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
He gave Tara Lee the maximum sentence allowed, 10 years and one month. And she'd have to pay more than $1 million in restitution to the families. When sentencing was over, night had fallen. The blizzard had stopped. It was bitterly cold. There were no cameras allowed in the courtroom. So Heather Catalo rushed outside in gloves and a coat to go live with the WXYZ Channel 7 newsroom.
Mike and Teresa stood on the sidewalk in the bitter cold, looking around for a blonde-haired guy from Chicago, Nick Granath. But Nick had gone out the back door, looking for Mike. Hours earlier, in the middle of the sentencing hearing, Nick had realized who the Mathenies were. During a recess, he rushed out and found them in the hallway.
They stood in the middle of the hallway, speechless. Nick was choked up, trying to ask any one of a million questions about Stephanie, about her baby boy, before the courtroom doors closed again. When sentencing was over, it was crowded and they couldn't find each other. Nick drove home to Chicago in the snow to tell Tammy he'd met the couple who'd adopted Stephanie's baby.
Teresa and Mike flew back to Atlanta, hunting for Nick's phone number. The next day, they called one another. and spent hours on the phone filling in all the holes on everything that had happened. Then, eventually, the Graniths, with May, flew to Atlanta to meet the Mathenys in person.
As the snow melted in Detroit, the pandemic took hold. Everything was canceled, people strapped on masks, and video calls replaced seeing each other in person. The case had done long-lasting harm to everyone involved. But for a lot of the families reeling from Tara Lee's fraud, 2020 and the years after were also about renewal. Courtney went home to her family and a newly adopted baby.
Adam and Kyle began working with another agency and successfully adopted a second child. So did the Methenys. So did the Graniths. And Julie Falkenberry got pregnant and had a girl. As Tammy and Nick's daughter May grew into a toddler, they kept in close touch with her birth mother, Sarah. They shared videos, photos, and phone calls. They visited.
They wanted May to grow up knowing her birth mother. They embraced that there's no one definition of family. But in the fall of 2023, Sarah's mom called Tammy and told her that Sarah had been hospitalized and was on life support.
Tammy told me she can't stop herself from thinking that if Tara Lee had acted in good faith through the adoption process, it might have saved Sarah's life.
I spent almost a year investigating this story, and about halfway into my reporting, I felt I knew enough to reach out to Tara Lee. I wanted to talk with her.
Yes. Tara Lee was incarcerated in Federal Correctional Institution, Alliser, a women's prison in Alabama. I made calls, I wrote letters, but she turned me down. I'd hoped she wouldn't. I'd hoped that in the nearly five years since her sentencing, she'd had time to reflect on how much pain she'd caused. But maybe that's just how it works in the movies.
I'm not really surprised she declined, and neither are some of her former clients like Courtney. Do you think she's capable of remorse?
I keep circling back to the question of why Tara Lee did it. It caused people so much emotional pain, exploited people's desire to start a family, and took advantage of women making one of the hardest decisions of their lives. And this was not a crime of passion. It took an incredible amount of time, focus, deceit, and a staggering absence of empathy.
Hunting for the right word to describe what Tara Lee had done, Judge Friedman called her evil. A few days after this podcast releases, the Bureau of Prisons will transfer Tara Lee to a residential reentry center in Detroit. Due to credits she earned in prison, she'll be released in October of 2026. about three years early. And she's appealed for an even earlier release for medical reasons.
She says she's pre-diabetic, takes medication for high blood pressure, and has an injured ankle. She attached medical records to back it up. Her latest appeal reminded me of her unsubstantiated claim to the Mathinis that she had a concussion, to Courtney that she had breast cancer, and to others that she'd had a heart attack.
None of those past ailments appear in the medical history in her appeal, by the way. Reading her most recent appeal, I realized something simple and profound about Tara Lee. That she sees herself as the victim. A victim of too many texts to answer. Of a shopping addiction. Of birth mothers not obeying her. Of adoptive parents breaking her rules.
of being compelled to lie and cheat and steal, of being taken away from her family and sent to prison, a victim of her own bad decisions. I don't know where that sense of victimhood comes from, but I believe it's at the root of her character and her crimes.
I wonder if Tara Lee ever truly saw the women she was trying to help, women who had so much less, who needed a ride to their doctor's appointments, who needed somewhere to live, who needed a bed, a refrigerator, and heat. Women like Stephanie and Sarah, who gave the Mathenys, the Graniths, the Bells-Thomases, and others what they wanted most in life, a baby, and got almost nothing in return.
The irony in Tara Lee's fraud was that so many of the people she harmed persevered and are now raising families. and the family she destroyed most was her own. Unlock all episodes of Baby Broker ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel.
Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple?
Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. Baby Broker is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. It was hosted and reported by me, Peter McDonald. I'm the executive producer, along with Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch of Sony Music Entertainment. Steve and George recorded the narration at the Invisible Studios, West Hollywood.
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