Tag: Investigation Discovery

Review: ‘Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,’ starring Sherri Papini, Richard Graeff, Loretta Graeff, Suzanne Papini, Denise Farmer, Stephen Diggs and Veronica Alegria

May 25, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie”

Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer

Culture Representation: The four-episode documentary series “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few people of color) discussing the case of Sherri Papini, who claimed to be kidnapped from her home city of Redding, California, for 22 days in November 2016, and was convicted in 2022 of faking the kidnapping.

Culture Clash: Sherri Papini, who is interviewed extensively in the documentary, has changed her story again and says that she was kidnapped and abused by her ex-boyfriend James Reyes during her 2016 disappearance.

Culture Audience: “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about fraud and people who went missing, but there is something distasteful about giving a convicted fraudster a platform to tell more questionable stories.

Whether or not you believe Sherri Papini—the California woman who’s told contradictory stories about her 22-day disappearance that happened in 2016—there’s no doubt that “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” can be perceived as an attempt to repair her tarnished reputation and to rewrite a closed case. This four-episode docuseries is more exploitative than investigative. It’s so tacky to have convicted fraudster Sherri Papini recreate her controversial disappearance for the cameras. The documentary also fails to ask some questions that need answers.

Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer, “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” tries to give the impression that it has journalistic integrity by interviewing a variety of people: those who support Sherri Papini, those who don’t support her, and those who want to give the appearance of being neutral. This documentary also has the first extensive interviews that Papini has given since she was released from prison in 2023. The year 2023 was also the year that the divorce of Sherri Papini and her ex-husband Keith Papini became final. In addition to having original footage that was filmed specifically for the documentary, “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” has archival footage (such as TV news reports and audio/video police interviews), much of which has been seen in other documentaries and news reports about the Sherri Papini case.

Any attempt that “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” might have made to have journalistic integrity is ruined when it’s revealed that Rittenmeyer and the other people involved in making this documentary came up with idea for Sherri to recreate on camera the moment that Sherri says she was kidnapped, despite Sherri’s therapist warning that this recreation was not a good idea. Sherri says in the documentary that she doesn’t remember what happened when she was in the vehicle that took her to the house where she stayed during the disappearance. The recreation was supposedly intended to help Sherri remember what happened.

However, Sherri can only recreate jogging on the road where she was last seen before she disappeared. When the recreated “kidnapping” car drives up, she starts crying on camera and says she can’t go through with getting near the car. At one point, she can’t even look at the car. While Sherri shows obvious signs of emotional distress (whether it’s real or not), Rittenmeyer can be heard off camera callously and repeatedly telling Sherri to look at the camera. This tasteless stunt is not responsible documentary filmmaking. It’s the type of bottom-of-the-barrel trashy fakery that many reality shows do in pathetic attempts to get ratings.

Let’s be honest here: What was supposed to happen for this on-camera recreation when that vehicle drove up on the road and stopped neared Sherri? The documentarians couldn’t have someone jump out of the car and “kidnap” Sherri, because that would be a contradiction to what law enforcement and Sherri’s on-the-record criminal conviction say really happened. On the flip side, Sherri wasn’t going to recreate willingly going into the car because she repeatedly says in the documentary that she can’t remember how she got into the car that took her away. Simply put: This recreation “experiment” was an exploitative and dismal failure.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” also has Sherri do a lie detector test, which gets mixed results for her. The lie detector test is a less-exploitative part of the documentary, but it still comes across as something you’d see on a low-level reality show. Sherri makes shifty excuses when it’s revealed which parts of the lie detector test found her to be deceptive.

First, some background information on the case: In 2022, Sherri Papini was arrested for faking her 2016 kidnapping. Investigators say that Sherri was the master planner for this phony kidnapping, and she lied about it to federal investigators, which is a felony. In 2022, she confessed to law enforcement that she planned the fake kidnapping, and she was the one who decided when she wanted to go home. She pled guilty to this hoax and was convicted of crimes related to this hoax. Her ex-husband Keith Papini gave his side of the story in the 2024 Hulu docuseries “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini.”

Sherri (who was born on June 11, 1982) and Keith (who was born on March 25, 1982) got married in 2009. Their son Tyler was born in 2012. Their daughter Violet was born in 2014. The family seemed to have an idyllic middle-class life in Redding, California. Keith was born and raised in Redding, which is in Shasta County. Sherri was also born and raised in Shasta County. Several people who knew homemaker Sherri described her as a “supermom.”

On November 2, 2016, Sherri disappeared from Redding. On that day, she had planned to go jogging while her two kids were at a daycare center, and her then-husband Keith was at work. When Keith arrived home, he couldn’t find Sherri, but he used the Find My Phone app to find her cell phone, which was abandoned in an area about a mile from where the couple lived. Keith immediately reported Sherri’s disappearance to authorities. His 911 call is included in the documentary.

Sherri’s disappearance made international news. Although investigators received many tips, none of them led to finding Sherri. When Sherri was missing, some people in the general public speculated that Keith could’ve been involved in abducting, even though Keith had an alibi (he was at work), and investigators ruled him out as a possible suspect.

On November 24, 2016 (which was Thanksgiving Day), Sherri was found partially bound by chains, outdoors in Yolo County, California, about 150 miles south of Redding. She claimed that two Spanish-speaking Latina strangers kidnapped her and held her captive for the past 22 days, but the two so-called kidnapper women decided to let her go. Sherri had several bruises and burns on her body, she was branded with letters on her right shoulder, and she was emaciated.

Sherri could not describe the vehicle that was used to transport her because she claimed that she could not remember anything about the vehicle. She described the Latina kidnappers as one who was young and one who was middle-aged. Sherri said she couldn’t see their entire faces because she claimed that she only saw the two women wearing bandanas covering the lower halves of their faces, which is also the description that she gave to a police sketch artist.

Police could not find the women whom Sherri described as her kidnappers. The FBI was also involved in the investigation. Four years later, in 2020, there was a major break in the case: DNA that was found in Sherri’s underwear that she wore during her so-called kidnapping was traced back to James Reyes, her ex-fiancé who lived in Costa Mesa, California, which is about 585 miles south of Redding.

When interrogated by investigators, Reyes at first denied anything do with Sherri’s disappearance. But then, he confessed that Sherri had asked him to pick her up in his car at a designated meeting place and hide her in his house for the period of time that Sherri went missing. Reyes said that he and Sherri used pre-paid “burner” phones to secretly communicate with each other before the disappearance, which is why Keith didn’t know that Sherri had been contacting Reyes.

Sherri and Reyes have reportedly said in separate law enforcement interviews that their relationship when Sherri and Keith were married was an emotional affair, not a sexual affair. Sherri has also denied speculation and gossip that she had sexual affairs with other men when she was married to Keith. She will only admit that during her marriage to Keith, she would flirt and get emotionally involved with other men, mostly through online communication.

According to Reyes, he agreed to the plan to help Sherri go into hiding because Sherri told him that Keith was abusing her, and she wanted to get away from Keith for a while. Reyes said that Sherri asked him to use a brand on her and cause many of the injuries that were found on her body. Reyes also claimed that some of Sherri’s injuries were deliberately self-inflicted, which is an allegation that Sherri continues to deny. Reyes was not charged with any crimes in this case and so far has not given any media interviews. There has been no evidence that Keith physically abused Sherri. Keith has also not been charged with any crimes in this case.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” shows footage of an unidentified private investigator (hired by the documentarians) ambushing Reyes in November 2024, at a house in Nogales, Arizona, where Reyes says he’s helping take care of his grandfather. Reyes is heard but not seen on camera. Reyes politely declines to answer any questions about Sherri and says repeatedly that he’s going to have to contact his lawyer in California.

In 2022, Sherri was arrested for lying to federal agents and committing mail fraud because she collected Social Security disability benefits as a result of reporting that she was an injured kidnapping victim. The case never went to trial because in 2022, Sherri eventually entered a plea deal. She pled guilty to one count of making false statements and one count of mail fraud. As part of the deal, she confessed to masterminding the kidnapping hoax.

Keith filed for divorce after Sherri’s guilty plea. He got full custody of their two children. Sherri was sentenced to 18 months in prison and served 10 months before getting an early release in August 2023. She was also ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution for the costs of the investigation and for the money that she got from disability benefits and the therapy she got that was funded by the California Victim Compensation Board.

All of this has been widely reported already. But now, Sherri wants to change the story about her 2016 disappearance again. In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” she claims that Reyes really did kidnap and physically abuse her during the period of time in 2016 when she disappeared. She now vehemently denies that any of it was her idea.

Sherri also says that she was pressured by William “Bill” Portanova, her defense attorney at the time, to admit that she came up with the idea for the hoax as part of the plea deal. According to Sherri, Portanova said that if she didn’t admit to masterminding the hoax in the plea deal, then she would be facing additional charges. Portanova is interviewed in the documentary, and he denies telling Sherri to lie about masterminding the hoax. He also says that Sherri would still be facing charges of lying to federal agents, regardless if her physical injuries were self-inflicted or inflicted by Reyes.

In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” Sherri’s story is that she arranged to meet with Reyes and misled him to believe she wanted to run away with him, but he took things too far and kidnapped her. Sherri says she lied about two Latina women kidnapping her because she was scared of Reyes and what he might do to her if she told authorities that he kidnapped her. She also repeats her previous accusations that Keith was emotionally abusive to her during their marriage. The documentary has disclaimers that Reyes and Keith have denied all of Sherri’s accusations.

The way Sherri acts in this documentary ranges from emotionally guarded to emotionally messy. She sometimes acts like a vulnerable victim and other times acts like an angry person who’s out for revenge. If she did this documentary to clean up her image, this attempt is a failure because she’s too contradictory in presenting who she really is.

Whenever director Rittenmeyer (who is not seen on camera but can be heard asking questions) confronts Sherri about Sherri’s proven lies, Sherri gets very defensive and snaps in response by saying that everyone is guilty of lying. Sherri’s lack of self-awareness is on full display. Yes, everyone is guilty of telling lies. But Sherri wants to ignore the fact that most people don’t fake their own kidnapping and most people don’t commit the felony crimes that landed Sherri in prison.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” has four episodes called “chapters” but they all essentially repeat the same pattern: Facts of the case are presented. Sherri disputes almost all the facts and tells another version of the story. People who are interviewed offer their own opinions.

Chapter 1 is titled “Exodus” and does a summary of the case, with Sherri’s added comments about why her story has changed. Chapter 2 is titled “I Am a Liar” and has some psychoanalysis of what’s going on with Sherri. Chapter 3 is titled “Multiple Truths” and shows the documentary’s aborted recreation of Sherri’s November 2016 disappearance. Chapter 4 is titled “It’s Complicated” and features the lie detector test.

In the beginning of the documentary, Sherri is asked why she wanted to be in this documentary. She giggles nervously before she comments solemnly: “The story that the world thinks they know is that I’m a master manipulator who’s fooled everyone.”

Sherri then waves her hand like she’s waving a wand. “That’s my magic wand,” she giggles again. “Sorry. I’m going to do ridiculous things because some of this is ridiculous.” (She’s right about that.) Sherri continues, “The Sherri Papini that’s out there is not me. It’s just this version of me that has been created to fit the narrative for the media’s version of what happened.”

Denise Farmer, who was the FBI’s lead investigator of the Sherri Papini case in 2016, is the only person interviewed in this documentary who was also interviewed in “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini.” Farmer, who is now retired from the FBI, is more candid in “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” when it comes to voicing her thoughts on how she was suspicious of the kidnapping claims from the beginning.

According to Farmer, one of the “red flags” was that Sherri’s abandoned phone had its headphone wires wrapped in a way that looked staged, not like someone had dropped it during a kidnapping. Farmer says that she thought Keith was very image-conscious and he wasn’t a complete ally to law enforcement. She comments that Keith often got in the way of the investigation, but she doesn’t go into specifics.

Peter French, another retired FBI agent, is also interviewed in the documentary, but he says he never worked on the Sherri Papini case and can only speak about FBI protocol. Also interviewed is assistant U.S. attorney Veronica Alegria, who was the lead prosecutor on the Sherri Papini case. Alegria doesn’t have anything new to add that isn’t already on public record.

Keith’s sister Suzanne Papini is another person in the documentary who echoes the description of Keith being image-conscious. Suzanne says that when Keith and Sherri were married, he was caught up in the idea of having a perfect wife, which was an unattainable standard. After Sherri was released on bail in 2022, Sherri and Suzanne lived together. Suzanne is one of Sherri’s supporters and says she has a sibling-like relationship with Sherri that Suzanne doesn’t have with Keith. However, the documentary doesn’t explain why Keith and Suzanne are apparently estranged.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” also has interviews with Sherri’s parents Richard Graeff and Loretta Graeff, who have reconciled with Sherri after a period of estrangement. For a while, Sherri lived with her parents after she got out of prison in 2023. Loretta and Suzanne have different opinions of Sherri’s 22-day disappearance. Loretta says emphatically, “It wasn’t a kidnapping.” Suzanne says she believes Sherri’s latest version of the story that it was a date that turned into a kidnapping.

What does it say about Sherri that her own mother doesn’t believe Sherri’s kidnapping story? Sherri is never asked about her mother’s opinion in the documentary. That’s not the only thing the documentary fails to ask.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” irresponsibly doesn’t ask Sherri’s parents about allegations that the parents raised Sherri and her sister Sheila Koester in an abusive household. Sherri’s childhood friend Jennifer Harrison and Koester both made these allegations in “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini,” a documentary that is mentioned several times in “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie.” Harrison said she personally witnessed Sherri’s mother physically assault Sherri when Sherri was a child.

In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” the only abuse from her childhood that Sherri and her parents mention (but don’t go into too many details about) is Sherri’s allegation that she was sexually abused by someone who was not either of her parents. Sherri and her parents do not identify who this alleged abuser is but Sherri’s father says that they know the abuse happened because the abuser was caught in the act. Sherri’s parents say that this sexual abuse was not talked about in the family because they found it difficult to discuss.

Sherri becomes infuriated when she is asked about her ex-husband Keith’s allegations in “Perfect Wife” that Sherri made their kids wear rags of soaked with alcohol and placed in Ziploc bags around the kids’ necks. Sherri’s version of the story is that the kids wore “cotton balls” soaked with “essential oils.” She also says that Child Protective Services investigated these allegations in 2022, and they found no evidence of abuse, which is why Sherri says that Keith should’ve never brought up these accusations again in the “Perfect Wife” documentary. There’s also a self-made video (apparently filmed shortly after Sherri watched the “Perfect Wife” documentary) of an angry Sherri saying that she just mailed a cease-and-desist letter to Keith to stop him from further making this accusation.

