Peter McDonald
speaker
265 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Peter McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That weekend, the Mathinis flew to the Georgia coast to attend a friend's wedding at an exclusive island estate.
They checked into a Best Western. The next morning, September 27th, Mike stepped out to get a coffee and a rental car. Teresa was packing up when her phone rang. This is the call that started it all.
Tara Lee had matched them in fewer than two weeks. The birth mom, Stephanie, was pregnant with a boy.
Did it surprise you at all that after two years of trying and not being matched, that all of a sudden, working with Always Hope, you've got a match?
They weren't about to question how she did it, though. They just figured Tara Lee had the Midas touch. They'd been trying to adopt for two years when, suddenly, it was like Tara Lee had pressed the fast-forward button on a VCR and sped up their lives in a surreal blur. It felt like magic. Teresa and Mike spiffed up a nursery, bought baby clothes, and installed a car seat.
But behind the scenes, something terrible was happening that would soon take center stage. A different kind of drama was about to play out.
Teresa was in the back seat when she got a very strange email from an adoption company she and Mike worked with a while back.
When they got home, Teresa hurried down to their furnished basement and sent the woman a text. Hey, what's going on? The woman replied.
Talia Getting and Tanya Corrado were lawyers in Detroit who handled adoptions.
Have you ever heard her scream like that before? No. No. From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Baby Broker. I'm Peter McDonald. This is episode one. You cannot tell anyone. I'm a parent, but I haven't adopted anyone. So when I delved into the world of adoptions last year, I had a lot of questions.
As it turns out, most people who want to adopt don't know how the process works either. which is why they hire an expert to guide them. And that person, or agency, wields a lot of influence and power. They're almost always a good Samaritan though. But I wouldn't be telling you this story if that was true in this case.
The news that the FBI was investigating Tara Lee absolutely shattered the Matheny's dream of becoming parents. and they had a million questions. In the years since, they've, in a sense, rewound the tape of the disorienting few weeks that led up to it. Were there signs that things were off? Clues that Tara Lee was not a good Samaritan? The Mathinis now say there were.
The day they found out they'd matched with Stephanie, they were sitting side-by-side on their bed at a Best Western in Brunswick, Georgia. Tara Lee was on speaker, rattling off bits and pieces about Stephanie's pregnancy. And the Mathinis, hopeful, trusting, vulnerable, thought their dream of parenthood was coming true.
Then Tara Lee told them that Stephanie, the birth mother, was waiting on another line.
Teresa said, of course. So Stephanie came on and said hello. She was in her early 40s and had been taking care of others her whole life. First, her younger siblings. Then, two children from her first marriage, who were now older. Then her husband went to prison for a drug-related offense, and they divorced.
And now, she lived with her boyfriend and was raising their four-year-old son on the boyfriend's limited income. They decided to put their baby up for adoption because they thought he'd have a better life. But it was a very hard decision.
The Mathinis told me the call was tense. They didn't want to say the wrong thing and make Stephanie second-guess her decision. As in any private adoption, Stephanie had the right to change her mind even a few days after the final adoption agreements were signed, and that would be days after her son was born.
They said Stephanie also seemed cautious though, but not because they were strangers making a life-changing decision together. It was more like Tara Lee seemed to be controlling what Stephanie said, as if Stephanie had been coached or prepped to seal the deal.
So Tara Lee created the text chain. Mike sent Tara Lee $13,000, and Teresa and Mike flew home to Atlanta with a mission.
Mike kept calling and texting Tara Lee, but she wouldn't answer or reply. They'd given her $13,000. The boy they were adopting would be born in a week and they had no contract. Why the hell wouldn't Tara Lee answer her phone? which was when Mike and Teresa got a surprising email from Tara Lee. She'd left the country.
Showing 201–220 of 265 · page 11 of 14
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