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.
Trend
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
Episode five, The Last Adoption.
Teresa and Mike stood up, introduced themselves, and gave Stephanie a hug. Everyone, except Tara Lee, was nervous.
Stephanie and her partner sat next to each other.
Because there'd been so much confusion about Stephanie's due date, Teresa decided to ask the one person at the table who would know for sure. Stephanie said she wasn't due for a few more weeks.
Teresa and Mike smiled and nodded through the dinner, but a whole other conversation was happening in their heads. They realized that if Tara Lee really was running a scam, it was perfect. And she had them. She had them good.
When I started working on this podcast, I reached out to Stephanie through Teresa and Mike, who are now friends with her. But she declined to be interviewed. The day after the Mathinis had dinner with Stephanie and Tara Lee, Mike worked from their Airbnb. Teresa hung out with her sister, who was visiting. And it was way too cold to play golf.
Late that night, Stephanie and her partner ran into trouble. It was dark out and below freezing. Stephanie had driven her partner to a grocery store. She idled while he ran in. Then she passed out. A passerby found her slumped over the steering wheel and called 911. EMTs arrived and revived her, but her blood pressure was dangerously high.
Teresa told me, rather than take her to the hospital, the police arrived and took Stephanie and her partner home. Then they impounded her car because her insurance had lapsed. The next morning, Stephanie called Tara Lee and asked her for a ride to the hospital. Tara Lee called her an Uber.
When Stephanie arrived at Hutzel Women's Hospital in downtown, her doctor quickly diagnosed her with preeclampsia and decided to induce. Stephanie tried calling her partner, but he wouldn't answer. Amidst the chaos the night before, he'd left his cell phone in their impounded car It was October 25th, Teresa and Mike's third wedding anniversary.
They said Tara Lee wore a black Lululemon tracksuit, Prada reading glasses, a Rolex watch, and a large diamond ring. She also had diamonds painted on her nails. As Tara Lee dug into her lunch, she told them a story.
It seemed like every time someone else was in the spotlight, in this case, Stephanie, Tara Lee would try to redirect everyone's attention to herself. When she was done eating, they went up to labor and delivery.
Then, Tara Lee made a phone call to someone to vent about a set of adoptive parents. She called them APs. It sounded like a birth mother was wavering in her decision.
My biggest takeaway from 30 minutes of recordings that Teresa shared with me was that despite Tara Lee saying to someone on the phone that she protected her mothers till the ends of the earth, I didn't hear her give Stephanie any emotional support. Stephanie was in labor. All the attention should be on her.
She couldn't get hold of her partner, and although the Mathinis were adopting her baby, she'd only met them once. The person she knew best in the room was Tara Lee, who was supposed to be her doula. Even during the birth of a baby, Tara Lee stole the spotlight. Stephanie, who says almost nothing in these recordings, seems in the shadows, alone, almost as if she wasn't there.
As the Matheny sat anxiously in the room, trying not to say the wrong thing, Teresa said Tara Lee leaned over to her.
Teresa just nodded. The two attorneys, Talia and Tanya, had told the Mathenys not to give Tara Lee any more money. Hours passed. Around 7 p.m., Tara Lee said Stephanie probably wouldn't deliver until the middle of the night. She encouraged them to go get some sleep and promised she'd call when Stephanie was close. Mike and Teresa went to a nearby restaurant to wait it out.
And it was a good thing they didn't go back to their Airbnb to take a nap. Because an hour later, Tara Lee texted to say it was happening. The Mathinis paid their bill and rushed back to the hospital. They ran up to the delivery room and found Stephanie sobbing. He'd been born. They'd missed it. The birth father was on his way. And you don't see Tara empathizing with the birth mother?
They went into the NICU and for the first time saw their son.
Mike reached in and touched him.
Their son's Ballard score was just 34 weeks, meaning Stephanie was right about her due date. She delivered early. The Mathinis didn't want to leave their son alone. They worried that if they stepped away, something might happen. They told me they just had a gut feeling about it.
Showing 141–160 of 265 · page 8 of 14
← Previous
Next →