnosed with histrionic personality disorder. Her, she never got help from a therapist, just kept on being obsessed with him. So, this, this series was something of a lightning rod for the people that watched it, the way that they are portrayed. Here's, here's the way that I would categorize it. Dan definitely is the asshole of the production, and and Linda is a close second, but, but the way that Dan is portrayed by Christian Slater as being slimy, sneaky, underhanded, gross, manipulative, just about any negative adjective that you can think of is applicable to the character Dan Broderick in Dirty John, Betty's character is much more sympathetic, much more sympathetic in Dirty John, not perfect, no, but much more sympathetic in Dirty John than what we see in the Meredith Baxter Bernie TV films. Essentially, it's like Betty is trying to do the best that she can to keep the marriage together, she doesn't want to lose Dan, even though Dan is no prize pony. It's like she wants to hang on to him and keep the family together, whether that's because of traditional Catholic values or it's just because she really does love him and doesn't want to lose him to another woman. She tries like hell, but Linda in in the Dirty John series, she's portrayed as more of your typical gold digger, a young manipulative.. I'm trying to, I'm trying to think of exactly the right way to describe her, young and manipulative, but somebody that's like, I don't really have any skills of my own, there's no way that I'm going to get rich unless I marry into money, so I'm going to get my hooks into somebody, by God. So she sits at the front desk in the building and is basically not even very good as being the initial telephone answer or people greeter, but Dan likes the way that she looks. She's flirtatious. There's a mutual attraction there, so he hires her to be a legal secretary, even though she can't type, and she's not a paralegal, and that it doesn't take too long before the two of them are doing more than just working together, but in the Dirty John series, unlike the TV movies from before, Linda is not portrayed as a frumpy dump, she's portrayed as, like, you know, I want this guy, and I'm hot, and I'm young, and so I'm gonna go fucking get him, and then she succeeds, but Dirty John attempts to show us the back story that we never get in those old Meredith Baxter burning TV movies, for example, Betty working all the jobs and keeping a roof over their head, being almost constantly pregnant, and having difficult, unhealthy, scary pregnancies and scary complications, and Dan just kind of acting like, well, it's all about me, it's all about me in medical school, and then it's all about me in law school, and then it's all about me getting my career off the ground.
You are just the support system, it, the way that it's portrayed in Dirty John, is that he looks at her kind of like being hired help or an indentured servant, but, but, like from olden times, you know, like when I'm thinking back to the TV series Rome, like there's this scene where James Purefoy is playing Mark Antony, and he's like, I am not rising from this bed until somebody fucks me. And his woman is like, well, why don't you just go get a slave to do that? Go get a sex slave to do that, because I don't want it. I don't feel like having sex with you today. That's that's kind of how Dan, the character of Dan, is portrayed in Dirty John. Like, whatever I tell you to do, you just do it. If I tell you to cook, if I tell you to clean, if I tell you to have another baby, if I tell you to have sex with me, if I tell you to iron my underwear, whatever I tell you what to do is what you need to do. You don't have any opinions of your own, you just go along to get along. There's a very creepy scene in Dirty John, where Dan is sitting with some of his lawyer friends, and they're talking about divorce, and they're very plainly laying out, here's what you do to screw your wife to make sure that you have the upper hand in court, so that you are only giving her a pittance, and you're walking away with the money and the kids and whatever else that you want, you can finesse it, so that if you want to pawn the kids off on her and have her raise your kids while you go off footloose and fancy free, you can manipulate it that way. If you want to have the kids and make Miss New Booty raise your kids, then you can play it like that, and you can hide property, and you can do this, and you can do that, and make sure that the kids get their braces, and they go to the doctor, and they do everything that they need to do, because you're going to want to show that on the taxes. I mean, all kinds of like manipulative things that they're doing with the law and with their finances that their wives have no clue about, and they're, and that they're also ill-equipped to fight back on there's. Scene after Dan and Betty have split up, she goes to a bar, is trying to like put herself out there, gets drunk, and calls Dan, and is like, oh, guess who I saw at the bar, and so they sit on the phone for a few minutes, reminiscing and laughing with each other, and he's like, well, okay, good night, click, and you can tell that she's disappointed that nothing else came of it, other than, oh yeah, haha, I remember that guy. How the hell is he doing? And it's like, you shouldn't even be doing that. She shouldn't be drunk dialing him, and then he shouldn't be talking to her and leading her on. There's another scene where he shows up drunk after they're separated and not even living in the same house anymore, he shows up drunk one night, and they have sex. You definitely want to talk about a mixed message, a mixed signal. If you have somebody that's making it very clear that they want to get back together and they don't want the marriage to end, and then you show up out of nowhere and get all romantic and want to have sex with them, that doesn't communicate the finality of anything, and it's not allowing them to have any closure either. So, in the Dirty John series, by the time that she picks up the boom stick and goes over there for the reckoning, you see it coming from a mile away.
The final straw in the Dirty John series is that one of the sons comes over to spend time with her, and he's little, you know, eight or nine, maybe, and he tells her about getting invited to go with one of his friends to Disneyland or Disney World, maybe, I don't remember which, and he's like, but I can't go because that's the day that I would get to spend with you, and so if I go with him to this Disney trip, then I won't see you, and then I won't know when I'll see you again, and it just devastates her, because she realizes that no child should have to make adult decisions like this. If a kid wants to go to Disney, they should go; they shouldn't have to choose between going to Disney and seeing their own parent. So, in the Dirty John series, she gets the boomstick, she's upset, and it's probably a combination of things: resentment, anger, anxiety, depression, sadness. She goes in, pop pops Dan and Linda, and as I say, in that particular depiction, it's like, well, we see it coming from a mile down the road, and nobody's surprised by it, because the way that Dan and Linda act in the Dirty John series is pretty horrendous, and they just, the both of them seem like complete assholes, Dan most of all, but Linda secondarily, the way that they're portrayed. Before I get into Betty's side of the story. Let's just go over some basics. I'll go to her Wikipedia page, just for ease of use. Betty Broderick was born Elizabeth Anne Baselia on november 7, 1947 in New York. She's raised Catholic, and the way that she describes it is like she was told you go to Catholic schools, you, you're a good girl, you date, look for a good Catholic man, you take care of your household, you have your kids, and then later on you become a grandma, and that's what you're supposed to be doing. In 1965 she meets Dan at a football game. There had been a football game, and they were at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and that's how they meet. He was a 21 year old senior about to graduate, and then go and attend Cornell Medical School. At 17, Betty is pursuing her degree at the College of St. Mary's, and she describes him as being like obsessive compulsive or stalkery, like the there wasn't any way that she was going to tell him no. They get married on April the 12th 1969 in New York. They go off on their honeymoon and she gets pregnant on the honeymoon with their first child, and she would give birth to some additional children as well, but suffice it to say she gets pregnant on the honeymoon, which, back, you know, if you're not using birth control, back in the day, that was not an uncommon thing. So, after the first child, Kim, is born, Dan finishes his medical doctor degree at Cornell in 1970 and he tells Betty that he wants to combine his medical degree with a law degree, and he wants to enroll at Harvard, and he gets accepted. Betty is the breadwinner for the family at this time, so it's like she has helped him get through medical school and have a baby and all of that, and then now he's going to take on the responsibility of becoming a law student, now not just a law student, which is daunting enough, but a law student at Harvard. He graduates in 1973 and is pretty quickly hired by a large law firm in San Diego. They had a substantial. Defense litigation practice, and so Dan moves to this kind of sleeper community of La Hoya. Benny, meanwhile, continues to work in a part-time capacity. Sometimes she's selling things like Tupperware Avon, sometimes she's taking on babysitting and child rearing type gigs for other people. In 1978 Dan has enough experience under his belt that he leaves the large firm where he's kind of made a name for himself, and he starts his own firm, and he niches in and specializes in medical malpractice litigation, and it is not an overnight success, it's not like he sets the shingle out, and then within five minutes he becomes a millionaire, but by the early 80s things are starting to go well, and he's making some serious money.
In the fall of 1982 Dan hires Linda Culcana, who's 21 She becomes the legal assistant at his firm, Betty starts to suspect along about 1983 give or take, like fall of 83 somewhere in there. Betty gets concerned that Dan is having an affair with Linda. Dan denies it, and in fact tells her, like, you're just imagining all this. It's kind of like you've got a dirty mind, get your mind out of the gutter. Nothing like that's going on. And Dan manages to kind of prolong the inevitable for a while, but eventually somewhere in the mid 80s he moves out and calls it a separation. He doesn't tell Betty, "This isn't working anymore, and I want a divorce. He just says I need to, I need to move out, I need to clear my head, I need to think about some things, and Betty's assuming that this is just more midlife crisis stuff, but Dan eventually takes custody of their children. Betty does some things that she shouldn't have done, like she, she leaves the kids on the doorstep, she goes off to a birthday party, and I still don't quite understand why it was an adults only birthday party, but she goes off to an adults only birthday party in New York, and leave essentially just kind of drops the kids on Dan, and he's like, okay, I'll keep them, her, her thinking is having four kids and trying to run around with a much younger woman and work. This is going to break his back, but it doesn't. He just hires caretakers, he hires maids and babysitters to raise the kids, and it's like, dude, if that was your plan, it was not a good plan. They go through an acrimonious divorce, which is finally finalized in 1989 like four years after Dan has filed on april 22 1989 Dan and Linda get married. We're told that Linda has been so concerned about Betty's behavior that she told Dan he ought to wear a bulletproof vest at the wedding, Dan says he's not going to go that far, but he will at least get some security, just in case anything were to happen. On November 5, 1989 at about 530 in the morning, so just a couple of days before Betty would turn 42 she gets into Dan and Linda's house goes in with a Smith and Wesson boom stick and pop pops them at the time. Dan is soon to be 45 Linda is 28 Betty claims that she never broke in with the intent to kill Dan and Linda, that she didn't premeditate anything, that in fact she had considered like she just kind of drove over there almost automatically, not even knowing what she was doing, and once she got in, she was thinking about offing herself, unaliving herself in front of them, like the two of you have caused me so much pain that I want you to see my suffering, so I'm going to go over and unalive myself in front of you as a protest at the second trial. She claims that she was startled because Linda woke up, saw her, and started screaming at Dan to call the police, and so she fired the boom stick, just as a reflex, like she panics, gets scared. She hasn't thought out what the hell she's doing, and so pop, pop, uh, oh, Dan and Linda are unalived, as you would expect. Betty has some difficulty finding attorneys because Dan is a hotshot. He is, he's a big deal in, or was, I guess I should say was a big deal in that community, president of the bar association, and somebody who had a lot of contacts, and so it's like trying to find an attorney, especially somebody local that's going to represent me in his murder, is a tough, tough gig, Jack Early represent. Broderick at trial, and for the prosecution, there's a forensic psychiatrist and criminologist named Dr. Park Dietz, using the analysis of someone named Dr. Melvin Gold's band, say that five times fast, Gold's Band, who previously worked on the case for the prosecution, Dietz at trial says that Broderick has histrionic and narcissistic personality disorders. Gold's band has diagnosed Betty as being severely narcissistic and histrionic. Clinical psychologist Catherine de Francesca, testifying for the defense, concluded that Broderick was histrionic with narcissistic features.