Sherri’s mental health is discussed mostly by her therapist Dr. Stephen “Steve” Diggs, a licensed psychologist. Diggs and Sherri say that she has successfully undergone eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy as treatment for her mental health issues. Diggs says that Sherri is a survivor of major trauma. He has diagnosed Sherri with having a self-defeating personality disorder. He also says that her personality is histrionic, not narcissistic.

Diggs comments on Sherri: “I absolutely believe she was abducted. She is now—most of the time—quite honest. She has now stopped telling big lies.” Diggs says he believes Sherri’s most recent version of her disappearance story that says Keith was abusive to her, and she asked Reyes for help in getting away from Keith, but Reyes ended up kidnapping her. Sherri says she believes Reyes let her go because she convinced him that she wouldn’t tell people that he was her kidnapper.

Someone else in the documentary who speaks up in support of Sherri is Mo De La Mora, who spent time in prison with Sherri and describes herself as Sherri’s friend. De La Mora (who identifies as Mexican American) says that Sherri got a lot of hostility from other prisoners—especially Latina prisoners—because of the lie Sherri told about two Latina women kidnapping Sherri. De La Mora comments with awe that Sherri was able to win over many of the prisoners, including herself, after Sherri explained her side of the story.

Van Kinney and Chase O. Kinney—a father-and-daughter attorney team who represented Sherri in her divorce from Keith—also express their support for Sherri in the documentary. Chase takes a moment to vape on camera before she does her documentary interview. Whatever was in her vape pen is not mentioned, but Chase looks very stimulated in her interview. Chase says she believes Sherri’s kidnapping story because Chase says Chase was kidnapped and raped by five male strangers in 2006 when she was partying on a boat.

Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist who says in the documentary that she has never met Sherri, gives the most pointed comments about the ethics of this documentary and Sherri’s changing stories: “I’ve heard so many different versions of this story, I struggle with what to believe.” In another part of the documentary, Durvasula adds, “Can a person fake it? Sure, they can. A person can fake anything. But that’s not where a psychologist is going to start this journey with someone. Our first duty is to believe. It’s not to doubt. We are not detectives. We are mental health practitioners. We are healers. And in a trauma-informed model, we believe.”

Durvasula speaks directly to Rittenmeyer on the approach that this documentary is taking to showcase someone with mental health issues and who has admitted to telling numerous lies that are crimes: “It’s such a tough line for you to skirt between journalism and compassion, being trauma-informed and, frankly, ego in not wanting to look stupid—because that’s really what this comes down to. And I can say this to you as a psychologist: You can’t win.”

Sherri gives a glimpse of her living situation by saying she’s staying at the house of “a friend,” who let her live at the house because it had been unoccupied. She shows her home office where she says she likes to make arts and crafts. Sherri also says she used to do branding of letters in her arts and crafts, but now she no longer uses a branding tool because it reminds her of the branding that Reyes did to her. She still has the branding scar on her shoulder.

In the documentary, Sherri makes a quick apology for the harm she caused with her lies, but most of her energy in the documentary is spent trying to convince whoever’s watching that she’s telling the truth this time, and she wants to prove that she is misunderstood. She expresses sadness about having limited supervised visits with her children (she can also talk to them on the phone once a week), but she mostly talks about her kids in the context of how it hurts her that she can’t see her kids as often as she wants, and not how her kids must be hurting from the harm that she caused. The documentary has a video clip of one of these phone conversations—the kids’ voices are not heard, to respect their privacy—and when Sherri hangs up after the conversation ends, she lets out an anguished scream.

Sherri becomes furious when she rants about Keith allowing the children to be filmed in the “Perfect Wife” documentary. However, she lacks the decency and remorse to admit that whatever she did to end up in prison caused much more damage to her children than the children being shown in a documentary for a few minutes. And let’s not forget that documentaries about Sherri Papini aren’t about what a great parent she thinks she is. These documentaries are about the crimes she committed that got her sent to prison and brought shame that her children have to live with for the rest of their lives.

Brett Bartlett is the polygraph examiner who administers the polygraph test on Sherri. He asked her specific questions about her disappearance and how much of it she planned. This review won’t detail all the results of the polygraph test except to say that Sherri failed the test questions where she denied knowing in advance that she was going to meet Reyes on November 2, 2016. Barlett shares his opinion on Sherri by saying she can be both a liar and a victim.

A very telling part of the documentary happens when Rittenmeyer confronts Sherri about Sherri’s stating over the years that she used what Reyes’ mother looks like to describe one of the fabricated Latina “kidnappers.” When Rittenmeyer says that Reyes’ mother is actually of Irish (white) heritage, Sherri’s eyes turn into a cold stare, and Sherri’s attitude becomes rude and abrupt. Sherri dismissively says that she only met Reyes’ mother once or twice, and she doesn’t “give a fuck” what his mother’s real ethnicity is. It’s a moment when Sherri’s “poor innocent me” mask falls off, and she turns into an unrepentant, foul-mouthed fraudster caught in another lie.

At the end of the documentary, Sherri is playing the vulnerable victim again and asks Rittenmeyer in a worried tone: “Do you think this film will do more harm than good for me?” If Rittenmeyer gave an answer, it’s not shown in the documentary, which lets the question remain unanswered. However, based on the exploitative nature of “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” and Sherri continuing to contradict herself on many embarrassing levels, there are no real winners here.

Investigation Discovery will premiere “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” on May 26, 2025.

Review: ‘American Monster: Abuse of Power,’ a true crime documentary series about authority figures who became criminals

May 25, 2025

by Carla Hay

“American Monster: Abuse of Power” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“American Monster: Abuse of Power”

Culture Representation: The true crime documentary series “American Monster: Abuse of Power” features a predominantly white group of people discussing well-known cases of authority figures who committed crimes.

Culture Clash: The stories are told from the perspectives of survivors, law enforcement and other people who are connected in some way to the perpetrators. 

Culture Audience: “American Monster: Abuse of Power” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching true crime documentaries that just recycle information about high-profile cases.

“American Monster: Abuse of Power” is about as generic as you can get in how it presents true crime. This “American Monster” series spinoff has very little resemblance to the more compelling and more intimate storytelling of “American Monster.” “American Monster: Abuse of Power” is just a dull rehash of widely reported facts about corrupt authority figures.

“American Monster: Abuse of Power” is from the same production company (Arrow Media), which also produces “American Monster,” which premiered in 2016. Arrow Media is the production company for other Investigation Discovery shows “See No Evil” and “Body Cam.” “American Monster,” “See No Evil” and “Body Cam” all make good use of raw video footage from surveillance cameras (in “See No Evil” and “Body Cam”) or from family home movies (in “American Monster”).

“American Monster,” which is narrated mostly by Robert Firth, is told mainly from the perspectives of families whose lives were damaged by murder. Each episode features a different case of how the murderer was a monster who had many people fooled for a certain period of time. The interviewees and law enforcement officials involved in the case give accounts of how the murderer was able to con people until the murderer’s true nature was exposed and it led to murder.

“American Monster: Abuse of Power” (which does not have a narrator) only made its premiere episode available for review before the series premiere. The episode, titled “Bodies of Evidence,” is about convicted sex abuser Larry Nassar, the former osteopathic physician who is serving consecutive prison sentences of up to 360 years, after pleading guilty in 2017 and 2018 to sexual assault, possession of child pornography and tampering with evidence. The only “candid” footage of Nassar in this episode is widely seen archival footage of him doing a few training sessions and being in police interrogations.

Nassar was the team doctor of the United States women’s national gymnastics team, from 1996 to 2014. From 1997 to 2016, he was a team physician and assistant professor at Michican State University, where he earned his doctorate of osteopathic medicine in 1993. In 2016, Nassar was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting at least 265 young women and girls by pretending he was giving them medical treatment. In the end, he pled guilty to only 10 counts of sexual assault, but his prison sentences will ensure that he will die as a prisoner before being eligible for parole.

The Larry Nassar scandal has received an enormous amount of media coverage. “American Monster: Abuse of Scandal” reveals nothing new. Unlike “American Monster,” which has details of the featured criminal’s personal life, there is almost no information about Nassar’s personal life in “American Monster: Abuse of Power.” The show does not even mention when and where he was born (August 16, 1963, in Farmington Hills, Michigan) and the fact that he was a married father of three kids during most of his sex crimes. Nassar’s ex-wife Stefanie Anderson, whom he married in 1996, divorced him in 2017.

Three of Nassar’s former patients/sex-abuse survivors are interviewed in the documentary: Amanda Barterian, Emma Ann Miller and a woman who is only identified as Marta. They were all sexually abused by Nassar when they were underage. They all gave victim impact testmonial statements in 2017, when Nassar received the the first round of his prison sentences.

In the case of Marta and Barterian (and many other survivors), the abuse happened while their parents were in the same room. Nassar would position himself in a way to block what he was doing with his hands from the view of anyone else in the room. Miller says it took her a while to come forward with her story about Nassar abusing her because she was in denial about it and she saw how many people didn’t believe the victims at first.

Nassar fooled many people into thinking he was harmless and a little nerdy. Barterian was a child gymnast who sought weekly treatment from Nassar because of a back injury she got at 8 years old. She describes Nassar this way: “He had a ‘good guy’ persona, right off the bat.” Marta comments about Nassar’s image: “He was warm, charismatic … easy to talk to.”

It’s mentioned in the documentary that a turning point in Nassar’s career was the 1996 Summer Olympics, when he received worldwide media attention for being the doctor who helped gymnast Kerri Strug off of the gym mat when she twisted her ankle. Strug and the rest of Team USA for women’s artistic gymnastics went on to win a gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympics. Nassar used that association with Strug as a claim to fame and to boost his career and reputation.

Other people interviewed in the documentary include Nassar’s former Michigan State University colleague Steven Karageanes, a doctor of osteopathic medicine; journalist Mark Alesia; attorney David Mittleman; and Rosemarie Aquilina, judge of the 30th circuit court in Ingham County, Michigan. Aquilina was the judge who sentenced Nassar in his Michigan court cases. However, her comments in this episode are basic and provide no new insight.

This episode “American Monster: Abuse of Power” is so lazy, there is only a quick mention of how Michigan State University and the USA Gymnastics had some officials who actively covered up Nassar’s crimes and/or enabled him to continue his crimes. The episode does not mention all the people who lost their jobs and/or were sued because of their enablement and protection of Nassar. It’s very irresponsible to do a documentary series about the abuse of power and not properly acknowledge that this type of abuse is made worse by enablers who know about the abuse but do nothing to stop it and/or are accomplices to the crimes.

“American Monster: Abuse of Power” made the mistake of debuting with an episode about a criminal whose crimes have already gotten a lot of massive media exposure. Whatever is covered in this episode isn’t covered in depth and is just a repeat of what’s already well-known. For a more comprehensive overview of the Nassar scandal and perspectives of his abuse survivors, watch the documentaries “At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal” (HBO) and “Athlete A” (Netflix), or listen to Michigan Radio/NPR Radio’s podcast “Believed.” In order for “American Monster: Abuse of Power” to get a loyal fan base, the series should offer stories that true crime aficionados might not know about, instead of stories that have already been through the tabloid ringer.

Investigation Discovery premiered “American Monster: Abuse of Power” on May 18, 2025.

Review: ‘The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood,’ starring Jane Parrent, Di Byrne, Cheryl Holsonbake, Lance Holsonbake, Chad Garrett and Olivia LaVoice

May 11, 2025

by Carla Hay

Cheryl Holsonbake, Di Byrne and Jane Parrent in “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood”

Directed by Jennifer Anderson

Culture Representation: Taking place in Bakersfield, California, the three-episode docuseries “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” (based on a 2022 Marie Claire magazine article) features an all-white group of people who are connected in some way to missing or murdered people Baylee Despot, Micah Holsonbake and James Kulstad, who all disappeared in Bakersfield in 2018.

Culture Clash: The parents of these victims worked tirelessly to find answers and get justice. 

Culture Audience: “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of true crime documentaries where victims’ family members become amateur sleuths in conducting their own investigations.

Chad Garrett in “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” is a true crime documentary that you won’t easily forget. Gripping from start to finish, this three-episode documentary series is a story of persistence in the quest for justice when three mothers united to find out what happened to their missing or murdered adult children. The story has a few twists and turns that will surprise some viewers. “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” is based on the 2022 Marie Claire magazine article “Of Murder and Motherhood” (written by Katya Cengel), with the documentary series having updates that happened since the article was published.

Directed by Jennifer Anderson, “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” tells the story of Cheryl Holsonbake, Diane “Di” Byrne and Jane Parrent—three mothers whose adult children were murdered or went missing within four weeks in 2018, in Bakersfield, California. Holsonbake’s son Micah was 34 when he went missing on March 23, 2018, and was later declared murdered after some of his discovered body parts were confirmed through DNA evidence. Byrne’s son James Kulstad was 38 when he was murdered by gun violence on April 8, 2018. Parrent’s daughter Baylee Despot was 21 when she disappeared on April 25, 2018.

Micah Holsonbake, Kulstad and Despot became known as the Bakersfield 3 because all three cases are connected to each other, for reasons that are explained in the documentary. This review won’t reveal all the details of what’s in the documentary, but it’s enough to say that only one of these cases was solved at the time this documentary was released in May 2025. Sadly, Byrne died of ovarian cancer in April 2024. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016 and ovarian cancer in 2023. There is a title card tribute to her in the epilogue.

As already revealed in the trailer for “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood,” Despot has been named a suspect in the murder of Micah Holsonbake. At the time she disappeared, Despot was living with her boyfriend Matthew “Matt” Queen, a convicted criminal with history numerous arrests, including false imprisonment by violence, possession for sale of a controlled substance, and illegal firearm possession. Her mother and many other people in the documentary say that they don’t believe Despot would willingly commit murder, but they think it’s possible Despot was a witness to the murder who was then murdered herself. Queen is not interviewed for the documentary, and it’s unclear if he was asked to comment for the documentary.

Episode 1, titled “One Mystery—Or Three?,” details all three cases and why they are connected. Episode 2, titled “The Boogieman of Bakersfield,” gives information on Queen and why he became a suspect in one of the murders. Episode 3, titled “Fights Like a Mother,” shows how the tireless activism of Parrent, Byrne and Cheryl Holsonbake made a big difference in the investigations and the 2022 trial that resulted in one of these cases.

