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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Oh, we were 100% side Tara. They felt this way even after Courtney and the Facebook group tried to get them to see the truth. Even after the FBI raided Tara Lee's house. Even after Heather Catalo's news reports alleging Tara Lee was a fraudster. And even after they'd been through three failed adoptions with Tara Lee.
Because every night they put their adopted son to bed was a reminder of what Tara Lee had done for them in the beginning. Their gratitude for that successful adoption blinded them to her manipulations. Adam and Kyle lived just 30 minutes away from Tara Lee and had become very close friends.
As other couples bonded over the shared trauma of being defrauded by Tara Lee, Adam and Kyle bonded with Tara Lee over her trauma of being investigated.
It would take a lot of time for them to see past what they wanted to believe. It would take reading her indictment to realize they weren't all that different from the other couples she'd defrauded. The couples they thought were the enemy. to realize they'd been duped.
The dupe began in 2017. Adam and Kyle had just gotten married. Kyle had gone to middle school with Tara Lee and heard she facilitated adoptions. They hadn't talked in years, but he reached out to her. Weeks later, Tara Lee matched them with a 22-year-old birth mother who was pregnant with a boy. She was homeless, staying on people's couches, and living out of her car.
They helped her move into a rental house, they got her furniture, and they sent Tara Lee $14,000. That was a lot of money for them. Kyle works in IT. Adam had a job at a local bank. They put some of it on their credit cards. And it worked out. Adam and Kyle were in the delivery room when their son was born, and they had a close relationship with their birth mother.
Adam lives in the semi-rural plains north of Detroit. I met him at a recording studio above a Walgreens near his house. He drove there in an old pickup truck after dropping his son off at school. Adam's a visual artist, like his mom. He's around 40, kind, and outgoing. He had a coffee from Tim Hortons, the Canadian Starbucks.
Adam explained to me how, after their successful adoption, he and Kyle became close with Tara Lee. They broke bread with her husband and children. Her oldest daughter babysat for them. Her husband fixed their HVAC. And they talked and texted with her almost every day, the way you do with your closest friends.
Then, in early 2018, Tara Lee told Adam and Kyle that their son's birth mother was pregnant again.
But Tara Lee didn't like that answer. She flashed a side of herself that they hadn't seen before and questioned their love for their son.
They looked the other way and put it on credit and got excited again. And they broke the great news to their family. It was all going well until the delivery, when, to their surprise, Tara Lee said the birth mother had changed her mind.
She matched them again. They put $9,000 more on their credit card to cover the woman's living expenses. But when they found evidence that the birth mother was using drugs during her pregnancy, they backed out of the match. Tara Lee said any money left over would be rolled over to the next match. They recommitted. The next match happened fast. The birth mother had been through an adoption before.
She knew the steps, and she was due soon. Adam and Kyle felt good about it. A few weeks later, though, Tara Lee told them that the woman had stopped returning her calls. So Kyle, the IT whiz and armchair sleuth, got on Facebook. And he found a profile of the family who'd adopted the woman's previous baby. And their posts showed them celebrating the adoption of her next baby.
The birth mom had even liked the posts. Kyle sent the family a message. Hey, not sure if you know what's going on, but we were under the impression that we were adopting this baby. He got a response from the birth mother's boyfriend. Back off. This baby's not yours. I don't know who you are or what you're doing. When Adam and Kyle told Tara Lee this, she expressed shock and outrage.
But the match failed. Adam and Kyle were emotionally and financially exhausted. Days later, the FBI raided Tara Lee's house. When Adam and Kyle found out about it, they called her. And despite all the trauma they'd been through with three failed matches in a row, they were still on side Tara. And they listened as Tara Lee explained to them what, in her mind, was really going on.
Tara Lee asked Adam to write her a letter of support. He did, and he focused entirely on their successful adoption, leaving out the three successive failures. He wrote, Tara was upfront, honest, and trustworthy with every penny that she spent to help our birth mother.
For weeks, WXYZ Channel 7 aired Heather Catalo's investigative reports about Tara Lee, including this one about a birth mother named Mariah.
Every time one of Heather Catalo's news reports came out, Adam said, Tara Lee would call them and rant. And then, one night in December, they got home from work and found a note from Heather Catalo taped to their door. It terrified them. Heather was the enemy, and they did not want to talk to the enemy. They circled the wagons.
And then, a few nights before Christmas 2018, Tara Lee called them and sounded excited.
After New Year's, Tara Lee called them with the opposite message.
Showing 101–120 of 265 · page 6 of 14
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