The lead detective in the case was Terry DeGelder of San Diego Homicide, who provided testimony for the prosecution. The first trial ends with a hung jury. Two of the jurors felt like she should have been convicted of manslaughter, citing a lack of intent, meaning they didn't think that she premeditated it. They didn't actually think that she went over there with the intention of murdering them, maybe she was going to unalive herself, or maybe she didn't even know what the hell she was doing, maybe she was just going to scare everybody. A mistrial is declared by Judge Thomas J. Whelan. Betty is retried a year later with the same defense attorney and prosecutor. The second trial has some similarities to the first. This time around, the jury gives a verdict of guilty on two counts of second degree murder. Betty is sentenced to two consecutive terms of 15 to life, the maximum sentence at that time under the law, plus two more years for the illegal use of a boom stick. She was incarcerated from the day she committed the murders until her death. She was serving her sentence at the California Institution for Women in Chino, California, in January of 2010 She is denied parole because the parole board said that she didn't show remorse and didn't acknowledge any wrongdoing. Then she was denied parole again in January of 2017 She wouldn't have had eligibility again until January of 2032 at which time she would have been 84 years old. She died just recently, on may 8, 2026 I didn't even hear anything about it. It took several days before I ever even saw anything on social media about Betty Broderick having passed away. I went down this rabbit hole, and I was like, I really want to know, like, what's her side of the story. We've seen Dirty John, we've seen the TV movies, and then everybody has their opinion, ranging from, like, a Chicago style thing, he had it coming, like maybe, maybe Dan was a butthole, and he had it coming, maybe Dan and Linda were really cruel to her, and whatever happened wasn't right, but I could kind of see why it happened. You have people that that are on that side of the fence, and then you have people that are like Betty was crazy, no wonder Dan left. She was a shrew, she was a battle ax, she was nuts, she was a narcissist. Dan is being pinned as the narcissist, but really it was Betty. And I'm sort of like, I don't know that anybody in this situation had clean hands. I don't know that anybody is a particularly likable figure. Does it justify murder? Of course it does not. No, emphatically it does not. There's.. it's like you wish that you could just tell her, "Please forget about the two of them. Living well is the best revenge. Get the fuck away from them and leave them alone. Go get something positive of your own and get away. Get the fuck away from them. I understand that it's much more complicated when you share children together, but my God, get the fuck away from them. Don't, don't kill them, don't think about them 24 hours a day. To me, I mean, I'm no psychiatrist, but it definitely seems like she was obsessed, like at some point get away from them, even if you have to move out of state. Get away from them. I wanted to know, what does she think of all of this now? Like looking back on it with all of these years of hindsight, and then thinking about what that must be like to have spent half of your life outside of jail, and then the second half of your life incarcerated with basically no hope of ever getting out again. What, what is that like? Like, if you could go back in time and do it all differently, would you? And at what point, like at what point in the timeline would you have done something different, and then, and then, what would you have done? I was legitimately curious, and I wanted to find some resources. I had thought about writing a letter, obviously I didn't, didn't know she had died in early May, but I had thought about writing a letter.
Back in, like, maybe March or April, to just say, like, well, what do you think about all of this now? What would you want people to know? But I was like, I don't know that we would get the truth. I mean, if I even got a response back, what would the response be, and how trustworthy would it be? But I did want to find something where she explains her side of the story, and I, lo and behold, I found that she had written a book called Telling on Myself. The copyright on it is from 2015 so it's not recent, recent, but recent enough. Like this woman is an adult going into her older years, reflecting on what happened. This might be the best possible way to find out what she was thinking. She describes a childhood where her mother more or less punishes her father for having a life that she's not really crazy about, and then in some respects Betty gets parentified because as her mother continues to have kids, it's her responsibility to help take care of those kids. She talks about the idea of the caboose baby. I always heard this described more as the change of life baby, like the woman is going through perimenopause, stops having periods, doesn't realize that there's still fertility there, has an oops a daisy pregnancy, and now has to start all over again with parenthood, as the rest of the kids are considerably older, it's Betty's argument that the caboose baby was done on purpose because the woman didn't want to go back to work. The initial group of kids is away at school all day, they're getting older, and so in order to stay home and to not be forced into a job, the caboose baby comes along, but at the same time she's also going off and having other jobs, like she's even though she's only like 12 years old and she's been parentified at home, she's also going out and doing babysitting jobs, she later gets a modeling job, she gets a job working in a department store, and the idea is she's got some money and she has a good work ethic. She describes the time in 1965 where she goes off to the USC Notre Dame football weekend, and while she's there, she meets Dan, and he comes over to the table and asks if anybody has an ink pen. She says that she does, and so she hands it over to him, and right there on the tablecloth, he writes down Daniel T. Broderick the Third, MDA. She looks at it and says, "What's the A for? And he says, "Almost medical doctor, almost. They strike up a conversation talking about New York. He says that he has recently been accepted to Cornell Medical School in New York. She says, "Oh, I'm from New York. He's like, great, I'll look you up when I get there. And she was like, well, I'm probably never going to see him again. This is probably just a hello, goodbye kind of thing, but it isn't. She starts, according to her, getting flowers and telegrams, and he wants to meet up with her, and he tells her, like, "Hey, I'm coming to the Notre Dame Navy game, and I want you to meet up with me at Grand Central Station. But she thinks, "Well, I've never met a guy on a street corner, and that doesn't seem like a very polite or lady-like thing to do. So she doesn't want to go, but she says everybody else tells her that she should go take a chance, meet up with him. He seems like he's probably a nice boy. You ought to do it. She says that as they continue dating, Dan has told all of his friends, 'See that girl over there, that's the girl that I'm going to marry. She furthermore says that she and Dan dated all through her college years, but she dated other guys too. She says that she and Dan were not exclusive, and they were not engaged, and that they had an on-again, off-again thing. At times, they were broken up. She describes a time on a Friday afternoon in the summer when she had battled Manhattan traffic, and it took forever for her to even find a place to park.
She gets to the dorm room, and he yells at her, "You're late, and she's furious, so she stomps off and is like, "Screw this, I'm not, you're not. I fought traffic to get down here. I'm finally here to see you, and this is how you treat me. I'm out of here. But he starts turning on the charm. "I'm sorry, I reacted poorly. I shouldn't have behaved that way. She says that for her 19th birthday on November 7, 1966 he gave her a gift, which was a large pastel head and shoulders portrait of himself, and she really didn't know what to quite say to that. She describes an occasion on New Year's Eve, 1967 when Dan has gone home to visit his family in Pittsburgh. This family she knew, called the Finks, had asked if she would do them a favor and babysit for some of friends, some of their friends on short notice, like, "Hey, it's New Year's Eve, they really want to go out, there are other sitters not available, could you really do us a solid and go over there? She says, "Yes. So she goes to this beautiful house in the woods in Larchmont and. I decide, like, well, even though I don't know these people, and we're kind of out in the woods, like, if they're friends of the Finks, they've got to be fine. She describes a fairly, you know, TV movie sounding situation where she's in this house in the woods with these people that are strangers to her, babysitting, and she tells herself, like, well, there's nothing to worry about, don't don't get yourself scared for no reason. These people are bound to be fine. And at some point in the babysitting gig, the doorbell rings, which startles her. She goes to the door, and it's Dan, and he tells her that he's been checking up on her to make sure that she actually was babysitting on New Year's Eve and not going out and screwing around with some other guy. She describes that as, like, hey, he, he was showing me right then that he was obsessive and controlling. I didn't understand it, because I was too young to get it. I was too young to comprehend what was going on there, but it was toxic, and I should have gotten away from it. Now, look, we have no way of knowing if that's true. He's deceased, and now so is she. We have no idea if this babysitting story that sounds a little bit fishy to me, if I'm being honest, is true. If he did show up like some kind of stalker, going, 'Where the hell were you tonight? Why are you off in the woods? That's creepy, but how, how would he have even found it if she didn't even really know where she was? Then, how would he have known where she was if he was supposed to be at Pittsburgh? It's one of those stories that, like, it sounds harrowing, but it doesn't even really make any sense. So, let's just say I'm skeptical. By the time that Dan proposes, and they start talking about getting married, Dan is discussing the possibility of an elopement. Maybe we just drive to Pittsburgh, get married there, and keep everything simple. Betty says that she didn't even really care. At some points during all of the wedding discussions, she was so frazzled that she didn't even want to get married at all. She just didn't care and had become apathetic. However, her mother turns into Mother of the Bride Zilla and gets into a big fight. She wants to have control, according to Betty. She wants to have control of the wedding and everything that's going on. She gets into an argument with Dan, saying that he should be in a cutaway morning coat, stats, gloves, and so forth to match Betty's father, as well as all of the other male guests. Dan refuses because he says that he wants to wear a navy blue pinstripe double-breasted suit with a pink flowered tie that he had found for 99 cents and a pair of brown wing tips to finish it off. So there's fighting already between Dan and Betty's mother as to who's going to control the wedding and how everybody's going to dress.