Parrent (who is a single mother) is the most outspoken of the three mothers, who all became close friends. Parrent is shown putting up missing-person flyers of her missing daughter Despot, which is a daily ritual that she says has helped her maintain sanity and motivation during this heart-wrenching ordeal. She was also put in an uncomfortable situation when her daughter was named a suspect in Micah Holsonbake’s murder. Parrent’s friendship with Micah’s mother Cheryl changed but ultimately was not ruined by this legal development because Cheryl also believes that Despot was a victim.

Cheryl Holsonbake and Byrne are more soft-spoken than Parrent but no less determined in seeking justice. According to the documentary, Byrne (who was a divorced mother of six children) she was the first person to make the connection between her murdered son and Micah, who knew Kulstad and Despot. Of the three mothers, Cheryl Holsonbake seems to be the most skilled at being an amateur detective, because she uncovered a lot of important information through diligent research and investigations.

Bakersfield is a city with a population of about 414,000 people, as of 2023. Bakersfield’s largest industries are argiculture and energy production. In an interview for the documentary, Lance Holsonbake (the husband of Cheryl and the father of Micah) describes Bakersfield as having two sides of being both a “nice place” and a “terrible place” to live. “It’s got two personalities,” he adds. “And there’s a lot of people who trickle back and forth between the two worlds.”

Despot, Kulstad and Micah Holsonbake were three of the people who went back and forth between those two worlds. They are described by their mothers as loving and outgoing children who were raised in supportive households and who had bright futures ahead of them. But their health and their futures were damaged because all three of the children became addicted to drugs—mainly painkillers and other opioids.

When she was in her late teens, Despot became a rape survivor, and her unresolved trauma drove her deeper into drug addiction, says her mother. At the time that Despot was living with Queen, she had been separated or divorced from a short-lived marriage, and Queen kept her isolated from her family, according to her mother. Kulstad was an entrepreneur and a single father to a daughter, but he was unemployed and living with his mother at the time he was murdered.

Micah was a U.S. Navy veteran who became a banker and a stockbroker. Micah survived a benign throat tumor that ended his military career, but he became addicted to painkillers after a 2007 car accident that shattered his wrist. Micah was a married father to a son and was a very devoted parent, but his marriage fell apart because of Micah’s increasing drug addiction, according to his mother Cheryl, who says that Micah was very paranoid toward the end of his life.

This well-edited documentary includes interviews with Sgt. Chad Garrett of the Bakersfield Police Department (the lead investigator in all three cases) and former KGET-TV reporter Olivia LaVoice, who has been covering these cases since the beginning. Other people interviewed in the documentary are James Kulstad’s brothers Ryan Kulstad and Steven Hendrix Jr.; Micah Holsonbake’s friends Will Kanavalov, David Bledsoe and Matt Bledsoe; Despot’s sister Katelyn Parrent; and Despot’s friends Jourdain Kominski and Maddie Barrett. “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” is heartbreaking but inspirational in showing how loved ones can legally take matters into their own hands when they are seeking justice for crime victims.

Investigation Discovery premiered “The Bakersfield 3: A Tale of Murder and Motherhood” on May 11, 2025.

Review: ‘Toxic’ (2025), starring Elizabeth Chambers

May 6, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Toxic” host Elizabeth Chambers (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“Toxic” (2025)

Culture Representation: The documentary series “Toxic” features a predominantly white group of people representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Various people share their stories about toxic love relationships where someone in the relationship committed crimes against the other person in the relationship. 

Culture Audience: “Toxic” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching true crime documentaries about romances that became criminally dangerous.

“Toxic” shouldn’t be dismissed as another tawdry true crime series. Elizabeth Chambers, an investigative journalist who used to be married to disgraced actor Armie Hammer, brings authentic empathy and credible experience as the show’s host/interviewer. Having lived through the scandal of Hammer’s admitted infidelities and drug abuse—along with accusations that he sexually abused women and allegedly has a cannibalism fetish—Chambers has publicly stated she was blindsided by Hammer’s secret life when their 10-year marriage collapsed in 2020.

Chambers and Hammer, who got married in 2010, officially divorced in 2023. As of this writing, he has not worked as an actor since the scandal. (Hammer’s movies that were released after the scandal had already been filmed before the scandal happened.) Chambers does not mention his name in “Toxic,” but there is a montage of headlines in the show’s introduction sequence to demonstrate why Chambers has personal experience of being in a toxic relationship. People who watch the show will notice that the show’s theme song uses part of Britney Spears’ Grammy-winning hit “Toxic” from her 2003 album “In the Zone.”

“Toxic” (the TV series) is produced by Investigation Discovery by Breaklight Pictures, a Pantheon Media Group company. Investigation Discovery did not make episodes from the series available for review in advance of the series premiere, so this review will cover the first episode of “Toxic,” titled “Sleeping With a Stranger.” This series premiere episode is about the ordeal that New Jersey-based psychotherapist Kelly Sutliff went through when her whirlwind marriage turned into a nightmare of abuse. He viciously assaulted her on December 19, 2019, one year after they were married.

Sutliff’s ex-husband, who is only identified by the name Chris, is not interviewed but photos and videos of him are shown. In 2022, he pled guilty to aggravated assault by strangulation, possession of a deadly weapon, and criminal mischief. This review won’t reveal the sentence that he got after pleading guilty to these charges. However, it’s enough to say that the results will outrage many people when they find out. “Toxic” could’ve easily taken a safer route by featuring a case with a predictable outcome. But the outcome of this case is almost as disturbing as the attack.

This particular episode sets the tone that “Toxic” is very much about the perspectives of survivors and keeps things uncomplicated by not have too many “talking head” interviews. There are only three people interviewed for “Sleeping With a Stranger”: Sutliff, her best friend Christina Henschel, and Dave Littman, a retired detective from the Hanover Township Police Department.

The story of Chris going from charming and loving boyfriend to abusive and dangerous husband will sound familiar to anyone who watches enough true crime shows about domestic violence. Sutliff met him on a dating app in August 2018, and they got married in December 2018. In January 2019, he moved into the house that she still owns. Sutliff says she was the breadwinner in their marriage. The documentary doesn’t say if Chris, a U.S. Army veteran, had a job during their marriage.

Things stared to go downhill soon after the honeymoon. Sutliff says that Chris started showing a Jekyll and Hyde personality. He would be cruel and angry but then later act like nothing happened, and he would go back to being sweet and romantic. This extreme way of acting started to make Sutliff feel paranoid and confused about who he really was.

Sutliff describes what she saw when Chris would go into his rages: “His eyes went from blue to black.” Chambers nods and says, “I’ve experienced that. The eyes are the windows to the soul. And when you are in that deep, dark space, you see it in their eyes.” It’s open to interpretation if Chambers was talking about her ex-husband with that comment, but you get the feeling that she probably was.

Sutliff says in an interview that during her short marriage to Chris, she became almost bedridden by an unexplained illness and broke out into hives. She later found out that Chris had possession of Tamoxifen and Mamofen—two drugs prescribed for breast cancer. Sutliff says that she believes Chris was trying to poison her with these drugs—which she is certain he put in her food and drinks—although she admits she can’t technically prove it.

She later found that Chris had at least three ex-wives before he married her. Sutliff says she tracked down and talked to several of his ex-girlfriends and ex-wives after surviving her horrific attack from Chris. She says all of Chris’ exes whom she talked to told her that Chris abused them too. Sutliff’s story is a warning to find out as much as you can about a potential love partner before you get involved.

Sutliff also believes that during their marriage, Chris raped her while she was unconscious from drugs that he gave to her without her knowledge and without her consent. She mentions an example of waking up to find Chris raping her. She got upset but he acted like he didn’t know that she was asleep. It’s a typical abuser tactic: Make the victim think that the victim is overreacting or imagining things when harm has been inflicted.

The attack on December 19, 2019, is described in harrowing details that won’t be described in this review. Sutliff and Littman say that Chris had allegedly planned to kill Sutliff and make it look like she committed suicide after attacking him. They also say that Chris planned to explain any injuries on Sutliff as injuries he caused in self-defense. Chris assaulted her on that fateful night after she confronted him about finding sexually explicit messages from another woman on his phone.

Sutliff’s ordeal in getting justice was also a hellish for reasons that are detailed in this “Toxic” episode. Chris stalked her and tried to get her arrested for the felony of possessing an illegal gun. “Toxic” is not an outstanding true crime series, but it’s better than many other true crime series that cover the same types of abusive relationships. In “Toxic,” when the host of the show says she understands the victims and survivors, you know that she really means it.

Investigation Discovery premiered “Toxic” on May 5, 2025.

Review: ‘In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni,’ starring Dina Doll, Emily Reynolds Bergh, Matthew Frank, Perez Hilton, Mia Schecter and Kjersti Flaa

April 19, 2025

by Carla Hay

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni in “In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“In Dispute: Lively v. Baldoni”

Directed by Chris Hackett

Culture Representation: The documentary special “In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” features a predominantly white group of people (with one African American) discussing the feud between “It Ends With Us” co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni over accusations that include sexual harassment, retaliation and defamation.

Culture Clash: Since December 2024, Lively and Baldoni (who is also the director of “It Ends With Us”) have been embroiled in multiple lawsuits against each other and with other people, with Lively accusing Baldoni of sexual harassment and retaliation, while Baldoni has accused Lively of civil extortion and defamation.

Culture Audience: “In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” will appeal primarily to people who want to get an incomplete and rehashed summary of this feud.

“In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” is yet another hastily assembled, cheap-looking documentary about a celebrity scandal that has less information than what anyone can find on Wikipedia. Everything about this documentary reeks of lazy, bandwagon-jumping filmmaking. It’s a dull rehash revealing nothing new and leaving out crucial facts about the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni feud. Some of the people interviewed have questionable credibility.

Directed by Chris Hackett, “In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” has a total running time of 42 minutes, but most of it is a weak regurgitation of well-known facts, padded with interviews that aren’t meaningful. A sure sign of a poorly made documentary is when at least half of it consists of journalists from gossip media re-stating what’s already known and giving their opinions. Needless to say, no one in the inner circles of Lively and Baldoni and no one connected to the lawsuits is interviewed in the documentary.

“In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” mentions the basic facts of this feud. In August 2024, the Columbia Pictures drama “It Ends With Us” (based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel of the same name) was released in theaters and became a hit. According to Box Office Mojo, “It Ends With Us” had worldwide ticket sales totaling more than $351 million.

In the movie “It Ends With Us,” which takes place mainly in Boston, Lively plays a flower shop owner named Lily Bloom, and Baldoni plays a neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid. Lily and Ryle meet, fall in love, and eventually get married. After they’re married, Ryle is controlling and abusive to Lily, although there were hints that he was problematic before Ryle and Lily got married.

In addition to being co-stars of “It Ends With Us,” Baldoni and Lively had behind-the-scenes roles for the movie. Baldoni was the movie’s director. He is also a co-founder of Wayfarer Studios, the production company that bought the rights to the book “It Ends With Us” and is one of the production companies that financed the movie. Lively (who is not affiliated with Wayfarer) was a producer of the movie. Christy Hall wrote the adapted screenplay for “It Ends With Us.”

During the publicity tour for “It Ends With Us,” people noticed that Baldoni was doing interviews separately from the rest of the cast members, who all unfollowed him on social media. Lively got some criticism for promoting her liquor brand while doing interviews for the movie instead of talking about the more serious subject of domestic violence. In an interview to promote “It Ends With Us,” Lively admitted that her husband Ryan Reynolds (who is not listed in the movie’s credits) rewrote at least one scene in the film.

In December 2024, Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department against Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios, with Lively alleging that Baldoni sexually harassed her while filming “It Ends With Us” by (among other accusations) unwanted kissing and inappropriate touching that was not in the script; graphic talk about his sex life and genitals; and coming into her trailer unannounced while she was breastfeeding her baby son Olin. The complaint also alleged that Baldoni and his public-relations team retaliated against Lively for speaking up about this alleged harassment. The alleged retaliation included engineering a smear campaign against Lively after the release of the movie.

The same day that the complaint was filed, The New York Times published an article that presented seemingly damning evidence (mostly text messages) to support Lively’s claims. “It Ends With Us” author Hoover and several of Lively’s former co-stars spoke out in support of Lively. Also in December 2024, Lively filed a lawsuit (which is separate from the complaint) against Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel, who worked with Baldoni as his publicists during the publicity campaign for “It Ends With Us.”

As a result of all this negative publicity over Lively’s allegations, Baldoni was dropped from William Morris Endeavor (WME), the same talent agency that represents Lively. Liz Plank, who co-hosted the “Man Enough” podcast with Baldoni and Jamey Heath, quit the podcast after Lively’s legal claims went public. In December 2024, Baldoni (who describes himself as a feminist) then filed a libel lawsuit seeking $250 million in damages against The New York Times. All parties involved in these lawsuits are denying the accusations against them.

In January 2025, Baldoni sued Lively, Reynolds and the couple’s publicist Leslie Sloan for $400 million for civil extortion, defamation and invasion of privacy. Reynolds is a defendant in the lawsuit because Baldoni claims that Reynolds exerted too much control during the making of “It Ends With Us,” and Baldoni claims that Reynolds’ Nicepool character in 2024’s “Deadpool & Wolverine” movie was a cruel parody of Baldoni. In March 2025, Baldoni and Abel filed a separate lawsuit against publicist Stephanie Jones, who was Abel’s former employer.

“In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” is such a shoddily made documentary, it doesn’t mention that Baldoni was dropped by WME and that he filed a lawsuit against his former publicist because of this feud. The documentary doesn’t go into details about the publicists who are plaintiffs or defendants in these lawsuits. Instead, “In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” is just a collection of interviews with people who have little or no connection to any of the plaintiffs or defendants.

Aaron Boucher, a business owner in Hoboken, New Jersey, has a store that was used as the location for Lily Bloom’s flower shop in “It Ends With Us.” He talks briefly in the beginning of the documentary by saying predictable things about how he was thrilled to have his store used in the movie. Boucher has nothing important to say, unless you think it’s fascinating that he got photo of himself with Baldoni. The photo is shown in the documentary.

