Growing up in Brazil, Kat Torres was a shy kid who loved to learn the latest dance routines on TV. But a promising future as a model took a surprising turn. It led her to tabloid gossip columns, the glitz of Hollywood and claims of supernatural powers.If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, here are some resources:The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 988. The National Alliance on Mental Illness is available at 1-800-950-6264.If you or someone you know is a survivor of sexual assault, here are some resources: The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) survivor helpline is 1-800-656-4673. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center provides resources for sexual violence and prevention education. You can find them at nsvrc.org.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who is Cat Torres and what is her background?
From Wondery, I'm Chico Felitti, and this is Don't Cross Cat, episode three, The Voice. The Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte is not the kind of place that gets much attention from the gossip columns. It's a town north of Rio, surrounded by mountains. Its name literally translates to beautiful horizons. But for Julia, living there as an eight-year-old, life was mainly about two things.
Chapter 2: What was Cat Torres' childhood and early friendship like?
I used to do ballet, and after ballet class, I would come home and walk my little dog at the park.
Julia's not her real name, by the way. She didn't want to ruffle any feathers and asked to remain anonymous, so her words are spoken by an actor. One day, she saw a boy playing in the street with a girl she didn't recognize.
The girl was very thin and we both had short Chanel hair, but she had bangs framing her green eyes. Anyway, when I got close, my dog started to bark at them.
Julia noticed the boy got scared with the small barking dog, but the pretty green-eyed girl didn't. She was more interested in what Julia was wearing.
She liked my ballet outfits, my pointe shoes. She was, like, dazzled, you know? She loved all that stuff. So we said we would meet again at the park some other time, and that was it.
The green-eyed girl's name was Cat Torres.
She was one of my best friends. We were inseparable.
Even though they lived in the same neighborhood, Julia and Cat went to different schools. Cat attended public school, whereas Julia went to a fancy private school. But they would meet up every afternoon to play together. What they loved most was to dance. And it wasn't just ballet. This band, El Cha, had a famous routine that they used to do on Brazilian TV.
They had these tiny shorts on and little tops. And we used to learn the choreography and do the dance.
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Chapter 3: How did Cat Torres' family life affect her growing up?
My mom used to say that when Cat came over to our house, she barely heard her speak. And yeah, Cat was very closed off in front of others. Like when my mom made us dinner, Cat was always very quiet at the dinner table.
And when Julia visited Cat, she would notice how different things were there.
Kat's house was the most humble one in her block, like by far. There was only one bathroom and it was super tiny. The rooms were also very small. The room that Kat shared with her sister had two small beds, some shelves and a little TV.
Julia remembers Kat's mom as sweet and kind.
But she was also very, very strict. Like if Kat had to be home at 9 and it was like 9.01 and she wasn't home, her mom would call her house complaining that Kat hadn't left.
Her dad was different.
He was definitely drinking at work. And many times they found him passed out on the street.
Julia remembers that when Kat's dad was sober, he could be very affectionate to his daughter. It was when he drank that things got bad.
I knew he was an alcoholic. And at times we heard him fighting with her mom. And Kat told me that he sometimes hit her mom.
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Chapter 4: What happened to Cat Torres after she left home?
So she was getting a lot of catalogs and not a lot of high fashion, well-paying jobs. She wouldn't have as many castings, apparently, as the other girls.
But still, Kat wasn't struggling. She seemed to be making decent money. It didn't make much sense to Georgia until the day Kat started talking about her past. Her life in Rio after she left her parents' home.
What she told me was that she was very young, living in a favela in Rio, and she was very beautiful. And a man who was a lot older saw her in the favela and fell in love with her, and her family agreed. to give her away to this man and said that she ended up marrying him. And they moved to a very big house in Rio where she spent three or four years of her life living with him.
She said the man had given her money and bought her everything she always wanted. She had 12 members of staff working for her at the house. But even so, she wasn't happy.
She was a victim of domestic violence with him. And one day she decided that she needed to run away. So she didn't tell her family and she went to a Model A agency, managed to get a contract to Milan and she left only with the clothes in her body and she left all this very wealthy life behind and that was how she ended up in Milan.
While they lived in Italy, Georgia says that Kat appeared to be in touch with another older man.
And she used to say that he adopted her like a daughter. So this was something that I found strange because it's like you have this guy that treats you like a father and sends you money when you need.
Georgia has her own theory of what was going on. Kat's relationships with men had become transactional.
So I think now that this guy might have been her sugar daddy and he was helping sustain her lifestyle. I don't think she was doing prostitution, you know, but I think she had this weird relationship with these men.
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Chapter 5: How did Cat Torres’ modeling career in Milan unfold?
And the first thing that showed up was this article for a fashion blog saying something like Cat Torres, Brazilian model, blah, blah, blah. So I had to open it. And when the photo popped up, I saw this beautiful woman with blonde hair down to her butt. And I was like, damn, like she was a real model and stuff. So I was like, my God.
Julia got in touch.
We would talk on Facebook and message back and forth.
And as they caught up, Cat confided something she'd never told Julia before. What she said was the reason she had left home. The reason she changed so much. Cat said it all began when her dad went out of town for work. Her parents left her with friends and family for long periods of time. She said it was during those times that she went through some deeply distressing experiences.