In April of 69 they get married when Dan has a spring break from medical school, and Betty asks, on the wedding day, was it really my wedding day, was it Dan's wedding day, was it my mother's wedding day? She claims that her father walks her down the aisle, that everything is lovely, the weather is pretty, the church is pretty, her dress is pretty, but her father leans over and pretends that he's kissing her on the cheek, like he's proud of her, and he's feeling really wistful in that moment, but Betty alleges that instead he says to her, "Good riddance, and she cries through the whole ceremony, can't even remember anything that the priest said, or that Dan said she just felt like she had been trying to keep everybody happy about the wedding, and now her father has said good riddance. I'm sure if that happened, it was painful. She quotes the Irish saying, when a thing starts out bad, it can only get worse. She describes the honeymoon as a disaster. She says they leave directly from the wedding, and they're both very tired on the way to the airport. Dan has either lost their gift money or someone stole it, so they get on a plane to fly to a private estate on St. Thomas in the British Virgin Islands, and she admits that part sounds fabulous. I know, but Dan got drunk from the champagne during the flight, and that night we had to check into a really crummy hotel until we could get out to the estate on the far end of the island the next morning. She says that once they get in the room without any kind of seduction or foreplay or warm up, he throws her on the bed, fully dressed, undoes his pants, pulls down the underwear, and has very mechanical, not impressive sex. She says that he acts weird, that he brings a suitcase full of books to read for pleasure, not for school, but for pleasure, and that he wants to sit by the pool and read by himself all day. He gets rid of the helpers, like there were servants that came with the house, but he says that, like, I guess he tells the servants, 'We don't want you here because this is our honeymoon, we want to be able to mess. Around, and do our own stuff without any witnesses, so scram. But then he tells Betty, "I got rid of them because it's your job to serve me. I want you to cook, I want you to clean, I want you to do all the things that a housewife is supposed to do. Starting now, she claims that Dan telephoned his brother to say that he had made the worst mistake of his life by marrying Betty, so whatever really happened on this honeymoon again, we're only getting her side of the story, so we don't really know how much of this is true, but it definitely doesn't sound like one big party, although they're in St. Thomas in the British Virgin Islands on a private estate, so even if all of their gift money from the wedding got stolen. Theoretically, this shouldn't be a complete washout. I mean, you're still at an estate in the islands. Something this is another situation for me where it's like something is just not right here. Something for me is just not totally adding up. Betty claims that as soon as they get back to New York from the honeymoon, Dan tells her this is how our relationship is going to work. I don't believe in having a joint account because they're too confusing. You'll give me all your money and then I'll manage it. She says that she didn't want to get into a fight, so even though she had her own credit cards, savings account and checking account. She didn't want to get into a ruckus with him. It's like, okay, we're not only married, but we're newly married. I'll just acquiesce. It seems to be maybe not the most comfortable decision for me, but I'll go along with it. She claims that in the early weeks of their marriage, she was in a knit dress with stockings and heels, and had just come home from a long day, and then a long commute into Manhattan.
She alleges that Dan jumped her from behind, puts a hand around her neck, pins her arms behind her back with his other hand that was free, and then wrapped his legs around hers until they both fell over. She said she didn't know what he was doing or why, and she tried to get him off of her. And so there they have a little wrestling match on the floor. She couldn't figure out what was going on. He winds up with a bruise on his cheek, from where she kind of head butts him, and she, furthermore, says that he, he loved to tell the story that he twisted around that she attacked him, that she comes home from work like a bitch on wheels, attacks him, and head butts him out of nowhere. Her story is that he's trying to get into some weird, sweaty wrestling match on the floor, and she doesn't understand why. She claims that another incident occurs in the first few months of their marriage, where he gets into bed, straddles her, holds her arms down, and tells her, you know, I know of at least five ways that I could kill you, and nobody would be able to prove anything, she says that he would brag about the medicine that he was learning, and all the different things he knew about the human body that she didn't. Is any of this true? We don't know, because we weren't there. There's no way for us to definitively say yes or definitively say no, but here's a particularly interesting passage, and whenever I was listening to the audio book, I was folding some laundry as I was listening to this chapter, I literally stopped, I was folding some towels, and when she got to this part, I literally stopped, and I was like, there's something about this that strikes me as fake. That was really for me a moment where I was like, I'm starting to tune out and have a have a weird opinion about all of this. So, here's what she writes. I often wondered if Dan was gay, and I still wonder that today he had his own demons, having been raised the way he was, and nothing in his life or his view of himself would have allowed him to have come out. I think this could be why he was frequently so angry. It's hard to stay angry at yourself. It's easier to send it outward, like my mother and Dan did, and blame others for where you end up. That's something I've learned all too well over time, lots and lots of time. Dan was a dandy, obsessed with clothes and hair and facial products, which I'm guessing is not so typical of straight men even today, and was almost unknown 40 years ago. At first, I found it kind of attractive, as it was so different from what I'd seen in other men, but then he took my savings and went to Barney's and bought this ridiculous-looking striped neighbor's suit. No one was wearing anything like that, certainly not in Cornell Medical School, and this was years before the Austin Powers movies. Then he bought the infamous black cape with red silk lining and a top hat, a la Sherlock Holmes or. Count Dracula, take your pick, and that just seemed extreme, even comical to me. The money they cost was less amusing, though. His closest friend, Jack, was an openly gay doctor, which was very brave of him for those days. Dan spent every free evening with Jack and visited him for years afterward. Jack had a steady boyfriend, but let Dan know that he found him very attractive, though I'm not sure he admired Dan's over the top taste in clothing. Personally, I think everyone owes a huge debt to Oprah Winfrey for opening up difficult topics in a sensitive and non-judgmental manner. It all existed back then, but no one dared speak of it. There must have been lots of shame and guilt, as well as a very valid fear of what would happen to you if you were exposed. Dan's friend Jack was more courageous than most. He was out and open about being gay. That was so uncommon. Then isn't life strange? It was expected of Dan that he would marry, just as it was expected of me, but he was never completely with me.
His love making was by rote and in the dark, and he needed to be loaded up on alcohol before he attempted it, or at least he always was, whether he needed it or not. I had nothing to compare it to, so I had no idea that real love between a man and a woman could be different, not a painful exercise done but never spoken of. End quote. Okay, what the fuck? So suddenly we're given this revelation that Dan suspects that Betty, or that I got that backwards, it's such a crazy allegation. We're hit with this allegation that Betty wonders if Dan is gay and on the down low, forced to get married because of Catholicism, but really he wants to be with other men, and our evidence for this is that Dan is a dandy who likes to take care of his appearance, and he also has a close friend, Jack, who's openly gay at a time when a lot of men were not, but this will also become relevant because there are some other passages in which it's like Dan and I were having sex. There's also a boyfriend that Betty had later, after she and Dan had split up, and she had said, like, yeah, we have sex, but it's not nearly as good as it was when I was having sex with Dan, and I'm like, well, if he was supposedly gay but on the down low, and he had to get absolutely loaded and turn all the lights off and have mechanical sex just for the purposes of a pregnancy and you're saying the sex was lousy, why did you then go and tell other people that the sex was hot as shit? I mean, something's not adding up here, just saying. So now she talks about how after the honeymoon she gets sick, and she feels that she's having really bad heartburn. And Dan says to her, "You're pregnant. She says, "What? How would that have happened? And he's like, "Well, we've had sex, you're not on any birth control, of course you're going to wind up getting pregnant. She acts like sex education was just completely anathema. She didn't get it at school. She didn't get it at home, so she didn't really understand quite all of the working parts. I guess she goes to her first OB-GYN appointment, and they tell her that she has a condition called - I'm going to try to pronounce this right - uterus to Delphis, which I guess is where a woman has two uteri. The doctor tells Betty that because of this unusual condition, she's never going to be able to carry a baby to term, and at the time she says that that seems like good news, and that she's relieved, and so she's just waiting to have a miscarriage, hoping that the baby will abort itself, so she's working every day as a school teacher, and she says every day up until the actual day that her daughter was born on january 29 1970 That night they're having a party at their place, she's cooked the food, Dan is supposed to bring the alcohol, and she gets home at about four and has cramps, but doesn't think anything of it, which, you know, okay? In fairness, the argument, maybe if you don't know that much about pregnancy and you haven't ever had a baby before, maybe you wouldn't think that much of it, but I'll just find skeptical of that, but okay, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. She says that she gets the food ready for the party and waits on Dan. He doesn't come home. About eight, the guests start arriving. There's no Dan, there's no alcohol, but the food was good. Most of the guests were fellow medical students, so they stayed to get some free food anyway. She says that Dan finally shows up hours later and is stumble fuck drunk. He's got a drunk with him, a lawyer who was humorously named Daniel Webster, another woman who's drunk, and she just finds the whole thing embarrassing. Later on, when everybody leaves and the party breaks up, she's in some significant pain, but he's still liquored up. She says to the point where he can't even stand up straight.