Emily Reynolds Bergh, the founder of R Public Relations, is apparently in this documentary because she describes herself as a big fan of “It Ends With Us” author Hoover. Reynolds Bergh gives generic comments about the lawsuits doing damage to the reputations of all the plaintiffs and defendants. She also says that if she were the PR representative for Lively or Baldoni, she would advise each of them to show more humility and vulnerability.

Freelance entertainment journalist Kjersti Flaa is in the documentary to comment on a previously unreleased 2016 video interview that she did with Blake Lively and Parker Posey for the movie “Cafe Society.” In the interview, Lively and Posey are rude to Flaa after Flaa congratulates Lively for her “bump” (pregnancy), because it was in the news at the time that Lively had announced she was pregnant. (The pregnancy resulted in the birth of Lively’s second child, Inez.)

Flaa released the video in August 2024, around the time that Lively was getting backlash for how Lively was doing publicity for “It Ends With Us.” Flaa titled the 2016 video interview this way: “The Blake Lively interview that made me want to quit my job.” The video went viral and got millions of views. What the documentary doesn’t mention is that Flaa has publicly denied she was part of a smear campaign against Lively. The documentary also doesn’t mention Flaa has said that just because Lively was rude to her in that interview, it doesn’t prove or disprove Lively’s legal claims against Baldoni.

Tia Streaty, an actress who worked briefly with Baldoni when he co-starred on the TV comedy/drama series “Jane the Virgin’ (which was on the air the 2014 to 2019), describes him as “very down-to-earth” and “considerate.” But this documentary is about the disputes over how Baldoni was as the director/co-star of “It Ends With Us,” not how he was in a TV series that he did years earlier. The interview with Streaty is ultimately pointless because she barely knew Baldoni. The documentary does not interview anyone who worked with Lively.

People from the media who are interviewed in the documentary are gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who seems to side with Baldoni; BuzzFeed senior writer Natasha Jokić, who seems to be on Lively’s side; and The Ankler reporter Matthew Frank, who seems mostly neutral and comments that neither side in the legal dispute will end up looking good. The documentary also includes videoclip montages of people commenting on social media about the feud. That’s another indication of how low-quality a documentary is: Many of the quoted “sources” are random strangers on social media.

“In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” also has an interview with intimacy coordinator Mia Schacter, who has never worked with Lively or Baldoni. Schacter looks at text messages between Lively and Baldoni that were released as “evidence” over Lively’s and Baldoni’s communication about an intimate scene in “It Ends With Us.” Schacter comments, “These texts made me think that at one point, she did feel a lot of trust with him.”

Schacter also points out that an “It Ends With Us” video outtake that Baldoni released of a slow-dancing scene between him and Lively only proves that he was trying to do things (such as kiss her) that weren’t in the screenplay. She also thinks it’s contradictory that Lively reportedly refused to have an intimacy coordinator, even though that was one of her demands in a contract for “It Ends With Us.” Some of the people in the documentary say that much of the evidence can be argued as being supportive of either side.

Attorney/legal analyst Dina Doll is the most outspoken commentator in the documentary and makes it clear that she thinks Lively’s case is more believable. Doll says about Baldoni’s libel lawsuit against The New York Times: “It’s not The New York Times’ job to give all sides of the story. You might not like that, but that doesn’t open them up to liability.” Actually, anyone who knows anything about ethics in journalism knows that a news report is supposed to get as many facts and as many sides of the story as possible.

Doll comments, “Blake Lively has the stronger case because all of Justin Baldoni’s arguments about fame and control don’t really refute her claim of sexual harassment.” With all these lawsuits filed in this massive feud, the documentary does nothing to give any real insight. At the time that this documentary premiered on TV, the only lawsuit that had a trial date announced was Lively’s lawsuit against Baldoni. That lawsuit is expected to go to trial in May 2026.

Doll is shown in the conclusion of the documentary saying: “The bigger loser is victims of domestic violence. This movie [‘It Ends With Us’] was about domestic violence, and nobody’s talking about domestic violence.” Anyone who watches “In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” will lose something too—valuable time in watching a shallow and insufficient documentary that barely scratches the surface of what could have been reported in this documentary.

Investigation Discovery premiered “In Dispute: Lively v Baldoni” on March 31, 2025.

Review: ‘Hollywood Demons,’ a true crime documentary series about the downfalls of celebrities and the dark sides of fame

March 25, 2025

by Carla Hay

An image of actor Stephen Collins in “Hollywood Demons” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“Hollywood Demons”

Culture Representation: The documentary series “Hollywood Demons” features a predominantly white group of people (with some people of color) discussing various scandals involving famous American people.

Culture Clash: Celebrities often have troubles lives behind the scenes that sometimes are in direct contrast to their public images.

Culture Audience: “Hollywood Demons” will appeal primarily to people who like watching documentaries about celebrity scandals and celebrity problems.

“Hollywood Demons” is one in a long list of true crime documentaries about celebrity scandals and the dark sides of fame. It’s not a groundbreaking series, but it gets the job done sufficiently enough for people inclined to watch these types of TV shows. The scandals in this docuseries have already gotten a lot of media coverage, so the best that “Hollywood Demons” can do is offer interviews with anyone who can provide new and interesting information.

“Hollywood Demons” is produced by AMPLE Entertainment for Investigation Discovery. AMPLE Entertainment was one of the production companies behind Investigation Discovery’s documentary series “The Fall of Diddy,” about the downfall of entertainment mogul Sean Combs. Only the first episode of “Hollywood Demons” was available for review before the series premiere. This episode—titled “Stephen Collins, America’s Dad”—chronicles the rise and fall of actor Stephen Collins.

Collins was best known for playing Reverend Eric Camden (a Protestant minister) on the drama series “7th Heaven,” which was about Reverend Camden, his wife and their five children. “7th Heaven” was on the air from 1996 to 2007. In the United States, “7th Heaven” was on The WB network for the 10 of the show’s 11 seasons. After The WB and rival network UPN merged to form The CW network in 2006, “7th Heaven” had its 11th and final season on The CW from 2006 to 2007.

Collins was born on October 1, 1947, in Des Moines, Iowa. He was the youngest of three sons born to an airline executive father and a homemaker mother. Collins and his brothers were raised in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He graduated cum laude from Amherst College in Massachusetts. During and after his college education, Collins did some amateur work as a singer and a musician before he settled on being an actor as his main profession.

Collins was disgraced in 2014, when audio recording excerpts from a 2012 marriage counseling session that he did with his then-wife Faye Grant (who used to be an actress) were leaked to the media and revealed that Collins confessed to sexually abusing three girls under the age of 14, in separate incidents about 10 years apart from each other. One of the girls was only 10 years old at the time.

In the audio recordings, Collins described exposing his naked penis to all three of the girls. In at least one instance, he was completely naked when he exposed his penis. And for the 10-year-old, he made her use her hands to massage his penis.

The first victim was abused in 1973, the second victim was abused in 1983, and the third victim was abused in 1994. Collins and Grant (who was his second wife) were married from 1985 to 2015. Their daughter Kate was born in 1989. Collins was married to his first wife Marjorie Weinman from 1970 to 1978 and did not have any children with her. Collins, his ex-wives and his daughter are not interviewed in the documentary.

Even though Collins confessed to sexually abusing girls, Collins was not arrested or charged with these crimes because the statute of limitations had run out by the time this information was made public. However, the backlash against Collins for these confessions was very swift: Collins got fired from his upcoming projects, and his career never recovered. He’s probably living mostly off of any money he makes from “7th Heaven” residuals.

According to the Internet Movie Database, Collins has not had work as an actor in movies and television since 2014, the year the scandal broke. He is described as a former actor or retired actor in recent news reports about him. At the time this documentary premiered on TV in 2025, he was living a reclusive life in Iowa. It’s mentioned in the documentary that Collins is currently living with a woman who’s about 40 years younger than he is. This live-in girlfriend’s name is not mentioned in the documentary.

The abuse victim from 1973 and the abuse victim from 1994 are not interviewed in the documentary. According to the documentary, the abuse victim from 1973 filed a police report about the alleged abuse in New York City, where the abuse occurred, and there was a police investgation. The victim from 1994 never came forward publicly. The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed years ago that it investigated Collins for child molestation in 1994. But no criminal charges could be filed in that investigation, for reasons that the Los Angeles Police Department will not disclose.

As for the abuse survivor from 1983, she did come forward, and she is interviewed in the documentary. Her name is April Price, and she has the most compelling interview in this episode. Although some reports have said Collins abused her in 1982, Price says it happened in 1983. She gives a lot of details, many of which might make some viewers very uncomfortable.

In 1983, Price was 13 years old and living in a small town in Oklahoma. Her aunt Cindy Akins lived in the Los Angeles area, where Akins worked as a producer of TV commercials at the time. Akins invited Price to visit her and stay at Akins’ apartment in the spring of 1983. At the time, Collins and his future second wife Grant lived together in an apartment building next door. In the spring of 1983, Collins was 35 and would turn 36 on October 1 of that year.

It just so happened that Price was a big fan of ABC’s 1982-1983 adventure drama series “Tales of the Gold Monkey,” which had Collins and Grant as two of its co-stars. Price remembers feeling star-struck when she first met Collins, whom she said paid the type of attention to her that made her feel special. She got a photo with him and later got an autographed photo of Collins. Both of these photos are shown in the documentary. In the photo with Collins, he has one of his arms around her, and his hand is touching her hand that she has lifted behind her.

The autographed photo was signed: “April, come out and see us again sometime. Love, Stephen Collins.” In the documentary, Price has this to say about that autographed message: “For some reason, that was weird to me. I thought that was off-putting to me.” It is indeed an odd thing for a man to say to a 13-year-old girl he doesn’t know, says Dr. Drew Pinsky, a medical physician who has appeared in many TV shows but who does not know Collins personally. Pinsky is in the documentary mostly to make withering commentary about Collins being a sexual predator.

Price says her Aunt Cindy invited her for a longer visit in the summer of 1983. And that’s when Price says that Collins sexually abused her. The first inappropriate thing that happened was when Price was home alone in the kitchen, she says she saw him through the kitchen window, as he walked completely naked back and forth in a shared courtyard in the back of the building. Price says Collins knew that she could see him naked, but she was too shocked to say or do anything.

The next time she saw Collins, she was home alone and asked him to help her set up her Atari game system. That was the second time he deliberately exposed himself to her in an illegal sexual way. According to Price, he had his jeans zipper pulled down to expose his penis. Price says she was again too much in shock to do anything. But looking back, Price believes that he was testing her boundaries.

Price says she didn’t tell anyone at the time because of a previous bad experience when she reported being sexually abused. When Price was 4 years old, she was sexually molested by a man who was babysitting her. And when she told certain adults about the abuse, Price says she wasn’t believed. Price thought that because Collins was a celebrity, there was even less of a chance that she would be believed if she reported this sex crime.

Sometime after Collins had begun exposing his penis to Price, she says that Collins had a creepy conversation with her where he told her that she had pretty feet. When he could see that she looked uncomfortable with this comment, he tried to make her seem like she was uptight. Collins told Price that she needed to learn how to accept compliments.

The third and last time that Collins exposed his penis to her, he lured her into his apartment with the promise of giving her special memorabilia from “Tales of the Gold Monkey.” This time, he got completely naked. Price believes that it probably would’ve escalated to sexual touching, but her aunt had unexpectedly arrived at home, so Price used that as an excuse to quickly leave Collins’ apartment.

But that wasn’t the last time she saw Collins in person. Years later, in 1997, about a year after “7th Heaven” had launched, Price was living in the Los Angeles area and working in the script department for a company that made TV commercials. She was surprised to see Collins at her job. He was there to film something that she wasn’t working on but he was doing some work in the same building.

Price says that Collins immediately approached her for a private conversation to make an apology. “He told me, ‘What I did was terribly wrong. Please forgive me.'” Price comments on this apology: “Looking back, I don’t think it was sincere. I think it was damage control.” Just like Price had done in 1983, she kept quiet about her encounter with Collins in 1997, and didn’t go public about the sexual abuse until years later.

She went public about Collins abusing her after she heard the leaked audio recordings of Collins confessing to exposing himself to a 13-year-old girl in the early 1980s. Price says that even though he didn’t say her full name, she knew he was talking about her because he said that his victim was visiting her aunt, who was Collins’ neighbor at the time. Even though it’s too late to bring criminal charges against Collins for his confessed sexual abuse, Price says it still felt like a relief for her to finally go public, so that people know that Collins’ victims are real and not anonymous.

In the beginning of the documentary, there’s a caption that says the documentarians reached out to more than 100 people who knew Collins, but almost everyone either declined to be interviewed or did not respond. The documentary gives very little information about Collins’ life before he became an actor. It’s noted that none of his female co-stars wanted to speak about him for this documentary.

Only one woman who was a former Collins colleague is interviewed: Tashiba Wilson, a set costumer for “7th Heaven.” Wilson does not have much to say about the scandal and doesn’t make detailed comments about working with Collins. She speaks in mostly generic terms about how the “7th Heaven” cast and crew were like “family,” and she was sad when the show got cancelled.

One of the documentary’s biggest messages is exposing how self-admitted predators like Collins often have different sides of their personalities that they show to different people. Jeremy London and Kyle Searles—two actors who were on “7th Heaven” for a few years—both say that Collins was a role model to them before they knew about Collins’ heinous crimes. They describe Collins as an easygoing, friendly, down-to-earth guy who was generous about helping and mentoring people.

Searles (who had a recurring “7th Heaven” role as Mac from 2004 to 2007) acknowledges that he was very much in awe of Collins. He admits that he was so shocked to hear about Collins being a sexual abuser, Searles purposely did not listen to all of Collins’ confessions because Searles said it would hurt too much. However, for this documentary, Searles agreed to listen to all of the recordings and watch a post-scandal 2014 interview that Collins did with Katie Couric.

The documentary shows Searles’ reactions. Searles is visibly shaken when he gets all the details. He expresses dismay when he finds out for the first time that one of Collins’ victims was 10 years old at the time. Searles says that doesn’t minimize Collins’ abuse of the girls who were older, but it seems that it’s the first time that Searles discovers that Collins did something like this to a girl who hadn’t reached puberty.

London was on “7th Heaven” from 2002 to 2004, when he had the role of young preacher Chandler Hampton. London has had very public problems with addictions to alcohol and drugs. He was fired from “7th Heaven,” but London says he still has great memories of working with Collins. (On a side note, London was also on Pinsky’s VH1 reality show “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” in 2010.) London seems to be more aware of the full extent of Collins’ confessions. However, at one point in the documentary, London says Collins was a father figure to him and that a part of him still wishes that Collins had been his father.