She told me that she was sexually abused And that she would ask, like, beg for the love of God not to be left alone with these people again. But her parents would leave her anyway. She told them what was happening, but they never believed her.
Kat said she'd try to make people listen.
There was this one time she told me that she hated her parents and she tried to kill herself because nobody believed her.
Julia was shocked to hear Kat's story, but Kat seemed to kind of brush it off.
She said, oh, I've been through all these traumas, but I'm happy. I'm going to be happy. Things are going to work out. And she would also say things like, oh, these men, they just want to take advantage of me. They want to take advantage of my beauty, my body. So now I take advantage of them. They give me money and I don't let them touch me. Just like that.
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Chapter 6: What difficult experiences did Cat Torres reveal to her friend Julia?
What if your mind could trick your body into feeling sick? Or even worse. In Hysterical, I investigate the bizarre medical mystery that unfolds in a high school in upstate New York. It starts with one girl developing strange, violent symptoms. And then another. And then another. Rumors begin to swirl. Is it something in the water, inside the school, or is it all in their heads?
Hysterical is my search for answers, and along the way, I uncover surprising connections to unexplained incidents around the world, events that challenge everything we think we know about our bodies and our minds. Named Podcast of the Year at the Gambies, Hysterical is a mind-bending, unforgettable ride. Binge all episodes right now exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus.
Start your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
It was 2016, three years after that photo. Coburn Bell, a tall, square-jawed guy in his late 20s, was living in LA, working at a wealth management firm, when a friend of his got in touch. The friend had met this great Brazilian girl at a retreat in upstate New York. Her name was Kat.
I had never met a person like that before. Just the assertiveness and almost like being able to manifest immediately the future that she wanted for herself.
And a week later, Kat reached out to him.
I got a message from her because she didn't drive. She asked if I would drive her to the beach.
It was late, but Coburn was like, yeah, sure, why not?
So we went to the beach at night and there was just by happenstance, an incredible, beautiful meteor shower. I think she felt it was a universal sign. It was exciting for me. I mean, it was just an immediately, incredibly impassioned and passionate affair. It was literally in the stars. And that was, I think, when the relationship kind of just started.
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Chapter 7: What was the truth behind the Leonardo DiCaprio relationship rumors?
At least that was the impression she gave Coburn. But Kat wasn't going to completely reject the jet-set life. Around the time Kat and Colborne got married, Kat created an Instagram account. She posted videos. In a bikini, of course. But also footage of her twirling in front of a designer store on Rodeo Drive. Or posing at luxury hotel rooms. Or on the hood of a Ferrari.
In one of her Instagram posts, she was in a fancy hot tub with a caption that read, American Dream. The reality, though, was different. She didn't own a Ferrari. She was living in a regular apartment, no major luxuries.
And my piece was in trying to figure out how to take that perfect picture as quickly as possible. I was somebody that was very anti-social media, that really respected my own privacy, that never wanted to do anything like this. I mean, I had obligations to go, like, make content with her. That was part of the agreement for sure.
She was creating a fantasy. The perfect life she had always wanted. But this time, it was on social media.
It was a crash course in... how to create and manipulate and portray the reality of the situation into something that was idealistic, into kind of like the message that she wanted to share.
And it worked because her newly created Instagram soon reached 300,000 followers. But around this time, there was something else that was pushing Kat in a new direction. something that happened in a luxurious house up in the Hollywood Hills. I had the perfect bachelor pad with the swimming pool that you see in the movies.
The owner of the house asked us not to share his name, so we'll call him Jim, and his words are spoken by an actor. One day, a friend told him about Kat.
He says to me, we're going to come to your next ceremony. We just did a photo shoot together, and she wants to meet the T. And I said, okay.
By tea, he meant ayahuasca, the psychoactive drink held sacred by some indigenous groups in the Amazon. Each weekend, Jim invited a small circle of friends around to try it for themselves.
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Chapter 8: What path did Cat Torres choose after the tabloid fame?
It's a ceremony. It's a ritual. We sing predominantly in Portuguese, and we have these chants with drums.
Ayahuasca contains the psychedelic chemical DMT, which makes it illegal in the U.S.
When you open your eyes on ayahuasca, a dirty wall can look like a sacred painting made 10,000 years ago. And you look at it, and it's the most beautiful thing, and it's just a dirty wall.
When Kat arrived, she immediately connected with the group. She became a regular, sometimes even singing during the ceremony. Jim says she wasn't particularly good, but he let her do it anyway. A friend of Colborne called Ryder came to one of those ceremonies with Kat.
You step down into this living room that has this huge window that looks over all of L.A. And so it's in that living room area that the ceremonies happen.
At first, Ryder was skeptical. But as the group sang, he began to feel more and more comfortable.
I really felt like you were being held and guided and moved in the right way. So it brings up a lot of bad memories, experiences, whatever else. It was a pretty profound experience.
Then ayahuasca's other effects kicked in.
And then eventually you vomit. And through the vomiting, you purge all of those bad memories and bad energies. I could feel like everyone going through some shit.
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