She claims that when she gets to the hospital, the very first nurse to spread her legs and take a look catches the baby on the fly. She was still completely dressed. Dan was passed out drunk in the hall, and the doctor hadn't even had time to get in, and the baby just pops out, like, "Hey, y'all, here I am. Betty can't go back to work teaching because there's nobody to watch the baby, but she finds a doctor and his wife who were looking for someone to watch their five month old infant while the woman goes to law school, and so she gets this job, kind of as a babysitter nanny type, so that she can watch this five month old infant, and then also bring her newborn along too, and make some money. One night, she hears the noise of her car being stolen. She tells Dan about it, and says, "Well, thank God I have full coverage insurance. He says, well, no, you don't. She says, well, yeah, I do, and it's paid up in full until next year. Dan tells her that he has canceled her insurance without telling her, got a refund for what hadn't been used already, and used what what he got in refund at Barney's department store to buy clothes for himself, he tells her that he never really wanted to be a doctor anyway, that he had only gone to medical school because he saw the wealth that would follow. He says he doesn't like seeing people in pain, he doesn't like seeing people suffer, and he also doesn't like touching people or interacting with them that much. So he decides that he wants to be a dual MD JD because he's been told that he'll make a million bucks the first year out, so it's like he's already made up his mind, this is what we're doing, so as they're packing up and going off, so that Dan can be a student at Harvard Law School, Betty realizes that she's pregnant again. She says they don't have any money, they don't have food, they don't have furniture, they don't have a car, and they wound up living in some pretty slummy, scuzzy places. She describes one of one said places being a bootleg apartment, which is an illegal add-on, cunningly created by putting up plywood walls around a broken boiler in the basement with no heat and no windows underground. She has to take the bus everywhere, including to the laundromat, to do everybody's laundry, and she's pregnant with another kid at the time. It's cold, they don't have proper heat or hot water in the apartment, and it's just a miserable experience. She describes an abusive situation. We don't know if this happened. I want to be very clear about this. This is what Betty is saying, not me. I have no way of knowing if this is true or not. In the book, she claims one night I was out at the laundromat, Kim was asleep, and Dan, who was at home, agreed that I could leave her and go alone. As I approached the door of our apartment, I could hear both Kim and Dan screaming from inside. I was panicked and threw open the door. Dan was hitting Kim; she was 10 months old, and he was slapping her with both of his hands. I screamed at him and cried and told him I wanted a divorce, that I was getting a divorce, and that I was leaving him, and he tried to stop me by saying that we were both under a lot of pressure, and that Kim had woken up crying and wouldn't stop, and he had been trying to study, and he'd lost his temper. I wasn't in a listening mood. My life had turned to utter crap, and now he was hurting my baby, and if I wouldn't save myself, I would do it for her and the baby I was carrying. Kim and I took the midnight Greyhound bus to my parents' place. I hadn't packed anything, and it was cold and dark, and I was so tired that I let Kimmy crawl around on that filthy bus floor until her little dress was all black. That's how we arrived at my mom and dad's house.
My mother let us spend one night there before having my dad drive us back to the bus station and pay our fare home. She told me that she wasn't going to raise my kids, that I was married, and that I had to live with it. She said she'd never liked Dan, but it was too late now. I've made my choices. Dan seemed neither surprised nor happy to see us, nor did he apologize for hitting Kim, but he promised to never do it again, and he didn't. There was nowhere for me to go, and whatever happened to me from here on in, there would be no one who wanted to hear about it. I belonged to Dan, and he could do what he wanted with me. I'd made my choices. My mother was right. Things got better on Christmas 1970 when we went to Pittsburgh. Praise be to God. Dan's wonderful grandparents gave us the money to buy an orange Volkswagen hatchback, and it helped so much. End quote. Wow, wow, a lot going on there. So we have an accusation of child abuse, and in baby beating, not even child abuse, but to take it even further, beating a helpless baby. Then it switches pretty abruptly to things got. Better on Christmas of 1970 because we got the orange VW hatchback. What, in Dan's final year of law school, he takes a legal internship in LA, so they pile into the Volkswagen and go from Massachusetts to Los Angeles. Betty said she hated the cold in Massachusetts, so the idea of going to SoCal sounds great. Of course, they yet again live in a small, dirty, nasty apartment while Dan works in downtown LA at a law firm. Neither of them really like the traffic and the smog and the congestion, but one day at the park, another young mother tells Betty, well, if I could live anywhere in this area, I'd pick San Diego. They drive down there, they like the lay of the land in San Diego, and they meet the people at Gray Carey, and Betty describes it as like wining and dining. The wives take Betty shopping and out to lunch, and everybody's getting schmoozed. The boys of the firm show Dan around like they're masters of the universe, and then the wives help to schmooze Betty. She describes them as being like good Stepford wives, which, who knows, that may be true. She describes what she calls a strange incident. Dan goes down to San Diego by himself to meet up with some of the guys from Gray Carey, she was at home in their little crap sack apartment with the two girls, and then she's also nauseous and sick because she's yet again pregnant. She wakes up till midnight hoping that he's going to come home, then she finally just gets up and goes to bed, but she can't sleep very well. She keeps looking at the clock, thinking, oh my god, maybe he got drunk and had an accident. Something could have happened to him. It's dark. There's a long stretch of freeway, you know. We're not natives of this area. Anything could have happened. It goes gets to be 2o'clock 3o'clock and four, 9am the next day. He's still not home. He still hadn't called. She calls his job in LA to find out if he's there, but they haven't seen him either, so she's freaking out. He has the only car, and he hasn't come home, and she doesn't know what to do. Finally, she locates him. She says that he's been all night with someone that she refers to as Don Manning, and that's in quotes, so we don't know who Don Manning actually was. She says that Dawn and Dan were very close from that night forward. She additionally writes, "I'm not sure why they had wives and girlfriends. In reality, they preferred each other's company over any woman's. Please don't misunderstand me, or think for one minute that I don't like gay people, and don't fully support gay marriage and rights, because I do. Some of the best people I have ever met, don't we hear that? You know, some of my friends are black, some of my friends are gay, that's what people always say.
Some of the best people I have ever met were gay men and women whom I worked with in the fashion industry, and in fact, I've always found gay people to be some of the smartest, funniest, kindest people I've ever known, and they've always been good to me. The problem I had with Dan, and guys like him, is the fraud and dishonesty intrinsic to their denial of who they really are. No wonder Dan had so much trouble connecting on an intimate level with me. He should have just been honest with himself and me and everyone else, but the way he was brought up, he just couldn't face the truth, or I guess what he would have seen as the fallout, so we're back yet again to the narrative of maybe Dan was just gay, maybe he had gone out all night and gotten plastered and had wild swinging from the chandelier sex with Don Manning. I mean, maybe stranger things than that have happened, but it just sounds so it not only sounds bizarre and far-fetched, but it also sounds very self-absorbed to me. That's just my opinion, and it could be wrong, but to me it sounds very selfish and self-absorbed, because it's kind of like if Dan doesn't want me. I'm a tall, leggy blonde, and if Dan doesn't want me, then he must not like vagina at all. He must only want other penis. Like, well, well, it's not quite as simple as that. She says that whenever it's time to go back to Harvard, she wants Dan to leave her and the girls in California, fly back to finish your last nine months of school. You can come out here for a visit, but leave us and the car here in California. But she says Dan does not allow them to do that, so they get back in a hot car going cross country with two very small children, and then a baby, and meaning inside her, her being pregnant, and she describes it as being literally nauseating. She tells a very depressing story about getting back to Cambridge and living in another tiny apartment in not very safe conditions. More or less, having to make the girls stay in the bathtub, because that was the only way that she could keep an eye on them. She describes herself as puking constantly and bleeding constantly, so she'd have to sit on the toilet to bleed, and then have a trash can on her lap to puke into, and then keep the girls sitting in the dry bathtub, just so she could keep an eye on them while she was sick. Dan, of course, is not home, he's not helping out. And she had thought of having an abortion. It was legal at that point in time in New York, but Dan is pretty much telling her, "Don't worry, I'm going to help out more. But then he doesn't. The baby, she does carry the baby. The baby is born breach. It's a son who was born like seven pounds, so it was a carried to term pregnancy. She says the baby only lived for a day, but she didn't get to see the baby while the baby was alive. They only allowed her to see the baby after the baby had died. This was in February of 1973 She said that they never named him or buried him, and so she still did not know, you know, even in 2015 she still did not know where that baby was. She claims that Dan said they could not afford to bury the baby, and that he wasn't sorry about the baby, and in fact he said that he was mad at her for ruining the first ski trip he had been able to take for years and then continue to go on about it for days. She claims that that was the first time that she tried to unalive herself. She says that her attempt to unalive herself consisted of swallowing every pill that she could find in the medicine cabinet, but it did not succeed. She woke up when Dan came home and roused her, and he says, "Just hang on for a few more months, everything will be better when we make it to California. I understand that it's shitty here, but whenever we make it to California, I'm going to hit it big. The weather's going to be better.