London gets teary-eyed and choked up not when he’s talking about Collins or Collins’ victims but when he talks about himself and how Hollywood has shunned him after London was arrested for domestic violence. (London was arrested in 2012 for domestic violence against his first wife Melissa Cunningham, and in 2018 for domestic violence against his second wife Juliet Reeves.) As for Collins’ confession of sexually abusing girls, London comments: “Stephen Collins would be a dead man if that was my kid.”

Is Collins a pedophile? Kelley Mead, a sex crimes expert who used to work in the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Unit, says he might be, but he is more likely to fit the description of a hebephile: someone who is sexually attracted to children in the early years of puberty, which are 11 to 14 years old. The definition of a pedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. The documentary mentions that there have been no other reports of Collins sexually abusing any additional children, other than the ones he confessed to abusing. Grant supposedly accused him of sexually abusing their teenage babysitter, but that accusation was not officially verified by the alleged victim or law enforcement.

Other people interviewed in this episode are those who worked with Collins and say they never saw any indications that he was a perverted sexual predator. These former work colleagues are Garth Ancier, former president of programming at The WB; Harvey Laidman, one of the directors of “7th Heaven”; and Tom Greene, who was a writer and producer of “Tales of the Gold Monkey.” Greene says he first met Collins when Greene worked on 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (where Collins had a supporting role as Captain Willard Decker), and he remembers that Collins made a great impression with his charisma.

This documentary episode mentions that Collins was very skilled at making people believe that he was a lot like his morality-driven “7th Heaven” Eric Camden character. For example, Collins publicly criticized “7th Heaven” co-star Jessica Biel and Gear magazine for doing “child porn,” when in the year 2000, she posed topless (with her breasts covered) at 17 years old for Gear, a publication that was marketed to men. Biel’s role on “7th Heaven” was then significantly reduced until she was written off of the show.

Even with Collins’ sanctimonious preaching about Biel’s controversial magazine cover, he had another side to him as a novelist whose books had provocative sexual content. The documentary says the only other public indication that Collins was interested in controversial sexual matters was when he starred in the 1996 TV-movie “The Babysitter’s Seduction,” in which he portrayed a married father who targeted his teenage babysitter for sex.

Also interviewed for the documentary are culture writer Scaachi Koul, who just repeats well-known facts about Collins and expresses her disgust about what he confessed to doing; “7th Heaven” superfan Rob Anderson, who created a “7th Heaven” fan community on TikTok; and Melissa Henson, Vice President of the Parents TV and Media Council, a conservative activist group that objected to some “7th Heaven” episodes that had discussions about sex and drugs. Koul, Anderson and Henson don’t offer any real insight into Collins because they don’t know him and are just outside observers.

Collins apparently kept his crimes so well-hidden, he didn’t need a long list of enablers to help him cover up the crimes. It’s in contrast to the many enablers who are usually exposed after someone famous confesses to sexually abusing people over multiple decades. What this “Hollywood Demons” docuseries mostly succeeds in doing is to show how denial is a major factor in why crimes are often unreported—and this type of denial is more likely to happen if a well-liked celebrity commits the crime.

Investigation Discovery premiered “Hollywood Demons” on March 24, 2025.

Review: ‘Who Is Luigi Mangione?,’ starring Dan Abrams, Joseph Kenny, Kelly Wirtz, Giovanna Blatterman, Gurwinder Bhogal and Dorian Wright

February 19, 2025

by Carla Hay

Luigi Mangione in “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“Who Is Luigi Mangione?”

Directed by Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross

Culture Representation: The documentary TV special “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans) talking about the case of Luigi Mangione, the wealthy American engineer who has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and other charges related to the gun-shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on December 2, 2024.

Culture Clash: Mangione, who was 26 when he was arrested in December 2024, has indicated that Thompson was a target because of health insurance companies’ controversial decisions to deny coverage to their customers.

Culture Audience: “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in coverage of this high-profile case, but this documentary offers no new information and comes across as sensationalistic and superficial.

“Who Is Luigi Mangione?” can’t even be bothered to comprehensively answer the question in the title. This low-quality documentary is just a rehash of information already told in other quickly made documentaries and news reports about Luigi Mangione. Adding to the tackiness, the documentary has an unidentified actor doing a terrible imitation of Mangione by narrating Mangione’s messages that were posted on social media.

Directed by Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross, “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” clocks in at just about 45 minutes, but even that is too long for the scant amount of worthwhile information in the documentary. Mangione was born on May 6, 1998, in Towson, Maryland. He came from a wealthy family and did not have a criminal record before his arrest.

By now, the basic facts of the case are widely known. A man, who law enforcement says is Mangione, was caught on surveillance video pointing a gun at and shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as 50-year-old Thompson was walking in front of the shooter outside the entrance of the New York Hilton Midtown hotel in New York City, on the morning of December 2, 2024. Thompson was in New York City for a conference with investors. The shooter fled on a bicycle.

After surveillance photos of Mangione were publicly revealed and identified him as the prime suspect, he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on December 7, 2024. Mangione was brought back to New York City and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, criminal weapon possession and stalking. An investigation revealed that during the murder, Mangione had been in New York City and had been staying at a hostel under an alias and using a fake photo ID. At the time this documentary premiered on TV, Mangione was in a New York City jail and denied bail as he awaits his trial.

The reactions to his arrest have been very divisive. Many people have condemned Mangione as a cold-blooded killer, while others have praised him because they think he’s a hero for going after corrupt practices of health insurance companies. A disclaimer at the beginning of the documentary says that all persons are innocent until proven guilty. So far, Mangione has not given interviews since he was named as a suspect and arrested for these crimes.

“Who Is Luigi Mangione?” does what all of the other documentaries about him have already done and shows a lot of the same photos and videos of him. These Luigi Mangione documentaries give the same easily available background information on Mangione and talk about how he had a privileged life. With all the media scrutiny about his life, no media outlet so far has been able to extensively say much about his personal life except that he had health issues but he was also athletic and liked to travel and hung out with some people close to his own age during these travels.

Mangione is consistently described as someone who was outgoing, friendly and highly intelligent in his school years. He was valedictorian of the Class of 2016 at Gilman School, a private Baltimore high school for boys. In 2020, he graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor of science degree in engineering for computer engineering and a master of science degree in engineering for computer and information science. Mangione relocated to Honolulu, Hawaii, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.

Mangione had ongoing spinal problems that got worse after he had a surfing accident in 2022 that caused him to have spondylosis, a degenerative condition of the spine. He later had spinal surgery and had other medical treatments for this condition. Because of his family’s wealth, he could afford to get the medical treatment that he needed. But according to his social media posts, Mangione was in a lot of physical pain, had episodes of “brain fog” (feeling confusion or loss of memory), and expressed deep resentment about the way insurance companies refuse to give coverage or make it difficult for people to get the health care that they need.

Mangione was never affiliated with or had UnitedHealthcare insurance, but because UnitedHealthcare is the largest health insurance company in the U.S., he apparently thought that UnitedHealthcare was the biggest villain in America’s health insurance issues. Mangione made comments on social media ranting about capitalism and how insurance companies in the U.S. care more about profits than people.

Mangione also expressed an interest in the manifestos of convicted serial killer Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, who died of rectal cancer in prison in 2023. Kaczynski was a highly educated recluse who had anti-capitalist political views that motivated Kaczynski’s murders when he targeted people to get bombs that he mailed to them. Mangione’s social media posts will no doubt be used as evidence in the prosecution’s case against Mangione.

Just like the other documentaries so far about Mangione, “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” has mostly interviews with people who’ve never met Mangione and just repeat public information about him. The few people interviewed in these documentaries who did know Mangione all make generic statements about how shocked they are about him being arrested for these crimes. By all accounts, Mangione “went off the grid” and isolated himself from June 2024 until he surfaced in New York City in December 2024. His mother reported him as a missing person in April 2024.

People interviewed in this documentary who knew Mangione are his friend R.J. Martin, who reveals nothing new; Mangione family friends Giovanna Blatterman and Joe Di Pascuale; author/social media influencer Gurwinder Bhogal, who says that he met Mangione in person because Mangione said he was a fan of Bhogal’s work; and Dorian Wright, who was Mangione’s yoga instructor in Hawaii. Bhogal comments on Mangione: “He believed that people were increasingly living automated lives.” Bhogal says he last heard from Mangione in June 2024. Blatterman comments on how Mangione has apparently changed drastically since she knew him as a kid: “It just doesn’t make sense … Something happened to his mind.”

Wright repeats the same descriptions of Mangione that others have already had. Wright also mentions that Mangione always caught the attention of women in Wright’s yoga class. The documentary has widely known information that the notoriety of this case has resulted in Mangione having numerous female admirers who seem infatuated with him because of his good looks, his wealth and now his “bad boy rebel” image. Considering all the tabloid coverage of Mangione, it’s somewhat surprising that people who dated Mangione in the past aren’t speaking out to get their moment in the spotlight.

By all accounts, Mangione did not personally know Thompson. Thompson grew up in Jewell, Iowa, and he spent most of his life living in the Midwest. Thompson, who graduated from South Hamilton High School in Jewell, was valedictorian of the graduating Class of 1993. He was also valedictorian of his graduating Class of 1997 at the University of Iowa, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration. In 2004, he joined UnitedHealthcare, which is headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. He became CEO of UnitedHealthcare in 2021.

TV journalist Dan Abrams from Law & Crime Network is an executive producer of this documentary. Abrams openly expresses disgust by the notion that Mangione deserves praise. Abrams then complains in the documentary that when he talked about this opinion on his live SiriusXM radio show, he got backlash from listeners. The documentary becomes less about answering, “Who is Luigi Mangione?,” and becomes more about what random people who don’t know him think about Mangione and the U.S. health care system.

In the documentary, Abrams sanctimoniously says that people tend to forget the murder victim in this case, but the documentary interviews only two people who say they knew Thompson. Philip Klein, a former bodyguard of Thompson, doesn’t have anything memorable to say in the documentary except that it was “the biggest mistake in the world” for Thompson not to have any security personnel with him during that fateful walk outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel.

Kelly Wirth, who describes herself as a Thompson family friend, says she knew Thompson when he was a boy. Wirth gives the expected praise of Thompson and his family. And apparently, she hadn’t been in contact with him in decades, because she still talks about him as if her most recent memories of him are when he was a kid.

Jamie Peck, who founded the December 4th Legal Committee to raise funds for Mangione’s legal defense, says in her interview for this documentary: “I don’t think it’s possible to be the CEO of a for-profit health insurance company and not have blood on your hands.” Another interviewee who expresses contempt for UnitedHealthcare is Yolanda Wilson, a bioethics professor who says that UnitedHealthcare nearly denied her coverage for a hysterectomy and would have denied her the coverage if her doctor hadn’t advocated for her.

Wendell Potter, a former health insurance company executive (the documentary never says where he used to work) states that he was in the health insurance industry for about 20 years and has now become an outspoken critic of the industry. Dr. David Hascom, an orthopedic spine surgeon, comments on what he thinks Mangione experienced for any spine surgery, even though Hascom has never met Mangione. Another person interviewed in the documentary is criminologist Casey Jordan, who gives dramatic commentary as if she’s doing a recap for a soap opera.

The only two New York City public officials interviewed in the documentary are New York Police Department chief of detectives Joseph Kenny and New York City mayor Eric Adams. Kenny sticks to the facts and repeats information that the NYPD already released to the public and the media. He’s really the only person interviewed in the documentary who has close personal knowledge about the charges and evidence against Mangione.

Adams gets preachy and comments on all the young people who support Mangione: “We’re seeing a radicalization of our young people. We’re seeing our young people believing that the answer to a problem is by using violence. And I think it’s the wrong way to go.” Considering that Adams is dealing with his own controversies that include accusations of corruption, he might not be the best person to give lectures about ethics.

And speaking of investigations over ethics, it’s briefly mentioned in the documentary that Thompson was under investigation for illegal insider trading at the time of his death. It’s unknown if Mangione knew this information when he wrote angry rants about UnitedHealthcare because this documentary is so shoddy and ineffectual in investigative journalism. In fact, “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” is incompetent at delivering any meanfingful insight except to show viewers what it looks like for a documentary to jump on a tabloid bandwagon and have nothing interesting to add.

Investigation Discovery premiered “Who Is Luigi Mangione?” on February 17, 2025.

Review: ‘Very Scary Lovers,’ starring Donnie Wahlberg and Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg

February 15, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Very Scary Lovers” co-hosts Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg and Donnie Wahlberg (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“Very Scary Lovers”

Directed by Desma Simon

Culture Representation: The documentary TV special “Very Scary Lovers” features a predominantly white group of people (with one African American) talking about convicted American murderers Erika Sifrit and Benjamin “BJ” Sifrit, who were 24 years old and married at the time of the couple’s homicidal crimes on the United States’ East Coast in 2002.

Culture Clash: Erika had a reputation as a “good girl” until she got involved with Navy SEAL-trained “bad boy” Benjamin, and they both had a drug-abusing lifestyle that included being involved in the murders of an unsuspecting couple at the Sifrit couple’s home in Ocean City, Maryland.

Culture Audience: “Very Scary Lovers” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about couples who commit crimes, but “Very Scary Lovers” is too formulaic and has nothing important to say about a case that has already gotten a lot of media exposure.

The documentary “Very Scary Lovers” (a spinoff of “Very Scary People”) is an unimpressive imitation of the Oxygen series “Snapped: Killer Couples.” “Very Scary Lovers” co-hosts Donnie Wahlberg and Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg deliver their lines stiffly. “Very Scary Lovers” is described by Investigation Discovery as a TV special, but it looks like a pilot episode for a TV series that Investigation Discovery rejected. If “Very Scary Lovers” turns into a series, expect it to rehash many of the same cases already covered in “Snapped: Killer Couples” and many other true-crime TV series.

“Very Scary Lovers” is directed by Desma Simon, who is one of the show’s executive producers. Entertainer spouses Wahlberg and McCarthy-Wahlberg are also among the show’s executive producers. Wahlberg is the host of “Very Scary People,” a true crime series that originated on Headline News (HLN) in 2019, before “Very Scary People” moved to Investigation Discovery in 2023. Wahlberg is also an actor (formerly of the TV drama series “Blue Bloods”) and a member of singing group New Kids on the Block. McCarthy-Wahlberg is mostly known as a reality TV personality who rose to fame in the 1990s as the co-host of the MTV dating show “Singled Out” and later became a judge on Fox’s U.S. version of “The Masked Singer.”

