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
We used music from Audio Network and a few tracks from Epidemic Sound. News clips are courtesy of WXYZ7 in Detroit, Michigan. Our production managers are Tamika Balance-Kolosny and Sammy Allison. Our lawyers are Allison Sherry and Kathleen Farley. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasek, and Jamie Myers.
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Last October, I was in the recording studio with Mike and Teresa Matheny, the couple from Atlanta who adopted Stephanie's son. We were taking a break, drinking coffee, when Mike asked me,
From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, this is Baby Broker. I'm Peter McDonald. Episode 6, Don't Fuck With Parents. By September of 2018, the Facebook group Courtney Edmond helped start had evolved into a crowdsourcing juggernaut of Tara Lee's pissed-off former clients. By October, members of the Facebook group were telling their stories to FBI agent Matt Sluss.
By November, Sluss' investigation had swelled to include 150 couples, all of whom felt Tara Lee had misled, defrauded, or swindled them. Courtney's Facebook group was the seed from which the investigation grew. I want to zoom in on a moment in early October before the FBI got involved, when the seed took root.
Julie Falkenberry, one of the three women who started the Facebook group, told Courtney that she wanted to cold call Talia Getting and Tanya Corrado. They were the two lawyers who represented many of the couples in Tara Lee's adoptions. Here's Courtney.
When I talked with Talia Getting, one of the lawyers, I asked her about this call with Julie. Talia said Julie yelled at them and accused them of fraud. But Talia swore she had no idea who Julie Falkenberry was. Talia told me it was only when Julie said her adoption with Tara Lee had failed that she knew why she'd never heard of her.
Tara Lee would send out all-inclusive adoption contracts with Talia and Tanya's names and fees on them without ever telling them. If an adoption failed, they often never knew. Tara Lee usually only called them when one succeeded, usually at the 11th hour. Talia told me she hated that Tara Lee did this and reprimanded her, but it did no good. When I shared all this with Rob Kirsch, he was appalled.
He's an attorney who knows how adoptions are supposed to work.
Her scheme worked in part because no one was looking for criminals, con artists, and fraudsters in the adoption industry. Because not only was preying on people involved in adoptions unconscionable, it was unimaginable. Even the feds, at first, needed a minute to wrap their heads around what she'd done. Adoptions, by the way, are regulated at the state level.
So while there is oversight and there are rules, they differ. In Michigan, Tara Lee knew what the rules were, and she flagrantly violated them. The state had even told her to stop doing adoptions, but she didn't. On the phone, Julie Falconberry told Talia about the baby boy she was adopting through Always Hope. It was a closed adoption, meaning Julie had no contact with the birth mother.
Tara Lee told her that the birth mother went into labor unexpectedly, and the baby had died minutes after birth. Julie deeply mourned the loss. She now suspected, though, it was all a lie, that Tara Lee had made up the baby and the birth mother, that it was all for money.
While Courtney listened in, Julie told Talia and Tanya about their Facebook group of Tara Lee's former clients and all their failed adoptions, a graveyard of failures. When they hung up, it was early evening in Detroit. Talia and Tanya had a million questions. This was serious. This was potentially criminal. It was also, Talia told me, personal.
Talia had been adopted, and she had an adopted daughter. She said Julie's accusations not only scared her, they upset her. That night, Talia remembered that Tara Lee had given her access to Always Hope's email account. She wasn't sure if the login would still work, but it did. Talia and Tanya began reading over 4,000 emails Tara Lee had sent and received from her clients.
They created a spreadsheet of names, dates, and payments. Leaning against their office wall was another piece of evidence in a frame, Tara Lee's diploma for her master's in social work from Northwestern. Months earlier, Talia said she'd asked Tara Lee for proof of this degree. And after weeks of these requests, she said, Tara Lee presented them with the framed diploma for display.
But the FBI would discover that the diploma and her degree were fake, pure fiction. Talia and Tanya shared what they found with another attorney, Maria Penchenko, who represented the birth mothers in many of Tara Lee's adoptions. They took matters into their own hands and together reached out to the FBI's Detroit field office to report Tara Lee.
Days later, they were sitting with Special Agent Matt Sluss and Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Woodward. And that's how the three prongs of the investigation, the Facebook group, the lawyers, and the Department of Justice came together to stop Tara Lee. For three weeks in October, agents Matt Sluss and Mark Krieg conducted as many interviews with adoptive parents and birth mothers as possible.
The evidence piled up. Agent Sluss' butcher paper chart morphed into a huge digital spreadsheet. Cell by cell, it documented the traumatic stories of more than 150 couples in 24 states and dozens of birth mothers from Detroit. Many of these couples kept good records.
By early November, Agent Sluss and the U.S. Attorney's Office had enough evidence for a search warrant. On November 9th, multiple FBI agents drove to a middle-class neighborhood in New Haven, a semi-rural suburb north of Detroit, and parked their unmarked cars in front of Tara Lee's two-story house.
someone connected to the Facebook group, whose name remains private, had been tipped off about the raid. They parked out front too, their cell phone camera aimed at the door. Three, two, one. The agents got out and went in. She was there. As the FBI went in, the person secretly recording the raid from her car began posting snippets of video to the Facebook group. Word traveled fast.
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