We won't be living in shithole apartments. Just hang on a little while longer, she says that in May of 1975 they drive back across the country again, and they have themselves and their kids, but no furniture, no possessions, and no friends or family waiting to meet them. When they got there, they get to San Diego, and she says that Dan dumps them in what she calls a real hell hole of a motel, he claims that he's going to go off and look for apartments. She says he's gone all day, but he doesn't go apartment hunting. Instead, he goes and gets drunk with Don Manning. She describes Don as being a problem in the marriage from the day they arrived in San Diego. She claims that Don takes Dan under his wing at the law firm, and there was a lot of cheating and after hours playing around. Don is into drinking and chasing after the secretaries after work, sleeping with the secretaries after work, and when Dan first gets to the firm, he's kind of incredulous about everything that's happening, but the more that he stays there, it's kind of like he gets pulled into the culture. So, according to Betty, what he sees at first as being like, "Oh my god, I can't believe these people behave that way. It becomes like, "We have this as normal, and I do it too. We don't know if that's true. We're hearing her side of the story, but let's take a pause here for a second. So, supposedly Dan is a closet homosexual, and that's why he can't connect properly with Betty. Also, supposedly he's running around with Don Manning, and the two of them don't really like women, they only want to screw each other, but then we're also told that Don is the type of person who pinches secretaries' butts and can't wait to have sex with women he's not married to after work. That doesn't immediately to me scream guy who's gay on the down low, it just doesn't. She says that from the very beginning, Dan was a great lawyer, or as she calls it, a great professional liar. He was excellent at lying to your face, and he could convince anybody of anything. She says that he was very boyish and good looking, always impeccably dressed, and it was like he just made a splash on the San Diego scene like something they had never imagined before, but his plan is to stay with this firm for five years, and then right before they say you've made partner, he'll leave and go out on his own. He felt that there was no way to get rich by working for somebody else, but he needs to get his bona fides, he needs to get a client base, he needs to get a reputation. So, for five years, it's like I'm going to devote my life to this firm and get myself established. Betty describes it as being like a cult, and of all the things she's written in this book, I'm inclined to believe that part of it, because I've just seen so many come. Companies that are cult-like, that you're one of us, you have to devote yourself to us. And I can completely see a high-profile law firm having that kind of culture. Betty gets a job at a Catholic school, and she describes herself as being happy to be back teaching, but before school even starts, she starts to feel queasy, and she thinks, "Oh God, not again, I'm pregnant again. She starts thinking about abortion, because at that point it's legal in September, and she thinks, like, "Well, it can't be much more than a tiny spec, so I'm just going to make an appointment, do it. And she did, so she gets an abortion, however, before that year is over, she gets pregnant again. That pregnancy ends in a miscarriage, and the way that she describes it in the book, quite literally, is this: abortion was legal and easy in California by that September of 1973 I know when I'm pregnant right away, and I told myself there was no fetus, no baby, just a tiny speck. I made an appointment and went and did it, but before the year was over, I had become pregnant again. That ended in a miscarriage, and I was able to teach school for both semesters. End quote.
Wow, there's a lot going on there, a lot going on there, not to mention how matter of fact all of it is described. Earlier on, we're told that she was pregnant and didn't know she was pregnant. She thought it was bad heartburn, and Dan had to explain to her what was happening. But I guess by this point, because she's been pregnant before and she's had some babies, she's like, "Oh, the nanosecond that I'm pregnant, I know that I'm pregnant. Okay, they moved from the apartment that they had been living in, and get into a rental house. However, it burns. Their possessions were insured, they had renter's insurance. So, even though Dan had had a history of canceling the insurance on Betty's car in the past, apparently he has the foresight to get renter's insurance, and with him being a hot shot lawyer, Betty says the insurance company couldn't do enough fast enough to suit them. They had purchased some furniture on in-store credit prior to the fire, but the fire had burned up too. But because it was Dan, it was like, we're going to bend over backwards to make sure that you get plenty of insurance money, we don't want any trouble now. Here's another passage where I was just like, what the fuck. Dan's great friend, Don, was very helpful to us during that time. He bullied the insurance company, saying that the firm was a powerful legal force to reckon with. I can't argue with him there, and went so above and beyond in his assistance to us, that he was the one who actually found us a house to buy in his neighborhood with some extremely fancy and elaborate financing. Dan parlayed our insurance settlement into a partial down payment on the house on Coral Reef. He then finagled a second mortgage from the seller to make the rest of the down payment on the first mortgage, with the proviso that a balloon payment was to be made in five years back to the original seller on the second mortgage. Pretty creative. The result of all this wonder-working financial genius, though, was that we now had huge debts on top of the student loans, and nothing we had was paid for. It was all financed to the hilt, and we could barely get by month to month. We moved to Coral Reef in December of 1975 December having become our annual move month by this time, I was very pregnant with Danny, and we had no furniture and no food, but we did have our first house. It turns out it was our only house, but that story comes much later. End quote. Okay, wait a minute. So, on the one hand, Don is the enemy, he and Dan are supposedly screwing each other on the down low and Betty resents the hell out of him and he's a problem in their marriage, but then at the same time he goes way above and beyond to make sure that they get insurance money and they get their first house, I guess we could make the argument maybe if he was in love with Dan he was doing that to benefit Dan, and didn't really care that that Betty and the kids also benefited from it, but there are so many moments in the course of this book where I find myself scratching my head and rolling my eyes, and I'm like, I just, the more that she talks, the less that I trust anything that she's saying, and to that point, let's also examine this. She says that the house was okay because it was theirs, sort of. It had been financed to the hilt. It was close to the I-5 freeway, it was close to Dan's job, and it was also close to Don, whom she hates and is kind of her nemesis slash rival, but alright, I don't know why you would list that as an upside to the house if you fucking hate the guy. She says that Danny Dan the Fourth is born only a few weeks after they move in. The firm gives a lot of like welcome the new baby type of presence and cute, cute little clothes and things. And she says Dan is thrilled because Danny's arrival means that they can have sex again. Okay, wait a minute.
You've told us that you think he's gay on the down low, that he doesn't like having sex with you, that the only way he can do it is to turn all of the lights out, get plastered drunk, screw you in the most mechanical, unpleasant way possible. But then you're also telling us that after you have this kid, Dan is excited because he gets to have sex with you again. Why would he be excited? I mean, I'm sure someone could say, well, then he can make more babies. He just fucking had a baby. There's a newborn involved that's getting all kinds of little cutesy clothes and presents from the firm. It sounds to me like she's saying sex for pleasure, which, if he didn't like her, he didn't want to be with her. If he doesn't like sex with women, why would he be excited to have sex with the woman? Something he here is not adding up. She describes Dan's brother, Larry, as being this financial financial wizard who does some kind of hinky things. Betty says, "I was there when he said, say you have $100 instead of spending that money, you can get credit and spend 10 times what you have, then you use your $100 in cash to make the minimum monthly payments on the $1,000 worth of stuff you bought. So she describes a marriage where Dan listens to that advice and leverages a shitload of debt. She describes incidents where Dan would do things like ripping doors off hinges, borrowing a sledgehammer, and then beating the lawnmower with the sledgehammer. She said that she would cry and get upset, and then Dan would get mad at Betty for crying, and say things like, "Next time it will be you if you don't shut up. But there weren't any witnesses to any of these things until apparently Betty says several years later one of the au pairs, Catherine, who I thought I had hid it from, came to testify about what she had seen and heard while she lived with us. It turns out she had been horrified by the way Dan treated me back then. My lawyer, Jack Early, did not call her as a witness, nor did he call Brian Burchell, who, like Catherine, had first-hand knowledge and had lived at my house and seen it up close and personal. Both had wanted to testify and help me, but neither was ever heard from. So now Betty is saying there were witnesses, apparently, but they were never brought out in court to swear under oath about what they had seen. Now we fast forward to 1978 Betty says that she's pregnant again. She says that in the three years between Rhett and Danny, she had another miscarriage and a second abortion, but despite this, she wanted to have a baby. She said that she wanted Danny to have a brother to grow up with. When Rhett comes out and is a boy, she says that she's ready to have her tubes tied, because it's like she's got two girls and two boys, and that's it. She's done, she says. And I quote, "I was so tired of being pregnant all the time, and I'm sure she was. Honestly, I'm sure that she was. She talks about how Dan was a master of manipulating and embarrassing other people, that it wasn't enough to serve a subpoena, you had to really humiliate the person. She said that he was good with juries, and that he could paint images of pain and suffering to the point where one hangnail or one paper cut was turned into a lifelong disability full of agony and suffering. She also says that Dan laughs and claims that every time a lawyer gets his first real big settlement. What he does is go out and buy a red sports car. It's always red, and he felt like it was such a cliche, and it was so silly. But then he winds up doing the same thing. Betty goes to an accelerated real estate school for one weekend. She says that Dan is totally against this, and refuses to babysit for the weekend while she's in school. Refuses to babysit while she's trying to study for the licensing exam.
She claims that on the day of the exam he removed the batteries from her calculator in the hope that she would fail the exam, but because of all the math that she had to do in Catholic school, she was able to still yet pass the test without any problem. She gets hired by a real estate firm in La Jolla, and most of the time, when she's showing the home, she has to do it on the weekends because Dan is refusing to be a babysitter or to hire a babysitter, so it doesn't really work out for her. Be a realtor, because you have to be available when the client says, I want to go. You can't say, well, I'll only show houses on Saturday and Sunday, that's not going to work. So she says, then she has an idea for a baby boutique to open it in La Jolla and cater to all the rich moms and grandmas. She gets a business plan put together for this boutique, and then Dan allegedly says no, even if you make 50 grand in profit the first year, and you won't, it will all go to taxes, and nothing will be worth it. She talks about Dan's drinking leading to DUIs, and him side swiping people in traffic, but not really facing any legal consequences of that, because he is the hot shot lawyer who can talk his way out of anything, and he's made a lot of the right connections. He has friends in high places, she says. By 1982 they had money, and they could finally start to do the kinds of things that they wanted. She talks about buying a baby grand piano for Kim and joining the Warner Springs Ranch, so the kids could go riding horseback riding on the weekends, and they, and they got.. they.. it's kind of like, okay, we're finally in the money, we're finally hitting the pay dirt for what we've wanted all this time. She says that it's at a birthday party somewhere during the kind of 1982 going into 1983 holiday season, when she hears Dan make the comment, isn't she beautiful, and it catches Betty's attention because she claims that she had never heard Dan say that about anyone, and then later on she's like, well, who were you talking about, and he says, oh, this girl who works in the lobby of my building in 1983 as they continue to have money, Dan claims that, or well, I should say, Betty claims that Dan claims that there they will not have any kind of entertaining or parties in their house in La Jolla anymore, because he claims he is quote embarrassed to be living in a tract house, she describes Dan as being cheap with anybody except Dan. Basically, like, if it's something that Dan wants, the sky is the limit. If it's something that anybody else on planet earth wants, then he gets totally cheap. Betty says that 1983 through 1985 were the worst years of her life, harder than being dirt poor and harder than being in prison. In the summer of 1983 she says that she had taken the kids on a camping trip, and they had car trouble around Las Vegas. She tries to call Dan at home and at work, but she can't get ahold of him. He's not at either place, day or night, she needs money to get the car repaired, so she keeps calling, and that's her first real major red flag that something's wrong. She says when finally she and the kids do get home, Dan is very rude. He doesn't ask for a divorce, but he just acts like a complete shithead and becomes horrible to live with, she says, in September of that year, he comes home and says that he has hired somebody to help him out at work. She says that her initial reaction is that she's thrilled because he needed help, he was totally overworked, and she thought that maybe if he got out from under some of the pressure and the exhaustion, he'd be nicer to everybody, but then he tells Betty that the person he's hired is Linda, the same lady whom he described as being beautiful, who was working in the lobby, and he says, like, well, she'd been fired, she was desperate for work, and he wanted to help her out.