“Very Scary Lovers” is about the case of “thrill kill” couple Erika Sifrit and Benjamin “BJ” Sifrit. Erika and Benjamin went on trial separately in 2003, for the 2002 murders of 32-year-old Joshua Ford and 51-year-old Martha “Geney” Crutchley, who were an unmarried couple. Erika and Benjamin met Ford and Crutchley at a bar called Seacrets in Ocean City, Maryland, on May 24, 2002.

At the time, Erika and Benjamin were living in a rented condo in Ocean City, at a building complex called The Rainbow. Ford and Crutchley were from Fairfax, Virginia, and were vacationing in Ocean City. According to court testimony and police reports, Erika and Benjamin invited Ford and Crutchley to the Sifrits’ condo on the night that the two couples met.

Ford and Crutchley were murdered at the condo. Ford was shot, while Crutchley was stabbed, according to Erika’s confession. What made the murders particularly gruesome is that Ford and Crutchley were dismembered. Some of their body parts were later discovered in a landfill in Delaware, in early June 2002.

Erika and Benjamin were caught because they were arrested for another crime. On May 31, 2002, they were caught during a burglary of a Hooters restaurant in Ocean City. While she was in handcuffs outside the restaurant, Erika started to hyperventilate and asked one of the police officers to get her prescribed Xanax medication from her purse.

In the purse, the cop discovered the driver’s licenses of Ford and Crutchley, who had been reported missing. Also found in the purse were spent bullet casings. That’s when law enforcement knew that the Sifrits were involved in crimes more serious than burglary.

“Snapped: Killer Couples” covered the exact same case in the show’s Season 11, Episode 2 that premiered in 2019. Other true-crime TV series have covered this notorious case, including “American Justice,” “Deadly Sins,” “Deadly Women,” “Forensic Files,” “Sins and Secrets” and “True Crime Daily.”

If you don’t know the outcome of the Sifrit murder trials, this review won’t reveal this information if you want to see any of this TV coverage for yourself. However, it’s enough to say that Erik and BJ blamed each other for being the mastermind. And one spouse got worse punishment than the other.

While in police custody, Erika eventually confessed to being involved in the murders, by saying that Benjamin shot Ford and ordered Erika to stab Crutchley. Benjamin had a different story during his trial. He said that Erika murdered Ford and Crutchley, and he just helped cover up the crime by dismembering the bodies and helping Erika dispose of the body parts. Erika is the one who made the first confession to police about the dismemberment and where some of the body parts were disposed.

There was apparently no motive for the murders except it was a twisted game for Erika and Benjamin. What Erika and Benjamin both agree on is that while both couples were partying at the Sifrits’ condo, Erika and Benjamin falsely accused Ford and Crutchley of stealing Erika’s purse, where Erika claimed she had a valuable ring. Erika even made a 911 call to report this supposed theft, but she hung up after giving a few vague details about her purse being stolen by someone in her home. (The 911 recording is played in the documentary.)

The purse was never stolen and was actually deliberately hidden by Erika and Benjamin, who both say that they wanted to scare Ford and Crutchley. Instead, Ford and Crutchley were murdered. Police believe that in the final minutes of Ford’s and Crutchley’s lives, Ford and Crutchley fled into the condo’s bathroom, where someone with a gun shot Ford through the locked door. After forcing the bathroom door open, Ford was killed with a fatal shot, and Crutchley was stabbed to death.

What would cause anyone to commit these heinous crimes? “Very Scary Lovers” covers the same basic facts of the case as “Snapped: Killer Couples” in nearly the exact same format: Each show talks about the personal backgrounds of the killers and has interviews with people who knew the couple. Then, the crimes, investigations and punishments are detailed. There are also re-enactments with actors portraying the killers and other people involved in the case.

Some of the same people are interviewed in “Very Scary Lovers” and the “Snapped: Killer Couples” episode covering the Sifrit murder case. These same interviewees are Kristin Heinbaugh, a childhood fried of Erika’s; Brett Case, a former homicide detective for the Ocean City Police Department; and Scott Bernal, the Ocean City Police Department’s lead investigator for the case.

Erika did not have a criminal record before she met and married Benjamin. She was born Erika Elaine Grace on February 3, 1978, in Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania, which is near Altoona, Pennsylvania. Erika came from an upper-middle-class family and is the only child of Mitch Grace (owner of a construction business) and homemaker Charlotte “Cookie” Grace.

By all accounts, Erika was under extreme pressure from her parents to be an overachiever in academics and in sports. Her mother is described as being materialistic. Erika’s father was the coach of Erika’s high school basketball team, where she was a star player.

However, according to Heinbaugh, Erika felt like an outsider in her own home because Erika’s parents were extremely close with each other and made Erika feel as if she was never good enough. Heinbaugh says that Erika had anxiety and depression and was prescribed Xanax before becoming an adult. Heinbaugh describes Erika’s parents punishing her for weeks at a time if Erika got less than “A” grades or if she didn’t do as well as expected in basketball games.

Erika turned to scrapbooking for emotional comfort. She also became obsessed with Hooters, a chain of casual restaurants known for having its female servers wear outfits that show off their physiques, especially their breasts. Erika reportedly developed this fixation on Hooters because her father would take her there on a regular basis when she was a teenager.

Benjamin Adam Shrift was born in Estherville, Iowa, on October 21, 1977. However, he grew up in Minnesota and Tennessee. “Very Scary Lovers” doesn’t say much about his parents Craig Sifrit and Elizabeth “Buffy” Sifrit to provide any insight on what kind of parenting he got from them. The documentary mentions Benjamin was a star competitive swimmer in high school, but sometime during his teenage years, Benjamin became rebellious enough where his parents would lock him out of their house as punishment. Benjamin learned how to pick locks during this time, according to the documentary.

Benjamin seemed to be turning his life around when he was 18. He joined the U.S. Navy and enrolled in the Navy SEAL program, which is the most elite unit of the U.S. Navy. Benjamin became a rare 18-year-old to be named an Honor Man in the Navy SEAL program, which is a peer-voted title for the person named as the best person in the class. But there were signs that he had a violent side.

Mark Greene, who was in the same Navy SEAL class as Benjamin, describes an incident when he, Benjamin and a few classmates were having a meal outdoors. There was a pigeon at a nearby table. One of the classmates jokingly dared Benjamin to grab the pigeon and bite off the pigeon’s head. However, Benjamin thought this was a serious dare and was about to do this barbaric act of animal cruelty until his classmates stopped him and told him that the dare was a joke.

Benjamin was in the Navy SEAL program when he met Erika in August 1998, at a bar in Virginia. At the time, she was a student Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she had a partial scholarship for basketball. Benjamin and Erika eloped after dating each other for three weeks. According to the documentary, this elopement was Benjamin’s idea and was considered out of character for Erika.

The couple’s relationship has been described by many as Benjamin being the dominant one, and Erika being overly clingy and caught up in doing anything to please him. According to the documentary, when Erika found out that Benjamin cheated on her with an unnamed woman who lived in Arkansas, Erika mainly blamed herself because Erika thought she wasn’t doing enough to make Benjamin happy. Meanwhile, the documentary says that Benjamin allegedly threatened this Arkansas mistress telling the mistress he would kill her and her kids if she told Erika the details of the affair.

Benjamin left the Navy SEAL program in disgrace, when he was dishonorably discharged for a number of violations, such as going absent without leave, having Erika as an unauthorized guest, and wearing the Navy SEAL insignia before he completed the program. “Snapped: Killer Couples” inaccurately reports that Benjamin quit the Navy SEAL program because it had too many restrictions that were in conflict with what Erika wanted out of the marriage. “Snapped: Killer Couples” inaccurately makes it sound like Benjamin left the Navy SEAL program to please Erika, who didn’t want Benjamin to be subjected to military assignments where he would have to work far from home or relocate on a regular basis.

After Benjamin’s exit from the U.S. Navy, he and Erika moved back to her hometown of Altoona, where they (with financial help from Erika’s father) started a scrapbooking supply business together by opening a retail store named Memory Lane. Benjamin and Erika also had a side business selling merchandise (mostly Hooters products) on eBay. Erika and Benjamin were also abusing alcohol, cocaine and other drugs. The couple had a collection of snakes and crocodiles and gave these pets names such as Hitler, HIV, Bonnie and Clyde.

Although plenty of people believe that Benjamin corrupted Erika and was the one who was controlling her, other people believe that Erika was a willing participant and was waiting for a partner in crime to unleash her unlawful desires. Dr. Katie Knoll-Frey, a criminologist interviewed in “Very Scary Lovers,” believes that Erika was emotionally vulnerable and easily manipulated by Benjamin. Erika’s childhood friend Heinbaugh essentially has the same opinion and believes that Erika’s parents didn’t raise her in an emotionally healthy and loving way, so Erika had low self-esteem and was an easy target for Benjamin.

There are no family members interviewed for either the criminals or the murder victims. Other people interviewed for “Very Scary Lovers” are journalist Ben Book of the Maryland Coastal Dispatch and tattoo artist John Mika, the person who gave tattoos to Benjamin and Erika after the murders and before Benjamin and Erika were arrested. Mika says that Benjamin and Erika acted like a normal loving couple, but he got the impression that Erika was a “ride or die” type of wife who would do anything for her husband.

“Very Scary Lovers” falls short of being a worthwhile watch because it’s really just a lazy copy of what other true-crime series have done in covering this case. The interviewees who are in “Very Scary Lovers” but were not interviewed about this case in “Snapped: Killer Couples” might have a few anecdotes but they do not have anything vital to add. “Very Scary Lovers” doesn’t mention that Benjamin divorced Erika in 2010.

“Very Scary Lovers” has very drab narration. And when Wahlberg and McCarthy-Wahlberg appear on screen, they just look like actors reading their lines with no real personality or charisma. “Very Scary Lovers” missed an opportunity to stand out from the pack of these true-crime documentaries and should have spotlighted a case that hasn’t gotten so much media coverage already. Instead, “Very Scary Lovers” took a very uninspired approach and just regurgitates a high-profile case in a way that fails to do anything original or compelling.

Investigation Discovery premiered “Very Scary Lovers” on February 2, 2025.

Review: ‘The Fall of Diddy,’ starring Danyel Smith, Kat Pasion, Roger Bonds, Thalia Graves, Rodney ‘Lil’ Rod’ Jones, Gordon Chambers and Phil Pines

February 9, 2025

by Carla Hay

Sean Combs in “The Fall of Diddy” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“The Fall of Diddy”

Directed by Yoruba Richen, Emma Schwartz and Scott Preston

Culture Representation: The five-episode documentary series “The Fall of Diddy” features a predominantly African American group of people (with some white people, Latin people and Asians) talking about the rise and fall of disgraced mogul/entertainer Sean Combs.

Culture Clash: Several of the people who are interviewed claim that Combs abuses his fame and power to commit crimes that allegedly include assaults, various sex crimes, racketeering and attempted murder.

Culture Audience: “The Fall of Diddy” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about celebrities and can tolerate graphic details in sex scandals.

Mara S. Campo and Phil Pines in “The Fall of Diddy” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“The Fall of Diddy” features interviews with several people (including some of his rape accusers) talking about their experiences with Sean Combs. This docuseries has a good variety of perspectives, but there’s a lack of accountability for enablers. Many of the interviewees previously told their stories in documentaries and news reports. A few are giving televised interviews about their experiences for the first time.

Directed by Yoruba Richen, Emma Schwartz and Scott Preston (who gets directorial credit on one of the episodes), “The Fall of Diddy” is produced by Maxine Productions and Rolling Stone Films. Maxine Productions is also known for the controversial docuseries “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” which premiered on Investigation Discovery in 2024. Rolling Stone Films (a company owned by Penske Media Corporation) has previously produced short documentary films in 2015 starring the Black Keys, Sheryl Crow and Ringo Starr. “The Fall of Diddy” is Rolling Stone Films’ first comprehensive investigative documentary series.

Combs was born in New York City, on November 4, 1969. He is a mogul in entertainment, fashion and alcoholic beverages. He’s best known as the founder of Bad Boy Entertainment, which launched in 1993 and includes the successful Bad Boy Records, whose specialty is R&B, hip-hop and pop. Some of the hit artists who have been signed to Bad Boy included the Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans and Danity Kane. Combs is also a music artist, producer and occasional actor. His nicknames over the years have been Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Diddy and Love.

In September 2024, Combs was arrested on several federal charges of sex crimes and racketeering. Since his arrest, he has been held in a New York City jail without bail. Combs also has several civil lawsuits from many people who are accusing him of various sex crimes (including rape) and other physical abuse against women, men and children. In many of the lawsuits, his accusers say that they were drugged without their consent.

Combs has denied all of these accusations except for the one that was in a hotel security video that was first televised by CNN in May 2024. In the video, which was recorded at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in March 2016, Combs is seen in a hotel floor hallway kicking and dragging singer Cassie Ventura, who was his girlfriend at the time, after she tried to get on an elevator. Ventura is in a fetal position during this attack, and she doesn’t fight back.

The assault matches one of several accusations of abuse that Ventura described in her November 2023 lawsuit against Combs. Her lawsuit—which accused him of sexual abuse, sex trafficking and other physical abuse—was settled one day after it was filed. Ventura was his on-again/off-again girlfriend from 2007 to 2018. Ventura (who went by the one-name stage moniker Cassie) was also signed to Bad Boy Records.

A few days after CNN televised the assault video, Combs posted a now-deleted Instagram video in which he said he took “full responsibility” for the attack on Cassie and said that this assault happened when was at “rock bottom” in his life. Combs also mentioned that he had gone to therapy and rehab, but he didn’t specify the reasons and how long he received treatment.

Combs and his representatives declined to be interviewed for “The Fall of Diddy,” which has repeated written statements from Combs’ legal counsel saying that Combs denies all accusations against him and he is looking forward to defending himself in court. All of this background information and more details about Combs’ scandals are included in “The Fall of Diddy,” which has the first four episodes giving a mostly chronological timeline of Combs’ life. Episode 1 is titled “The Making of a Mogul.” Episode 2 is titled “Empire Under Fire.” Episode 3 is titled “Untouchable.” Episode 4 is titled “The Fall.”

