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Back in the fall of 2018, I found out that a friend of mine had duped me and several others into believing that she was dying from cancer. It was profoundly destabilizing to be betrayed like that and I went in search of people to speak to who might understand what I was going through. To that end, my good friend Lilit Marcus, CNN Travel writer/editor extraordinaire, introduced me to author Andrea Dunlop. The introductory email that Lilit wrote had the subject line “Munchausen connections,” which was ridiculous but also fitting since that was what we were going to discuss.
According to my pandemic ravaged memory, Dunlop and I spoke on the phone before eventually meeting up at a bar in Manhattan when she was in town from Seattle, where she lives. At the time, Dunlop’s third novel, We Came Here to Forget, that drew from her family’s experience of dealing with Munchausen by proxy, had recently been published. (My very long essay about my experiences, of which Dunlop was an early reader, was published at Longreads in January 2020. I also wrote a newsletter about the process of writing the piece around the same time.)
Munchausen by proxy is a disorder in which a person, usually a caregiver (and usually a woman), fabricates, exaggerates, and/or induces illness in another—typically a child—for the purpose of emotional gratification. (In the DSM, it’s called “Factitious disorder imposed on another.”) Dunlop’s older sister was twice investigated over suspicions of abuse brought by her children’s doctors. (It’s important to note that Dunlop’s sister wasn’t charged with a crime in either investigation.) The ordeal tore Dunlop’s family apart, and she and her parents have been estranged from her sister for a decade.
Dunlop has taken her personal experience and brought it to Nobody Should Believe Me, a new podcast series that just wrapped its first season today. (I highly recommend you download and binge all eight episodes for the long Thanksgiving travel slog.) In it, Dunlop speaks to everyone in the blast zone of a Munchausen by proxy case—spouses of the accused, other family members, victims of the abuse, detectives, psychologists, and, in one instance, a perpetrator. (Since very few perpetrators ever own up to their behaviors, it can be quite difficult to speak with them plainly about it.) Having consumed much of of the Munchausen content out there and finding much of it gripping if sensationalized, I appreciated how nuanced this podcast series is and how empathetic Dunlop is towards all involved without ever losing sight of the fact that Munchausen by proxy can result in serious child abuse that can have serious consequences for the victims that last a lifetime. This is something that I feel that sometimes gets lost in the sensational stories that get written about the disorder.
I reached out to Dunlop about the series and she graciously agreed to answer questions via email. The following Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dvora Meyers: You’ve explored your family’s experience with a Munchausen by proxy investigation in your fiction. What made you decide to look at it through a nonfiction lens in podcast form?
Andrea Dunlop: I was working on another podcast project with LARJ media and my producer Tina Nole just as I was really getting to know my colleagues from the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s Munchausen by Proxy Committee (APSAC) back in 2020. I really fell in love with podcasting right as I was hearing all of these incredibly compelling stories about MBP and thought it would be a good for a true crime podcast, and a way to raise awareness about the topic. I pitched it to my producer and we dove in really having no idea what we were signing ourselves up for: a project that took us out in the field in three different states interviewing all of these different people about the most difficult experience of their lives.
DM: How did you find the people and stories you’ve highlighted on Nobody Should Believe Me? How or why did you end up choosing these specific stories to feature?
AD: Most of the people we spoke to throughout the season were involved with cases Detective Mike Weber—a member of the APSAC committee who is the top law enforcement expert on this form of abuse—worked on. Hope Ybarra’s case in particular felt so fascinating and familiar to me, I basically started reaching out to her family on social media and they were all unbelievably generous in agreeing to talk to me at a point where we didn’t even know exactly what the show would be yet.
[Edit note: The podcast goes into the case of Hope Ybarra, a mother who was imprisoned for medically abusing her child.]
DM: As someone who has her own experience dealing with a person who lied about having cancer, I know I’ve spent far too much time trying to get inside the head of the person who deceives and manipulates their friends and family the way I had been. It’s impossible not to want to try to understand people who behave like this. But ultimately, these efforts always seem to fall short, at least for me. I will never be able to fully understand what makes people lie and manipulate to this degree. Have you found yourself to be similarly preoccupied? Have you been able to explain, at least to yourself, what’s underneath these kinds of behaviors?
AD: It is very hard to understand this behavior and I’ve found that these questions really haunt everyone who’s been through one of these situations. This project was really about me trying to find answers and I think I’ve come a long way in understanding why someone would do this, in that it seems to provide an intrinsic emotional reward that they can’t get any other way. One of the biggest challenges is that people who engage in this behavior almost never take accountability for their actions, making it hard to get insights from them. Talking to Hope certainly helped give me some insights into how desperately alone someone would have to feel to start doing something so destructive. It can be very hard to empathize with this behavior, but I think I’ve gotten to the place where I can see the humanity of the person underneath and I think that’s an important piece of things for me. I felt a huge weight lift off of me after talking to Hope.
DM: I know that when I first realized—with the help of a friend pointing it out to me—that “Chaya” had been lying about having cancer (among other things), I felt really dumb and foolish. In hindsight, the things that hadn’t ever seemed to add up were obviously lies and I felt like I should’ve spotted them sooner. I remember feeling that I couldn’t trust my own judgment. How did you feel when the investigation into your sister started?
AD: It was the worst moment of my life. She had lied to me about her own health issues before—including a pregnancy—and I shared those same feelings you describe of feeling foolish and not being able to trust my judgment. But when the first investigation into her for abuse started, my fear about the situation really drowned out everything else. I knew that if I was honest about those fears with her, my relationship with her wouldn’t recover and I was right about that. It felt like the end of my life as I knew it; it was the kind of moment that divides your life into “before’ and “after” in a very dramatic way. My family was blown up over it.