He says, allegedly, according to Betty, that nobody else would hire Linda because she didn't have any credentials or skills, and she couldn't even type. She had been employed as the directory information assistant in the lobby of the building, and had been fired from her challenging position for dating too many of the men who worked in the building, and that had, again, this is all coming to us via Betty, that had caused a lot of gossip and tension. According to Betty, Linda had arrived in San Diego when she followed a boyfriend out west from Atlanta, and he dumped her as soon as she got there, as soon as they got there, and then she had just been couch surfing in Ocean Beach, in what Betty calls a rundown section of San Diego. So Dan is taken in by this damsel and distress story. Betty tells Dan that he has 30 days, she needs to be gone by October the first, or you can get out of the house. And Dan tells her that she's crazy and she needs to see someone, and, by the way, this is my house, and so if you don't like something, then you can be the one to get out our old buddy Don Manning, who is supposedly gay and on the down low, and having a wild, mad, gay love affair with Dan, has divorced his wife, left his wife and kids, and has gotten into a new custom house and has lived. Signing there, screwing his secretary, Dan buys himself a red Corvette, and Betty says that she starts acquiring books on midlife crises, and she figures out that Dan is going through a midlife crisis, and that it will pass at some point. He will settle down, and it will just pass, she says, whenever they argue about his lack of involvement with the kids, he says that his job is to pay the bills, and that's it, nothing further. So she challenges him by saying, well, if that's how you really feel about it, then why don't you just leave us and send us checks, but he doesn't. She says that he begins referring to himself as the Count Du Monet, meaning count the money. She says that the lawyers at Gray Carey had developed a booklet titled Steps to Be Taken When Preparing to Divorce. She says that Don's ex-wife is the one who told her about it. Step one is don't ever let the first, or don't, don't ever let the other party know what you're actually up to. Betty says that since Dan had exclusive control over the finances anyway, it was easy for him to not let her know because she didn't have a clue. So she says anyway, october 1 comes and goes. Dan, of course, does not fire Linda. Instead, he gives her an expensive office next to his on november 7 1983 It was her 36th birthday. She said that she bought an ice cream cake because that was the kid's favorite, and they waited for Dan to come home. 678, 9pm came, but Dan's still not there. She lets the kids have some cake, and then they have to go to bed. It's 10, still he's not there, not even a phone call. She feels like she's tired of him lying to her, like he's lying to my face, saying that there's nothing going on, but there has to be. So she says that night, for the second time, she attempts to unalive herself. She doesn't rely solely on pills, she says that she does take some medications, but then she also tries to, I think, I can probably describe this. She also tries to cut herself with razor blades, however, she says the attempt doesn't work, and it would later in court be described as the district attorney as a half-hearted attempt that was done for theatrics and not for really unaliving herself. November 20-second comes around and it's Dan's birthday. She says that a couple of her friends know that she's been concerned about Linda, so they say, "Get yourself gussied up, dress up, look sexy, look nice, and go down to the office and surprise him. Instead, when she gets down there and she's all gussied up, she finds that there are remnants of a cake and balloons, an empty champagne bottle on the desk, and Dan is gone. Also, so is Linda.
Betty retaliates by taking armfuls of his clothes, throwing them off the balcony into the backyard, and then get getting some gasoline from the garage, and setting the clothes on fire. So, even after she's burned his clothes, apparently a dance days and says that he and Linda had simply gone to lunch, and then they had both left to go do depositions, and he's like, I don't know what, where she was for sure, I was at a deposition, she may have been at some other deposition or some something else related to the court, so she may have just gone home, I don't know where she was, she says that they canceled a family's annual Christmas party for 1983 because that's what Dan wanted. Now, see, she says something that I think is actually probably true. She says, "I understood later that Dan was trying to get me to file for divorce, and in order to appear to be the innocent party, image and public perception were everything to him. He didn't want people to think that he would just up and leave his nice wife and four children for a secretary who couldn't even type. There's probably some truth in that. The idea of, well, think about a negotiation, for example, the person who throws out a number first is at a disadvantage. So, let's say, hey, I want to know what your budget is for this project. Well, I'm not really sure what's your bid? 10,000 Hell, no, that's way above what I could pay. I was really thinking more in the two to 3000 range. Click the person who says the number first is typically thought of to be the loser or the person that's at a disadvantage. So, it may very well be that Dan wanted to make things inhospitable and do some crazy making, so that Betty would say, "Fuck this, I want you out of here, I want a divorce. And then he could go to work on his scheme of, "I'm going to keep as much as possible for myself. That very well could be true. In the fall, they fly to New York, and she said that Dan is just cold and distant, no matter what. Does he's pissed at her. She finds him downstairs in the hotel lobby on the phone, talking to Linda in retaliation. She goes to the Elizabeth Arden store, gets a gown that's $8,000 and puts it on a credit card. She gets all dressed up for the Blackstone Ball that year in this elegant gown, thinking maybe if I look beautiful he'll pay attention to me. But according to Betty, he gets home, brush his pastor, and just says, "Hey, I got to get ready and change, and it's like she doesn't even exist. She says that one of the ways that he prepared for divorce was to get rid of anything that Betty had equity in. So, for example, she was moved into a temporary rental house because the house at Coral Reef had a crack in the foundation. She was also driving a leased car, so she wound up with zero equity in either a home or a car. Fast forward in time, it's May 1985 She says it's her dad's 70th birthday, and there was going to be a big party for him back in New York. The entire extended family was going to be there, and she really wanted to go, but the stipulation was, and this is something I mentioned earlier, that I still don't really understand the stipulation was that no children were going to be allowed to go to the party, it was going to be an adults only affair. She says that she could have left the children at home with a babysitter, but the rent house that she had been moved into had a plague of rats, and she's like, what babysitter would want to come and watch kids in a rat-infested house. It just wasn't feasible. Dan has moved out at this time, and she's thinking, like, well, there shouldn't be any problem with Dan watching the kids while I go to New York. There's not.. there's nothing wrong with the upstairs bedrooms of the house at Coral Reef, that the kids could stay there, and that would be better than staying with a babysitter in a rental house that's full of rats. On St.
Patrick's Day of that year, she said that he had come over, and she allowed him to spend the night. She was hoping that if she let him have some nookie that night, that maybe in the morning, after he had sobered up, then they could talk about the separation and getting back together, but he left before she woke up, and so again I'm just thinking, like, okay, if he's Gaben in denial or Gabe and on the down low, and he and Dawn are engaged in some passionate love affair with each other. Why does he show up on St. Patrick's Day to go have sex with her? And then he even does it like a late-night creeper, he doesn't even stick around, which doesn't tell me that, like, oh, he didn't want to have sex. It tells me he wanted to have sex, he just didn't want to have any discussions about it later. One afternoon in May, she goes to see the kids, because see, this scheme that she has backfires. She thinks that if she starts dropping the kids on to Dan, that he won't want to take care of them, he'll want to run around with this much younger woman, and she's not going to want somebody else's kids either, and so she will get the kids back, and he will start to play fair with her. Of course, it doesn't go that way. I still don't understand who has a birthday party that's adults only if it's a family birthday party. Believe me, I get the idea of let's have a party with some liquor, and don't bring the kids. I don't want a bunch of squall and damn babies in here. I get the impulse, believe me, but it's described as sounding like a family affair, but there's no kids around. And then, especially like a large Italian Irish Catholic family, where everybody has a huge family of kids. I just.. I find that story really weird. I don't know what was actually going on there, but it doesn't pass the sniff test for me, but at any rate, the plan backfires on Betty, and Dan decides, well, I'll just keep the kids, and then you're really going to be out with nothing, because who are you to me now? You're not even the person that takes care of my children. She goes by one afternoon in May to see the kids, and there's a Boston cream pie sitting on the kitchen counter, and she thinks that it looks sloppy and shittily made, so she asks the babysitter who had made it, and the woman says Linda, and Betty allegedly says Linda, who, like you wouldn't know Linda, who that the lady that you feel is boffing your husband that you want to get back together with, and you're going to say, Linda, who I find I don't find that to be plausible, but okay. You know, Dan's girlfriend, Linda. So now Betty says that she loses it because Linda has been in her house with her kids, and Dan is still trying to pretend that nothing's really going on, so she goes apeshit and smears the cake all over. Her the bedspread, and then Dan overreacts, according to her, by saying that there were hundreds of dollars in damages from the cake, and he uses this to get a restraining order to bar her from coming into the house, and I just keep thinking, like, you understand that this guy is manipulative, and he knows how to work the legal system. Why the fuck would you keep poking the bear? Somebody will undoubtedly say humans are not rational when they get into a big emotional tailspin like that. You're not thinking rationally. That's one of the reasons why crime of passion crimes happen, but my gosh, I just.. I just have to wonder, like, at what point why wasn't she intervened upon? Maybe her friends did try, and she didn't listen to any of them, but fuck, like, if there is a guide on what not to do, this is it. Betty says that Linda sends a photo to Betty of Linda and Dan together before he even officially files for divorce, and has a post-it note attached to the photo that says it must kill you to see these two happy together. Eat your heart out, bitch.