Episode 5 is titled “The Assistant,” and it was a sudden addition to the series, which was originally announced as a four-episode series. Unlike the other episodes, Episode 5 is half of the run time of each previous episode. Episode 5 only features journalist Mara S. Campo interviewing Phil Pines, who was Combs’ senior executive assistant from 2019 to 2021.

Campo is interviewed for other episodes of the series because she used to work for Revolt, the TV network founded by Combs in 2013. Combs stepped down from Revolt in 2023, after he was accused by more people of sex crimes. Campo says she was happy working at Revolt, and she is one of the few people interviewed in the documentary who says she never had a personal negative experience with Combs. Rev. Conrad Tiller, former minister of hip-hop for the Nation of Islam, is also interviewed and doesn’t have anything negative to say about Combs.

“The Fall of Diddy” will inevitably get compared to other documentaries about Combs, including Peacock’s documentary film “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” which premiered on January 14, 2025. “The Fall of Diddy” is the better documentary—and not just because “The Fall of Diddy” has the advantage of being a series that could have more footage than a feature-length film. Overall, the quality of interviews and the editing for “The Fall of Diddy” are superior to “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy.”

“The Fall of Diddy” has the expected chronicle of Combs’ life, from his childhood to his success as one of the richest hip-hop moguls in the world before his privileged life came crashing down on him with these scandals and legal problems. The docuseries dutifully covers the basic well-known facts of his past. Sean Combs’ father Melvin Combs was a drug dealer/police informant who was murdered (shot to death) at age 33, when Sean was 2 years old. The murder remains unsolved.

Sean’s widowed mother Janice Combs then moved to suburban Mount Vernon, New York. Sean has a younger sister named Keisha, who is never mentioned in the documentary. Sean was bullied as a child. But from an early age, Janice taught him to fight back even harder against his bullies, says cultural critic/journalist Touré, who has covered Sean’s career since the 1990s.

Tim Patterson, a Sean Combs childhood friend who was also interviewed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” says in “The Fall of Diddy” that Janice has always been a huge influence on Sean. Patterson describes Janice as being frequently abusive to Sean and says he personally witnessed Janice hitting Sean very hard. Gordon Chambers, a former Bad Boy Records songwriter, describes Janice as an ambitious hustler. Chambers says, “I think of her as the queen of that energy.” Janice Combs is not interviewed in the documentary and so far has not publicly commented on the federal charges against Sean.

Patterson says that Sean became tougher and more ruthless as Sean gained more influence and power. An incident described in the documentary is Sean shoving Christine Hylton, the mother of fashion stylist Misa Hylton, who is the mother of Sean’s eldest child Justin. (Justin was born in 1993.) Misa Hylton and Christine Hylton are not interviewed in the documentary and have not commented on this allegation. No one in Sean’s family is interviewed for this documentary either.

One thing that “The Fall of Diddy” has that no other documentary has is an interview with an unidentified woman, who says she witnessed Sean assault his then-girlfriend in 1988, when they were all students at Howard University. Sean attended Howard from 1987 to 1989, when he dropped out to pursue a career in the music business. In June 2024, Howard University announced it was severing all of its associations with Sean, including rescinding the honorary degree that the university awarded to Sean in 2014, and canceling the scholarship that was in his name.

The Howard University witness, whose face is obscured to protect her identity, says that she and her then-roommate (whom she did not name) were in their dorm room when they heard Sean outside shouting for his girlfriend, who lived in the same building, to come outside to talk to him. According to the anonymous witness, the girlfriend (whose name is also not mentioned) went outside, and the witness and her roommate could see from a window that Sean began beating the woman with a belt.

The witness says that while she and the roommate watched from their dorm window, they yelled at Sean to stop the attack, but he didn’t listen to them. She said that she and her roommate were too afraid to go outside and confront him. They also did not call for help. The witness chokes up in tears when she says she regrets not doing more to assist the assault victim. She says ruefully, “Nobody actually came to her rescue.”

“The Fall of Diddy” just has that one anonymous interview with the former Howard University student who says she saw Sean assault his girlfriend at the time, whereas “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy” has multiple anonymous interviews. “The Fall of Diddy” also mostly avoids putting vague accusations in the documentary, since the people interviewed are specific about the years and locations where they witnessed or experienced certain incidents.

From the beginning of Sean’s career, he was controversial. He started as an intern at New York City-based Uptown Records (founded by Andre Harrell) in 1990. Sean quickly rose to become an A&R executive at Uptown, where he worked with hit artists such as Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, Al B. Sure!, and Heavy D & the Boyz. Sean was working at Uptown in 1991 when he had his first big scandal.

In 1991, Sean was the chief promoter of an AIDS fundraiser basketball game at the City College of New York gymnasium. The event was oversold, and nine people (ranging in ages from 17 to 28) died in a stampede, which could have been prevented if exit doors had not been locked. The documentary includes archival footage of this tragedy.

Sean was mostly blamed for this mishandled event, he was sued over it, and he later settled out of court with the families of the dead victims. Two of these family members are interviewed in the documentary: Jason Swain (whose 20-year-old brother Dirk died) and Sonny Williams (whose 20-year-old sister Sonya died). Swain and Williams were also interviewed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” and they say essentially similar things in both documentaries.

On a side note: Al B. Sure! has had a longtime feud with Sean going back to the early 1990s. That feud is detailed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” in which Sure accuses Sean of being part of a conspiracy to kill Sure. Sure also claims in that documentary that former model Kim Porter—who was the mother of one son with Sure and the mother of one son and twin daughters with Sean—was murdered and didn’t die of pneumonia, which was her official cause of death in 2018.

Sean was fired from Uptown Records in 1993, reportedly because of ego clashes with Harrell and financial spending issues. Shortly after his ouster from Uptown, Sean launched Bad Boy. But as we all know, the controversies didn’t stop there.

In the 1990s, Sean was a key player in the feud between East Coast and West Coast hip-hop stars. By the end of the feud, two of its biggest stars were murdered in drive-by shootings: California-based Tupac Shakur in September 1996, and New York-based the Notorious B.I.G. (whose real name was Christopher Wallace) in March 1997. Both murders remain unsolved.

At the height of the East Coast/West Coast feud in the mid-1990s, Bad Boy Records rival Death Row Records, headquartered in Los Angeles, tried to set up East Coast operations called Death Row East. In “The Fall of Diddy” documentary, interviewee Dewitt Gilmore says that Sean Combs tried to run Gilmore over with a car, just because Gilmore was wearing a Death Row East T-shirt that Gilmore had gotten for free.

Gilmore says Combs (whom he did not know personally) was armed with a gun, expressed that he was offended by the T-shirt, and instigated a high-speed chase in Manhattan against Gilmore that Gilmore was certain was intended to kill him. Gilmore says he was lucky enough to escape in this car chase. Gilmore also makes it clear that he did not say or do anything to provoke Sean except wear a T-shirt that he had no idea would set someone off on an alleged rampage against him.

In the documentary interview, Gilmore still seems emotionally shaken up by the alleged incident. Either he’s telling the truth or he’s a very convincing liar. Gilmore directly addresses Sean when he looks at the camera and says: “Dude, you’re a menace to society.” Gilmore adds, “My story is just a piece to the bigger puzzle of his mayhem.”

“The Fall of Diddy” also chronicles Sean’s May 1999 assault of Steve Stoute (who at the time was the manager of rapper Nas) because Sean reportedly disliked how Sean looked in Nas’ “Hate Me Now” music video. Sean pleaded guilty to harassment and was sentenced to one day of anger management. Stoute later sued Sean over this assault. The lawsuit was settled out of court.

More trouble came in December 1999, when Sean and his protégé Jamal Barrow (also known as rapper Shyne) were arrested with singer/actress Jennifer Lopez (who was dating Sean at the time) over a shooting incident that happened when an argument broke out between Sean and some other people at Club New York in New York City’s Manhattan borough. The shooting injured three innocent bystanders, one of whom was Natania Reuben, who testified that Sean was the one who shot her in the face. He denied all accusations.

Lopez was not charged in the incident, but Barrow and Sean went on trial in 2001 for various weapons-related crimes in this Club New York shooting. Sean was acquitted of all the charges, while Barrow was found guilty of eight of the 10 charges and served almost nine years in prison. A pattern was emerging of Sean being involved in violent incidents but not getting prison time.

Ventura’s quickly settled lawsuit in November 2023 opened the floodgates to more accusations of Sean committing crimes that were previously not made public. And since Sean has been arrested and jailed without bail, even more people have come forward with similar accusations. These more recent accusations are the main reasons why most people will want to watch “The Fall of Diddy.”

Among those interviewed are people who say that Sean sexually assaulted them. These accusers are music producer Rodney “Lil’ Rod” Jones, who is a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against Sean, whom he lived and worked with from 2022 to 2023; actress Kat Pasion, who dated Sean off and on from 2013 to 2021, and says their relationship ended after he raped her; and Thalia Graves, who says she was raped by Sean in 2001, and the rape was recorded on video.

Graves believes she was drugged without consent before she was raped. Graves says she met Sean because she was at the time dating a man (whom she does not name in the interview) who was a Bad Boy Records executive. A caption in the documentary says that this man says that Graves tried to bribe him to back up her claims.

In Jones’ lawsuit against Sean, Jones claims that Sean sexually groped Jones, drugged him without consent, and forced Jones to participate in sex acts with sex workers. Jones claims that actor Cuba Gooding Jr. also made sexual advances on him while Jones worked for Sean. Jones also alleges that Sean didn’t pay Jones for Jones’ work on Sean’s 2023 release “Love Album: Off the Grid.”

Pasion says that she remembers a 2019 trip that she and Sean took to the Bahamas. During this vacation, Pasion says she was watching the docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly.” Pasion vividly recalls that Sean noticed she was watching this exposé of R&B singer R. Kelly’s long history of being an accused sexual abuser. Pasion says that Sean then made this comment to her, “There’s a little bit of R. Kelly in all of us.” (In 2021, R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison for sex crimes.)

Several of Sean’s former employees are also interviewed for “The Fall of Diddy.” They include former Bad Boy Records engineer/producer Prince Charles Alexander; Dr. LaJoyce Brookshire, who was Sean’s publicist from 1995 to 1997; Rob Shuter, who was Sean’s publicist from 2003 to 2005; former Bad Boy Records producer Easy Mo Bee; former Danity Kane member D. Woods; Roger Bonds, who was Sean’s bodyguard from 2003 to 2012; Jourdan Cha’Taun, who was Sean’s personal chef from 2007 to 2010; makeup artist Mylah Morales; and Wardel Fenderson, who was the getaway driver for Sean in the 1999 Club New York shooting incident.

Fenderson gives his first on-camera interview for “The Fall of Diddy” but he doesn’t really say anything that he’s hasn’t already publicly revealed. He says that Sean offered him $50,000 to take the gun that Sean was accused of using in the shooting. Fenderson ultimately testified for the prosecution and recanted his bribed previous statements about what happened that night.

Morales (who was interviewed in “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy”) repeats her story of seeing Ventura injured with cuts and bruises after an apparent fight with Sean in 2010 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Morales says she didn’t actually see or hear Sean assault Ventura, but Morales says that she knew Sean was the only person in the room with Ventura when the injuries happened. Morales says she helped Ventura stay in a safe location and got her private medical treatment from a doctor whom Morales knows.

Morales admits that she and Ventura were both too afraid to report this incident to law enforcement or to go to a hospital. Morales ominously says of Sean Combs: “Many people are afraid of him to this day.” Morales says that she and Ventura also never spoke of this incident again after Morales helped Ventura.

Bonds and Cha’Taun say that they each witnessed Sean assault Ventura on separate occasions. However, they admit they didn’t report these assaults at the time because they were afraid of getting fired or other retaliation. Bonds says that before Sean hired him as a bodyguard, Bonds was an ex-con who had a hard time finding a job because of his prison record, and he didn’t want to face unemployment again.

Bonds comments on Sean: “He is a master manipulator.” Cha’Taun says of coming forward as a whistleblower: “I’m not afraid anymore … These people do not have the power that they think they do.”

Danity Kane was an all-female pop group formed during the reality show “Making the Band 3,” which was televised on MTV from 2005 to 2009. Sean was an executive producer and star of the show, which featured aspiring singers competing to be in a group that would get signed to Bad Boy Records. In “The Fall of Diddy,” D. Woods says she believes that she and former Danity Kane member Aubrey O’Day were fired from the group in 2008 (this firing was on the TV show) because they rejected Sean’s sexual advances.

Not all the stories about Sean are about physical violence or retaliation. His former publicist Shuter is one of the few ex-employees who doesn’t have anything bad to say about Sean in “The Fall of Diddy.” Shuter comments: “We used to call him Puff the Magic Dragon. We said that with love. He threw the best parties.”

Mark Jacobs, a director who worked for the VH1 reality competition series “I Want to Work for Diddy” (which was on the air from 2008 to 2010), describes an inappropriate situation that he experienced the first time he met Sean, which was at Sean’s house. Jacobs claims that Sean came down the stairs and was completely naked underneath an open robe. Jacobs says he was too shocked to say anything about it and didn’t want to give the impression that he was uptight.

Other media people interviewed in the documentary mostly comment on facts that have already been reported. The journalists and other media people interviewed in the documentary include Mark Anthony Neal, editor of the non-fiction book “That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader”; journalists Peter Noel, Cheyenne Roundtree and Dee Barnes; and social media personalities B. Scott and Tisa Tells.

However, former Vibe magazine editor-in-chief Danyel Smith retells her story of how Sean threatened her life and she had to go through a top-secret mission to hide magazine proofs from him and his associates. It happened after Vibe did a cover photo shoot with Sean for Vibe’s December 1997 issue. Sean demanded to have approval of the photo of him that would be on the cover.

Smith told him no because it was against the magazine’s policy for anyone outside of the magazine’s editorial department to approve the cover photos. She also declined his request to see the cover photo before it went to press. Smith said that in a phone conversation between her and Sean about this matter about the cover photo: “He said he would see me dead in a trunk if I did not show it [the photo] to him.” Smith says she immediately called Vibe’s attorney, who got Sean to fax over an apology to Smith.

However, Smith says she had to have extra security and somewhat had to go into hiding, by shuttling from office to office, in order to protect the photos and that magazine issue before everything was published. Smith gets emotionally tearful when she says she had so much trauma from that experience, she blocked much of it out of her memories and didn’t remember everything that happened until Vibe’s former research chief reminded her. Smith says that after that incident, she had a cordial relationship with Sean, out of necessity, because she says it was impossible not to be in her type of job and not have some kind of interaction with Sean.