DM: The focus of the series seems to be primarily on those who have been harmed by the lying and abuse. Why did you choose to make the perspective of the victims to be the main focus of the series?
AD: Our goal was to humanize everyone involved with these cases, so not only the family members and survivors but also the doctors who end up getting used as a tool to harm children and what that’s like for them. And we also talked to Hope to get her perspective and devoted an episode to what treatment for perpetrators could look like. Obviously, the victims should always be top of mind, but I wanted people to understand what a huge blast zone these cases have, how many people’s lives get turned upside down by the revelations of abuse. These cases really rock—and sometimes divide—entire communities.
DM: Until I listened to the bonus episode, I had forgotten that I had been the one to connect you to Dr. Marc Feldman, the factitious disorder expert who I consulted for my own story. (I’m fairly certain I’m the unnamed New York reporter/writer that both of you refer to.) You described the relief you felt when you first spoke with him—that you didn’t need to explain yourself cause he already knew, of feeling validated. I remember feeling that way when I first got him on the phone to interview him for my story. Up until reaching out to him for the article, I had either discussed the case with friends who were directly impacted by “Chaya” or told the story to other friends who were curious. In the former situation, my friends were trying to understand what happened and in the latter, it felt like I was “performing” what had happened for an audience. I know this was quite a long winded intro into a question, but why do you think you needed to talk about this with someone like Dr. Feldman?
[Edit note: The bonus episode I’m referring to is up on the podcast’s Patreon page.]
AD: Yes, you are indeed the journalist and I’m so grateful to you for introducing us. That introduction really changed my life! I really relate to what you said about how exhausting it can be to try to explain all of this. People are really upset and horrified by these stories, so it can be a lot of emotional work to actually get someone through listening to it. Talking to Marc was so incredibly validating because for the first time, I was talking about something that was a recognizable pattern, not a one-off crazy story.
DM: After I published my essay in the beginning of 2020, I got a lot of emails from people who have had similar experiences. And even now, nearly two years later, I still get the occasional email from a person who stumbled upon my piece when they needed to read it. Have you also heard from readers who have shared their experiences with you?
AD: Oh gosh, yes. I came to a friend’s book club meeting in my hometown and I ended up sitting next to someone who was a survivor. It was really emotional. I thought it was a crazy coincidence but with the book and now the podcast, I’ve heard from enough people that I don’t think there’s any way that this is as rare as most people think. That is also the opinion also of all of the experts I spoke to for the show. It’s rare that offenders are convicted, but it’s not rare that the abuse happens.
DM: Can you tell me a bit more about your project with Dr. Marc Feldman? What need/void is this work attempting to fill?
AD: Dr. Feldman has done incredible research on the subject and has been a groundbreaking thinker on factitious disorders. He’s also one of the only experts that’s made himself accessible to the media and has done a lot of work to help spread good information both with his books and in hundreds of interviews. He and I serve on the APSAC committee together and worked to put all of those amazing resources online on MunchausenSupport.com – that is also now a 501c3 that supports professional trainings and survivor resources; I’m the founder of that organization and Marc is on my board.
DM: You and I both have personal experience dealing with people suspected of having factitious disorders but even before I had this experience, I was fascinated by these stories and couldn’t get enough of them. What do you think draws people to these stories? What are people getting out of them?
[Disclaimer: I don’t know my ex-friend’s diagnosis and am certainly not diagnosing her here.]
AD: I have many theories on this! For one thing, the vast majority of the perpetrators are women and I think we’re very fascinated by women con artists and criminals—because it challenges our (sexist) ideas of what women are, especially if we’re talking about mothers. These stories are also just truly wild in the details and take on a “stranger than fiction” quality. I think we also gravitate to them for the same reason people are into serial killer stories; it is morbidly fascinating to watch someone just completely go against social norms. I think people also like to tell themselves that they’d catch on faster than they would. I really believe anyone can be pulled in by a con under the right circumstances.
DM: Over the past several years, Munchausen by proxy has been featured in a lot of films and TV shows. How well do you think the topic and disorder has been handled?
AD: Oof, how much time do you have? On the one hand, I think it’s good if there’s any conversation on the topic happening and if people’s curiosity gets piqued, that could hopefully lead them to learn more about it. But that said, I think most of the big projects like The Act and Sharp Objects really leaned into the grisly parts without much nuance. I actually didn’t have so much of a problem with The Act as I did with some of the interviews that its big star, Patricia Arquette did around the show. She mentioned that she captured the character’s motivation by thinking about how she sometimes gets overly anxious about her own kids, which is a truly uninformed and disastrous thing to say about an MBP perpetrator, as this abuse is characterized by intentional deception, not delusion or anxiety. It was frustrating because that show introduced so many people to the topic and I don’t know the production was handled with much care. I did think Joey King’s performance was very good. The HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest did a much better job of handling the topic and that particular story, they even had the good sense to interview Marc Feldman!
DM: What do you hope listeners will take away from listening to the series?
AD: My biggest hope is that people understand that this abuse is not actually rare, and that our lack of awareness around it is leaving children vulnerable and survivors isolated. MBP is believed to be the deadliest form of child abuse, and right now the vast majority of victims are left with their abusers. The media often only pays attention when the child dies (or murders her mother in the case of Gypsy Blanchard), and that isn’t how it should be. It’s a difficult topic but I think we created something that is engaging and ultimately hopeful. And I hope it will make people who’ve been through it feel less alone.