Part of Dan's plan to dilute Betty's share of the money as much as possible were to use Epstein credits, even though they're not supposed to be used to dilute community property. Dan figures out a way to finagle the legal system, so that he is going to only owe Betty the most minimal amount of money by 1987 Betty says that she's fallen into a serious depression, that Dan has had her jailed for stepping a foot onto his property, which violated the various restraining orders, and also that he's isolating her more and more from the children. The headmaster at the school basically tells Betty, allegedly again, that I'm sympathetic, but Dan would sue if we violated any of the protective orders, and we just don't want to cross Dan Broderick. Betty writes about Linda, and I quote, Linda was no innocent bystander in that mess either. She was a very, she was very active in her partnership with Dan. Linda is the one who put the house's answering machine on the children's phone to keep me from being able to talk to them in 1985 after she and Dan and the kids moved into the house in Balboa Park, there was never an order that I couldn't speak with my children. My children loved me, and they relied on me for everything, even though they weren't living with me. They were as afraid of setting off Dan's temper as I had always been, and so if they had a problem or needed anything, they called me. I was still their primary parent. To me, it seemed that Linda wanted to be me, and that was impossible to do, unless she first erased me. Then she wouldn't be a sequel, she'd be the only one, Dan's only love and wife, his children's mother. But to make that real, or at least real to her, I couldn't exist anymore. To make it really real, not only did I have to go, but so did my memory, and it's weird, but if I can take myself out of this like she and Dan wanted, I can almost see why they felt that way. End quote. Here's something that Betty says that I think might be true. She writes, "For Dan, I think I was just this living reminder that he hadn't started out as this very handsome, seriously successful master of the universe, to borrow from Tom Wolfe, the Dan of the days of Linda was fairly untouchable in terms of looks, money, power, and the respect and control that I think he had thought was his due from birth. Yet I was around to remind him of the broke, skinny, nerdy, insecure young guy he had been, and I was a dark mirror that he wanted gone, end quote. So, Betty is basically saying Linda is this young, fresh-faced gal who comes along after he's become a quote master of the universe, and that's what he wants. He doesn't want anybody to remind him of the before times. She may be telling the truth on that. It certainly seems possible to me, and it makes a lot of sense. There's a scene in the Dirty John series where after the money has started to roll in, Dan and Betty are eating in a fancy restaurant, and they're actually kind of joking around about getting bored with this restaurant. Can you imagine a time, you know, when we were living in rat hole apartments? Can you ever imagine that we would ever even be eating in a restaurant like this, let alone that we would get tired of it, because we're able to go to fancy restaurants so often. Well, somebody that Dan knows, a client. Or somebody from work, some type of business associate walks up to the table and says hi, and he introduces this associate to Betty, and Betty, in the series, the character Betty makes a comment about, like, oh, it's just so crazy that we're even here, you know, we were living in rat hole apartments and eating government cheese, and now we're at a restaurant like this. Dan looks mortified. The business associate looks mortified, and then he's kind of like, "Well, enjoy your dinner, I'll see you later. And the character Dan rakes Betty over the coals. Why would you say that? Why would you do that? That was so uncalled for. Well, you should be proud.
You worked your way up from nothing, and now you're something. Well, I don't want people to know that it's inappropriate to talk about that. Oh, well, I know that our life used to be shit, and you don't want to hear about it. No, it's not that our life used to be shit, it's just I don't want to think about everything used to be bad, but now it's good. Quit talking about it. So they're sniping at each other at the table of this fancy restaurant, and I remember that scene, because I thought to myself, I don't know if that's true, I don't know if that really happened, but that would definitely be a moment where it's, it's not appropriate to do that, it's gauche, so it doesn't matter, gay, straight, male, female, whatever the dynamic is, there it is embarrassing, like somebody's saying, "Hey, this is a work associate, or this is one of my clients. And then you take that as the opportunity to say, "Well, we used to live in shit holes and eat government cheese, but look at us walking in high cotton now. Ha ha. I, too, would be embarrassed by that. So, there may very well have been a dynamic in the relationship of Betty kind of saying, in her own way, you owe me. I was with you when you were nothing. I was there during the hard times when we were living in the gutter and eating shit. I was with you, and I don't want to let you forget it. You still owe me for all of that. And then Dan kind of feeling like at some point you have to let it go. You can buy an $8,000 evening dress now, like we're going out to the finest restaurants. In fact, we're doing it so often that we're getting bored with them. Quit talking about the before time. She describes a series of Dan buying things for Linda, getting her a condo in Mira Mesa, getting her a new Toyota, picking up a fox fur jacket for her, taking her to the family orthodontist to get her teeth fixed, and this makes Betty mad, because she says that with her and the kids, Dan was always a penny pincher, but then whenever Linda says I want something, Linda gets it. Now she may not get the full monty of what she wanted, because it sounds like she asks for a Jaguar, and instead gets a Toyota. She asks for a mink coat, and instead gets a fox fur jacket. But nevertheless, Betty is mad, because it's like that's our money, not merely Dan's money. And then he's using it on Linda. He made me live in shithole apartments and didn't help with the kids, but now all of a sudden he can be cool as a cucumber with her. Betty says that in 1985 she still feels that she's in love with Dan and still imagining that somehow they might reconcile. In the fall of 1985 she says that Dan takes Linda to the USC Notre Dame football game, and it was the 20th anniversary of their first meeting there. She's sad about that, and she says the phone rings, and it's Dan, and he drunk dials her from South Bend, wanting to reminisce on how they'd met 20 years ago that night, how beautiful that Betty used to be, and how much he used to love her, and she felt like that was extraordinarily cruel. If that happened, that is a very shitty thing to do to somebody, to call them up drunk and say, "Hey, remember when we met here? I'm here with my new booty now, but man, you used to be a stunner, you used to be hot, you were a stone fox. I mean, you're fucking fat now, but you were really something back in the day, and I loved you, but I don't anymore. Bye. If that happened, then yeah, of course, that's a terribly awful thing to do to somebody. Betty starts leaving messages on the answering machine.
It's like she's, she's trying to be able, she says, to get a hold of the boys, and she gets frustrated, so she will, I guess, like try to exercise some of that frustration by cursing on the answering machine, but of course, back in the day, all of that was on tape, and Dan uses those tapes against her, and he institutes a fine system, like every time that you use profanity on the answering machine, you're going to lose money for doing it. This also helps to create telephonic evidence of the crazy Betty idea that Dan is being persecuted by his crazy ex-wife, who's a lunatic, after. They get married in 89 then Linda is no longer Dan's girlfriend, she's the wife, and I guess, according to Betty, a judge considered it that it's like Dan and Betty's kids become her kids too, by extension, and Linda gets on the answering machine and leaves a message like, "Hi, we're back from Greece, all tan and rested. Please leave a message, and this sets Betty's teeth on edge. Betty also describes a scenario of like Dan and Linda wanting to make sure that she always knew what they were up to, like they were actively trying to make her jealous, like high school kids would do, and maybe they were. I have no way of knowing if Linda was mature for her age or if she was behaving like a teenager, because in the Dirty John series she is portrayed as being immature and catty. I don't know if that's true. In the Meredith Baxter, Bernie films, she's frump a dump and mousy, but then in Dirty John she's turned into Bitch on Wheels, not to the extent that Betty is, but it's like, okay, Betty is the Bitch on Wheels, the battle ax and the Meredith Baxter Bernie movies, but then by the time we get to Dirty John, Linda really becomes a Hellcat, Betty says that somehow the millions of dollars of community property that she and Dan had amassed between the years of 1969 and 1989 had come to a grand total of $24,000 because Dan had subtracted Epstein credits, deducted lawyer expenses, the charges of all these different obscenities on the answering machine, etc. etc. So it's like Dan does some pretty creative math in court, and it's allowed to happen. She says that things escalate in 1989 and she feels that he was trying to take the kids away from her, and that's like the final straw. She says that in November of 1989 her birthday rolls around. She's turning 42 She thinks about the unaliving attempt that she had on her birthday in 1983 and she said, "I wondered why he couldn't just leave me and the kids and go off with his secretary, so many other men had done that. Why couldn't he leave me with my kids? Why did he feel the need to go total war, scorched earth? She says Dan was a master manipulator and a liar. It's what made him a great attorney. He lied for a living and was very adept at it. The other guy, no matter if the other guy was a wife or one of his own children, was always at fault in his worldview. I want to add something to that, and say I remember that Marlon Brando said that acting was lying for a living, and in fact he created, in his later years, he created, like, an acting workshop, acting seminar, and that's what he called it, lying for a living. And she does make a good point here, especially somebody that's going into litigation, somebody who's a trial lawyer, they have to sway the jury, they have to sway the judge. It makes sense that that person would be a master manipulator and a liar, I mean, wouldn't they have to be so. When the fateful day comes around, she says that she woke up early, put on a pot of coffee, went to get the newspaper from the driveway. She comes in and sees a legal letter in the rest of the mail. She opens it up because the boys are still asleep. She had some time to read it. She said that there were threats and ultimatums, copies of the transcribed answering machine tapes, you know, where Betty had been caught using profanity and saying nasty things on the answering machine.