Many of the interviewees who know Sean well have described him as having a hedonistic drug-fueled lifestyle, where people attending his most private parties were usually consuming large quantities of cocaine, ecstasy, alcohol, marijuana and other drugs. Pines says that in his job as Sean’s senior executive assistant, he was often ordered to supply drugs for what Pines says were Sean’s orgies, which Sean called Wild King Nights, also known as “freak-offs,” according to court documents. Pines says he never saw any sexual activities at these parties because he was in another room from where he believed the sexual activities were taking place.

However, Pines (who is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Sean) says that on at least one occasion, Sean pressured him to perform a sexual act with a woman with her consent, while Sean watched this sexual activity. Pines says he felt disgusted by what was happening, but he complied with Sean’s demands because Pines didn’t want to get fired. Pines says he also saw several women (usually non-famous women in their 20s) come and go from these parties. Pines claims he witnessed Sean kick one of these women.

Pines also talks about how he often had to clean up after these orgies and still gets nauseated by what he saw. What he saw won’t be fully described here, but he does describe bodily fluids such as blood and urine. Pines also says that the hotel rooms where these orgies usually took place often had significant damage that would cost thousands of dollars to repair. He comments that there was a lot of baby oil that he had to clean up, which has now made him dislike the smell of baby oil.

It should be noted that in the federal raid of Sean’s homes in Miami, Los Angeles and New York in March 2024, law enforcement found more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil. Several lawsuits accuse Sean or people who work for him of lacing baby oil with Rohypnol or GHB, which are liquid drugs that cause disorientation or unconsciousness. The plaintiffs in many of these lawsuits alleging rape say that they believe they were raped after being drugged with unknown substances.

Several people interviewed claim that Sean often likes to watch and videorecord the activities at his orgies. Sean has admitted in past interviews that he has a decadent sex life, but he says he only engages in consensual sexual activity. Pines says part of his assistant job was to erase incriminating videos and computer search histories for Sean. Pines also commented that Kristina Khorram (the chief of staff for Combs Enterprises) was Pines’ actual direct supervisor. Khorram has declined requests for interviews.

Pines, who describes himself as coming from a Christian background, gets tearful when he talks about his time working for Sean, whom Pines calls a “predator.” Like many people who worked with Sean, Pines says he was thrilled at first because he thought working for this celebrity would open up many more opportunities for him. But the dream turned into a nightmare, says Pines.

“The Fall of Diddy” certainly has enough of his former employees and former associates placing blame and telling stories. But the documentary doesn’t go deep enough in naming and trying to interview powerful people (not low-ranking employees) who knew about these alleged crimes and might have helped cover up these alleged crimes or simply enabled by doing nothing. Khorram certainly isn’t the only person who could be considered an enabler.

Sean Combs did not get his fortune from out of nowhere. He was well-funded by people at corporations that have a responsibility to know if he was committing serious crimes that could ruin people’s lives. But as is often the case, many enablers don’t care if they are profiting from other people’s pain, as long as the money keeps pouring in to the enablers. The enablers only come forward if they are forced to reveal information, or if the disgraced person is no longer of use to them.

Many documentaries about Sean Combs are being released after these scandals were made public and before his trial. Some people might question how much these documentaries might affect his ability to get a fair trial. But the reality is that these documentaries are considered news reports, which are entitled to rights that have to do with freedom of the press. Still, any documentary about Combs and his scandals will be considered too salacious and tacky for some viewers, so viewer discretion is advised. And one thing’s for sure: There isn’t a shortage of people who have things to say about this disgraced celebrity.

Investigation Discovery premiered “The Fall of Diddy” on January 27, 2025.

Review: ‘The Curious Case of …,’ starring Beth Karas

January 18, 2025

by Carla Hay

“The Curious Case of …” (Photo courtesy of Investigation Discovery)

“The Curious Case of …”

Culture Representation: The documentary/reality series “The Curious Case of …” features a predominantly white group of people (with some people of color) talking about crimes that took place in various parts of the United States.

Culture Clash: Various people are the accusers and are accused of crimes.

Culture Audience: “The Curious Case of …” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries, but the show’s tabloid approach lowers the quality of this series.

“The Curious Case of …” is a spinoff series to “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace,”  a three-season series that became one of the biggest ratings hits for Investigation Discovery. Instead focusing on one case for the entire series, “The Curious Case of …” features a different case per episode. This shoddily made program is exploitative reality TV pretending to be an investigative docuseries. The only thing viewers will learn is how this tacky show enables attention seekers of dubious credibility.

“The Curious Case of …” is produced for Investigation Discovery by Hot Snakes Media, the same production company behind “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.” The third and final season of “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace” devolved into antics and meltdowns with reality show editing. “The Curious Case of …” seems to be continuing that tone, to the detriment of the show’s subject matter.

Legal analyst Beth Karas, who was prominently featured in “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace,” is the host and narrator of “The Curious Case of …,” a show that seems to be way beneath her talent and expertise as a former assistant district attorney in New York City. Karas also used to be an on-air correspondent for Court TV in the 1990s and 2000s. On “The Curious Case of …,” she doesn’t do interviews or hard-hitting investigations. She’s just relegated to doing analyses and recaps of some of the cringeworthy shenanigans on display.

The first episode of “The Curious Case of …” (the only episode available for review before the series premiere) is nothing but a bait and switch that can be considered insulting to viewers looking for a real true crime story. The episode, titled “The Curious Case of … Bam Margera,” is advertised as a close look at the legal troubles of former “Jackass” star Bam Margera and whether or not he should be under a guardianship. This episode is more of a pathetic spectacle than a real investigation.

Margera was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on September 28, 1979. His birth name is Brandon Cole Margera. He is a former skateboarder and TV personality whose fame peaked in the 2000s. Margera has been publicly battling addictions to alcohol and other drugs for several years. He has had various arrests over the years and has been in and out of rehab.

Instead of being about Margera, the episode is really about a feud between entrepreneur Lima Jevremović (who was Margera’s guardian from June 2021 to July 2023) and YouTube personality BJ Corville, a lawyer who is the self-proclaimed leader of the Free Bam movement that believes he should not be under a guardianship. Karas says about the topic of the episode: “This is a story about the right to make your own decisions.” Actually, it’s not. It’s more about people making fools out of themselves on camera.

Margera is not interviewed for this show. Instead, the only exclusive footage the show was able to get of him are two brief clips (less than five minutes each) of Margera shouting angrily while he’s outside of the home property called Bam Castle that he owns in Pocopson Township, which is near West Chester. In the first clip, which is the episode’s opening scene, Margera and an unidentified female companion (whose face is blurred out on camera) are seen confronting Jevremović. This female companion is most likely model/actress Dannii Marie, who was Margera’s girlfriend at the time, but they got married in May 2024, after dating each other for less than a year.

It’s later explained that Jevremović’s guardianship of Margera had ended at the time this confrontation video was filmed, but Jevremović called police to report that she heard Bam threaten his older brother Jesse Margera, a musician who rents a home on the Bam Castle property. A Pennsylvania state trooper has arrived at the scene. Bam, wearing a black outfit and a long black towel over his head, walks over to Jevremović and says loudly to her: “Why are you so evil?”

Bam’s female companion, who is also hostile, points angrily to Jevremović and yells some choice words, including, “Get the fuck away from me!” Bam and his female companion both get into a car and leave. Ultimately, no one was arrested or detained in this incident.

In the second clip, Bam is seen ranting by himself about his brother. Bam is behind a fence on the Bam Castle property, after Bam has spray painted a wall with graffiti. Bam, who is wearing sunglasses and furry animal slippers, appears to be under the influence of an unknown substance. Whatever his state of mind is in this footage, it’s obviously not good.

The day after this “Curious Case of …” episode aired, Bam and Dannii Marie posted an Instagram video on January 14, 2025, in response to the episode. In the Instagram video, they both denounce Jevremović and claim that she was dangerous to Bam’s health when she was his guardian. In the video, Dannii Marie says that Bam is now “doing great.” Bam adds, “I’m just glad that part of my terrible, terrible life is over, and I’m not dead from it.”

This episode named after Bam Margera goes off on a number of tangents, and it fails to really be an insightful look at Bam and his problems. There are brief mentions of his 2022 arrest for assaulting Jesse. The legal outcome of that case is mentioned in the episode’s epilogue.

In an interview for this episode, Bam’s former “Jackass” co-star Stephen Glover, whose stage name is Steve-O, talks about himself as much as he talks about Bam. “Jackass” (a show about people doing reckless, gross and/or painful stunts) originally aired on MTV from 2000 to 2001, and grew into a franchise that included spinoff shows and several movies. Bam starred in two of those spinoff shows: “Viva La Bam” and “Bam’s Unholy Union.”

Glover says that when he and Bam first started working together, Bam wasn’t into drugs and Glover was heavily addicted to drugs. Glover (who says he’s been clean and sober since 2008) comments in the interview about Bam’s downward spiral: “Over the course of 20 years, we’ve had an almost total role reversal … It’s been so hard to watch.” Glover also questions the legitimacy of Jevremović being able to help Bam with Bam’s problems.

Bam’s mother April Margera gives a very short and tearful interview about her family turmoil. Bam’s father Phil Margera is not interviewed. According to Jevremović, Bam’s parents hired her in 2021 to be Bam’s unpaid legal guardian because they believed her alternative rehab therapy methods could work for Bam and because none of Bam’s family members or friends wanted to be his legal guardian. Jevremović is not a licensed therapist and does not have any medical credentials to treat any health issues.

At the time, Jevremović was the founder of Aura, a small Los Angeles-based business that used virtual reality as a way to treat addiction and mental illness. She babbles some explanation about how Aura uses software and virtual reality scenarios that users can see by wearing virtual reality headsets, in order to identify clients’ self-destructive “triggers.” Karas compares Jevremović’s murky methods to what convicted con artist Elizabeth Holmes tried to do with Holmes’ fraudulent Theranos company.

Why did Bam’s parents think Jevremović was a legitimate healer? Apparently, they heard about her so-called “rehab success” with a drug-addicted woman named Amanda Rabb, who was featured on the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly, which interviews people with major problems—usually addictions and serious criminal activities. Jevremović and Rabb (who was born in 1995) went on Soft White Underbelly to talk about how Rabb was able to recover from her addictions with help from Jevremović and Aura.

Rabb died in 2021 of cardiac arrhythmia. But when Jevremović posted a video online to state Rabb’s cause of death, Jevremović said that Rabb died of a seizure disorder. Soft White Underbelly founder Mark Laita, who is also a photographer, says in an interview that Jevremović was in no way responsible for Rabb’s death.

By this time, Courville (who operates the YouTube channel BJ Investigates from her home in Princeton, New Jersey) had become an ally of Bam and already launched a campaign to discredit Jevremović. Courville’s followers are part of an online community called That Surprise Army. One of the followers, identified only has Jaimie, admits in an interview that she was one of the people who participated in online bullying of Jevremović by “doxxing” her. (The word “doxxing” is the term used for publicly revealing personal contact information about someone else without their permission. Doxxing is usually done with malicious intent.)

The episode mentions the Free Britney movement in comparison to the Free Bam movement. It’s a weak comparison because these are two very different legal situations. The Free Britney movement, which began online in 2020, was about fans of Britney Spears protesting against Spears being under a conservatorship that was overseen by her father Jamie Spears since 2008. The conservatorship ended in 2021.

Karas explains that a conservatorship involves control over many aspects over someone’s life, including financial control. Bam was under a guardianship, which consists of control over medical decisions in someone’s life, not financial control. Still, the Free Bam movement often mislabeled his guardianship as a conservatorship.

Courville says that after Bam reached out to her and met her in person, he began to publicly speak out about hating his guardianship and no longer wanted Jevremović or any guardian to be a part of his life. The episode shows multiple clips of Bam and other people describing Bam as the “Britney Spears of ‘Jackass.'” Karas points out that although Jevremović was not paid to be Bam’s guardian, Jevremović benefited by all the publicity and other perks that she was getting for being his guardian.

As an example of how off-topic this episode gets, there’s a large amount of time showing Jevremović’s family problems. Jevremović says she grew up in an abusive household where she, her younger twin sisters Dahlia and Dia, and their mother Linda were all abused by a family member who is not named. Dahlia and Dia have mental health issues, according to their sister Lima. At one point, Dahlia goes missing, so there’s footage of Linda, Dia and Lima looking for her.

Courville talks about her own family problems. She says that her father died from a methamphetamine overdose when she was in her first year of law school. Courville comments that her father’s death is why she has empathy for people who struggle with drug addiction. She also admits that she ramped up her efforts to prove that Lima Jevremović was a fraud after she saw that Lima stated a cause of death for Rabb that was different from the official medical examiner report.

Linda claims that she and her twin daughters had to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to flee from the harassment they were getting from That Surprise Army. Dahlia had a mental breakdown and Linda called the police because Linda said Dahlia attacked her. Police body cam footage shows Dahlia ranting about Linda forcing her into sex trafficking.

When Courville got ahold of this body cam footage, she posted it online. Accusations flew and gossip spread about Linda being a sex trafficker, which are allegations that Linda vehemently denies. All of this feuding is just so sordid and is not about Bam at all. Casey Fowler, a former member That Surprise Army, says he quit the group because he didn’t agree with how Courville and That Surprise Army were going after the Jevremović family. An epilogue in the episode says that Lima sued Courville for libel and that the case is “pending.”

And do we really need to know what are these feuders’ favorite movies? No, but “The Curious Case of …” tells us anyway. Courville says the comedy film “Legally Blonde” inspired her to become a lawyer. Lima says the movies that inspired her the most were the gangster dramas “The Godfather” and “Scarface.” You can come to your own conclusions about what that all means, but it’s an example of how the episode goes off the rails into irrelevant topics.

The editing, music and cinematography in “The Curious Case of …” reek of techniques used by trashy reality shows. For whatever reason, there are multiple and repetitive closeups of Courville (who wears fuzzy pink cat ears in her interview) pursing her lips in a smug manner or putting on lipstick. “The Curious Case of …” doesn’t seem to care about treating sensitive issues with dignity. This show ultimately embarrasses many of its participants for the sake of “entertainment.”

Investigation Discovery premiered “The Curious Case of …” on January 13, 2025.

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