Abby Ellin
speaker
100 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Abby Ellin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And he says, there's a doctor who's writing prescriptions for narcotics, for Vicodin. And your name is one of the names he's been using.
I said, what? And he said, yeah, he's been writing prescriptions for drugs. Do you know him? Do you have a prescription? And I said, no, I know him and I do not have a prescription for Vicodin. You know, I prefer Valium.
CIA and Navy SEAL and all that, you know, everything is just coming together.
But while he was there... People he worked with at the Pentagon, he had used their names to forge drugs.
He used his dead mother's name. He used his dead father's name. He used, I think, his aunt. He used my name. All these people.
I asked if he was selling, and Dan Ryan said, no, we have no evidence of that.
She was one who told me about the girlfriend.
She was getting a divorce. He had reached out to her and, you know, and I never stopped loving you after 30 years, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.
He was helping manage her cancer.
And then I called up Gail, who was basically dying at the time. She had cancer. She had breast cancer.
After this happened, I was like, now I got a book.
It's not a straight-up memoir. It is really an investigation. We decided to focus on the victims. What is it like to be deceived? What is it like to be duped? What is it like to not have all the facts? And that the life you've been living is not the life you thought you were living.
The worst thing is you trusted somebody. And we have to trust. Society works on trust. You have to stop at the red light. You have to stop at the stoplight. You have to trust that the pilot knows how to fly the plane. You have to trust that that cop is really a cop. You have to. And if you don't, society will fall apart.
And it was just about, you know, how when children are being abused by their caretakers, they don't see it because they need that caretaker. They can't believe that that person is working against them. And it's the same thing in any relationship. Whether it's somebody, a business colleague or your romantic partner, you don't want to believe that someone's going to do this to you.
You can't believe it. And it's to your benefit not to see it because of your life that you built up.
So then I found this study that said actually smarter people are more susceptible to being duped because they don't think it would happen to them. So actually people who've been duped are smarter. They tend to be smarter specifically because of fatal overconfidence. It would never happen to me.
I never felt ashamed. I never felt embarrassed. To me, it was a story, and it was a great story.
I began reporting on different things. I became somewhat of an expert on fraud. I got to write a book about white-collar fraud. And I did a podcast, which led into a documentary that I did with the New York Times called To Live and Die in Alabama. So it did change my life.
I always knew I was resilient. I always knew I was strong. But I don't know that I realized just how capable I was. That's nice to know.
I think it's very important for people to know that they're not alone and that this happens to other people. It's very easy for it to happen now with technology. You're not a terrible person. You're not a stupid person. Lots of people are in this situation and don't feel like an idiot. Because, again, what's the worst thing you did? You trusted. That's okay.
Showing 81–100 of 100 · page 5 of 5
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