Dan's terms, which were, as she says, subject to termination based on whatever his whims were. She said that he threatened jail time and fines, knowing full well that if she missed one house payment, she'd lose the house. She said that he tried to force her out of the house, so that he could then go back to court and reduce her monthly alimony check, and he had this, according to her, an all or nothing mentality, and so it was like he wanted to have everything and make sure that she had nothing. She claims that he wanted to reduce her to being a homeless bag lady, and that's how he and Linda saw her anyway, and they weren't going to be happy until she was out on the street. She said that she completely fell apart, didn't know what to do, did not want to go back to court, did not want to go to jail, and didn't want to have her kids taken away from her or put on some kind of a trial basis, where she only got to see them every now and then. She said that her spousal support check was always late, sometimes it came on the third, sometimes on the ninth. She had asked the judge to say. Set up an automatic payment system, but that request was denied. She said that she was panicking about paying the mortgage, and she would ask the kids to talk to Dan. She said, "I really can't call directly, so just ask your father about sending me this check. And then she felt terrible about that, because then she's involving the kids in their divorce and her financial dramas. She said that she was so tired of all of it, and she felt like it wasn't getting ready to end or to fizzle out, but it was all getting ready to ramp back up, and she did not think that she could go through a lifetime of continued legal battles with Dan, so she was standing in the kitchen that morning, feeling like it was never going to end. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, it'll never be over. She claims that Linda went around town telling everybody, quote, "We're going to use the courts to drive her crazy, and Betty said they did. It had worked out because they did use the courts to drive me crazy. She said that she had purchased a boom stick months before. She bought it on the day that Linda and her sidekick Sharon came into her home and stole her diary while she was at work. That is depicted now, without the sidekick. It's depicted in the Dirty John series that Linda breaks into her house, steals her diary, and is like, "Oh my god, look at all of her private thoughts. And then Dan is basically like, you need to take it back. You can't just steal her diary like that. You need to slip back in and take it and put it back. You can't do stuff like that. So, if this is true, if in real life Linda really did break into Betty's house and steal her private diary, that that is such a shitty and awful thing to do, Betty claims that she felt the boom stick would force them to listen, and she said that it was important to her to get whatever she needed to say out of her mouth before they called the police, because they would undoubtedly have her hauled off again, and she thought maybe if I have a boom stick with me, they'll have to listen. I can tell them, don't touch the phone, let me say what I need to say, and then they'll have to listen. She says that Linda came up out of the bed and lunged at her. She was scared and hysterical, so she just started squeezing. just just kept it going. Didn't even really know what was going on. She claims that she had no idea that Dan was hit. She said she went around the bed to get to the phone, and that Dan put his hands up in surrender, like people do in the movies, and he says to her, okay, okay, you got me. She says that she interpreted that as Dan assuming that she was going to pop him again.
She says that she grabbed the phone and ran and just like burned rubber in the street because she thought that Dan was going to get up and chase her. Doesn't make a lot of sense as to why he would do that. That definitely sounds like something from a horror movie or an action espionage movie, and not something that happens in real life after you've emptied a boom stick into people. She claims that she immediately turned herself in, told the whole truth about everything, and that she was more afraid that Dan would catch her and get her than she was afraid of the police. She closes the book by saying, in the end, I think I've had a wonderful life. I've lived my dreams, and I think regrets are a waste of time for people. You can't go back and change the past. There are no real-life time machines. No, this isn't the life I planned, obviously, but it's the life I have. So, I will continue to embrace it and go forward in love and peace. It's the best any of us can do, and I'm going to try. I'm going to keep trying my best. Wow, wow, so, so much in this book. My goal was to try to find her side of the story, particularly something current now. This book is from 2015 so arguably we can't say that it's super current, but enough distance from the murders that we can say years later, after the fact, after being in prison for all that time. What does Betty think about it. What, what would she want the public to know? She herself passed away on may 8 of this year. It's said to have been natural causes, apparently. She fell and broke some of her ribs, and then wound up with sepsis. I don't necessarily know that that's what sounds like natural. Causes to me, but at any rate, in terms of how would she feel about it more recently, 2025 2026 we don't know, but I think that we can take this book from 2015 and say it's the closest thing that we're going to get to that, and it's revealing in its own way. Here are some of the common traits of psychopathy: superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, lack of empathy, no remorse or guilt, shallow affect, need for stimulation, parasitic lifestyle, lack of realistic goals, impulsivity, poor behavior controls, failure to accept responsibility. Now, do I think that Betty was a psychopath? I have no way of knowing that, because I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a medical doctor who was treating her and talking to her privately in therapy, to know that to me the tone of the book, the very exact word that popped into my mind, because I was listening to it as an audio book, as I would be up cleaning the house and doing other things, and I was like, glib, that's the exact word that popped into my mind. It's like I'm going to try to convince you, I'm going to come across as being really superficially charming and try to get you to let your guard down, so that you won't think critically about what I'm actually saying in the book, like the whole gay but on the down low accusation, there's really no proof of that. The idea of, well, he liked clothes and he liked to look good, and he had a friend that was gay, that's being used as the evidence that he was gay and on the down low, and she, and he was being mean to Betty because he didn't really want to have sex with a vagina. I don't find that to be compelling evidence, and then later in the very same book, she says that after one of the kids was born, he was excited because it meant they could start having sex again. Well, if you don't like having sex with a woman, why would you be excited that she was ready to go, ready for your pleasure again? It doesn't, doesn't make any sense if you hated doing it, and you had to get drunk to do it each time. Any opportunity you could get to not do it, you would not do it. You wouldn't be excited about doing it.
I also got a vibe that reminded me of John Lovett's in those pathological liars skits from SNL was just like, would you believe? No. Okay. Well, would you believe this? No. Okay. Well, would you believe that? It's almost like I'm gonna throw a lot at you, ranging from child abuse to physical abuse of me to lying, manipulating cheapskate behavior, gay but on the down low, gay but in denial, cruel, menacing, a financial manipulator, etc. Whatever it is that I can think of to put in this book that might make you hate his guts, I'm going to put it in there, even if there's no evidence to support it, and by the way, I'm not saying that this guy sounds like a prince of a man, he fucking doesn't to me. There's nobody in this story that sounds chivalrous and romantic. It sounds to me, if I were to really boil it down, hashtag real talk, it sounds like a love triangle of people who never should have been involved with each other to begin with. Then we also have the lack of remorse or guilt, along with shallow affect. Yes, she has said I shouldn't have done it, and she does say that in the book. I shouldn't have done this. I killed two people, and it was inappropriate, and I shouldn't have done it. She does say that, but it's a bit like this. It's kind of like I shouldn't have done it, but now I'm going to spend an entire book telling you why actually I should have. That's that's the vibe that I get from it. It's just my opinion, and it could be wrong, but that's how I interpret it. And impulsivity, poor behavior controls, failure to accept responsibility. Now she would probably say I did accept responsibility because I turned myself into the cops and told them what happened, but impulsivity is certainly there. Although, look, her defense would be I wasn't impulsive, I took their abuse in the court system for years before I finally said fuck this shit and showed up with a boom stick. Poor behavioral controls, certainly I think that shows up throughout her interactions with Dan, because it's like, you know, that this guy is a master legal prick. Why the hell would you keep poking the bear? Why would you do that? Why would you not just say I am going to fuck with him as minimal. Me as possible, I think she - this is just my opinion, to be clear. It's just my opinion, it's just an interpretation, and it could be totally wrong. I think she wanted some revenge. I think she felt like you owe me, and I'm not gonna let you forget that you owe me. I lived in rat fuck apartments and took care of your babies and worked so that you could have this life, and now you owe me, and you don't get to run off with a bimbo, you don't get to run off with the secretary and leave me in the dust, buddy boy, you're going to pay me, and you're going to make sure that I stay in the kind of lifestyle that you said we would have, and if you don't do that, we're going to have some trouble, but the thing of it was he held all the cards. If you're going to give somebody an ultimatum and say, like, all right, I'm ready to lock hordes with you, bucko, let's go. You have to know what you're doing. You have to have some kind of advantage, because when you challenge somebody like that, and they're the ones with all of the advantage, you're screwed. There are a few one star reviews for the book on Goodreads. There's one reviewer who writes, 'Want to read a book by a double murderer who feels zero remorse and demonstrates zero insight for her actions, killing two people and leaving her own children as orphans. She lies and lies and keeps lying. She is told at least six different versions of the murders prior to this book, and in this book, she tells a seventh, why believe anything that a murderer and pathological liar says. Another reviewer writes, "Wow, I felt sorry for Betty, genuinely, genuinely believing that she was driven mad by her ex-husband. That was until I read this book. I find it extraordinarily hard to believe a word she has written in this book for someone who claims to have been yearning for independence. She certainly didn't behave that way. And yes, being married to someone with a narcissistic personality disorder must have been awful. Too bad the narcissist was and is Betty." Ouch. I would actually say it kind of sounds like everybody in the situation, everybody in this triad sounds like they have their own agenda, and they also sound very self-centered. Betty was running her own agenda, as was Linda, as was Dan, and it really, to me, seems like a collision. Three people who should not have been involved with each other that decided to amp it up, instead of one person saying, I want to be the standard bearer, I want to be the person who de-escalates. I want to be the diplomat in this situation. It was like three fiery personalities, almost like hold my beer and watch this, like instead of de-escalating, everybody wanted to squirt lighter fluid on the fire and watch it get higher and higher, and then wonder why they all got consumed by it in the end. Check out the book for yourself, as always. Come to your own conclusions. Stay a little bit crazy, although not crazy enough to do these types of things, to be emphatically clear. And I will see you in the next episode.
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