S22 E3: Murder-for-Hire AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Something Was Wrong

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Episode: S22 E3: Murder-for-Hire

Author: Broken Cycle Media | Wondery
Duration: 00:41:55

Episode Shownotes

*Content Warning: mature themes, suicide, death, murder, false reporting, sexual abuse, rape, threats of violence, scams, fraud, emotional abuse, stalking, religious abuse, harassment. Sources:Former ARC Pastor Exposes ‘Unbiblical’ Movement by The Roys Report, Episode 93, February 10, 2022: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/former-arc-pastor-exposes-unbiblical-movement/id1470242499?i=1000550721576 I Almost Got Conned By an “Abuse Survivor”, by David Morrill,

May 2022: https://protestia.com/2022/05/03/i-almost-got-conned-by-an-abuse-survivor/ The Last Piece of the Roys Puzzle by David Morrill, May 2022: https://protestia.com/2022/05/05/the-last-piece-of-the-roys-puzzle/ J.D. Hall, Pastor and Founder of Pulpit&Pen, Admits Fabricating Story About Trans Activist by Bob Smietana for The Roys Report, May 26, 2022: https://julieroys.com/j-d-hall-pastor-blogger-admits-fabricating-story-about-trans-activist/ David Morrill on X: @coconservative7 https://x.com/coconservative7 Chloe Anagnos on X: @ChloeAnagnos https://x.com/ChloeAnagnos/status/1651260809362784261 The Sinking Arc by Megan Stoner, 2022: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-sinking-arc-megan-stoner-_OQ75y1JmbA/ iTown Indianapolis: https://itownchurch.com/ Megan Stoner on X: https://x.com/MeganEStoner Megan Stoner Chronicles on X: @ChroniclesMegan: https://x.com/ChroniclesMegan Resources:Free + Confidential Resources + Safety Tips: somethingwaswrong.com/resources Theme Song & Artwork: Thank you to NeonHoney and GIBBANEZ for covering our theme song, Glad Rags’s original song U Think U this season. NeonHoney’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/neonhoneymusic/ NeonHoney’s Website: https://neonhoneymusic.comGibbanez IG: https://www.instagram.com/@gibbanezmusic/ Gibbanez Linktree: https://linktr.ee/gibbanezmusicGlad Rags: https://www.gladragsmusic.com/ The S22 cover art is by the Amazing Sara StewartFollow Something Was Wrong:Website: somethingwaswrong.com IG: instagram.com/somethingwaswrongpodcastTikTok: tiktok.com/@somethingwaswrongpodcast Follow Tiffany Reese:Website: tiffanyreese.me IG: instagram.com/lookieboo See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary

In this episode of 'Something Was Wrong,' the narrative revolves around Megan Stoner, a member of a Facebook support group who fabricated traumatic experiences. Her increasingly bizarre claims, including stalking, led to her eventual removal from the group. Justin recounts his complex relationship with Megan, her online presence during the Me Too movement, and her attempts to manipulate the church-hurt community. The story escalates with her fabricating a murder-for-hire plot against Pastor Jeff Thompson, ultimately causing mistrust and distress among community members. The episode critically examines journalistic ethics surrounding false narratives and the impact of misinformation in influential circles.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (S22 E3: Murder-for-Hire) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_06
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00:01:31 Speaker_06
This podcast is intended for mature audiences and discusses topics that may be upsetting. For a full content warning, sources, and resources, please visit the episode notes.

00:01:43 Speaker_06
Opinions shared by the guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of myself, Broken Cycle Media, or Wondery.

00:01:51 Speaker_06
The podcast and any linked materials should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice. Megan Stoner's responses to these allegations are addressed within this season. I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is Something Was Wrong.

00:02:54 Speaker_05
Hi, I'm Alex Brewster. I am 30 years old and from Portland, Oregon. I met Megan through a Facebook group of women who are all roughly millennial age, Gen Z, called Spice Girls. And it's just a Facebook group where we talk about life.

00:03:16 Speaker_05
talk about issues with partners and parents and rental agreements and how to find apartments and all of that fun stuff. And that's where I initially met Megan. There was a group chat created by one of the admins of the group.

00:03:33 Speaker_05
because Megan's posts became so consistent and constant and a bit draining on the group. So there was a group chat created and I was one of the people who was added to the group chat.

00:03:47 Speaker_05
The goal was to try to give her the support and interaction that she desired from the group without bringing the entire group down with her. And what kind of things was she posting about? She started posting about the most mundane things.

00:04:04 Speaker_05
Everything from, has anybody pinned their bangs back with a bobby pin? A lot of things like that and things started to get increasingly strange.

00:04:18 Speaker_05
It got to, I need advice on how to communicate with my therapist, and then my therapist is out of town, and I have a stand-in therapist, and now this stand-in therapist is stalking me, and I'm being sexually assaulted by my mentor or my manager, and things just started sort of spiraling into great intensity.

00:04:44 Speaker_05
So everybody really tries to be really supportive to one another and that is really the spirit of the group. So with Megan's post, it was a bit cringy at first and so it was a lot of like, oh, oh honey. Oh goodness.

00:04:59 Speaker_05
Trying to empower her to be a little bit more independent, a little bit more, I would say, aware.

00:05:07 Speaker_05
But it got to a point where we were scared for her, we were really concerned about her, we were trying to get her help that she needed, and then it just ended in anger. It was a very high stress situation near the end.

00:05:24 Speaker_06
What years would you say that you started being in this group with her?

00:05:28 Speaker_05
I want to say Megan joined around 2017, and she was removed in 2018 from the group and all of its spinoffs, which she did her best to get in every single one of.

00:05:48 Speaker_06
What was the reason she was removed from the Spice Girls group?

00:05:52 Speaker_05
Ultimately, what we discovered is that we were in a strange sense, we were being catfished by her. We started to notice she would have these very consistent and very intense traumatic situations.

00:06:07 Speaker_05
And I can't remember what the pinnacle of this where we really figured this out. But ultimately, we figured out that she was lying. She was co-opting other people's traumatic stories as her own. Somebody would say, I'm being stalked by my ex.

00:06:25 Speaker_05
I've tried all of these things. I have talked to the police, like I've done all these things. What other options do I have? What have I not thought of to help me feel safer?

00:06:35 Speaker_05
And then a few days later, Megan would come in and say, well, I'm being stalked by my therapist. And this is all that I have done. What else need you know, what have I not thought of?

00:06:48 Speaker_05
She said that either her parent or her grandparent had completed suicide a day or two after somebody else had said, my grandparent had completed suicide. And the post was eerily similar.

00:07:04 Speaker_05
At the time, we didn't necessarily notice the similarities between the posts and our content until somebody pointed it out and said, she seems to go through a lot of the things that the rest of us are going through that we were able to sit down and sort of piece it all together to say that, oh, she's actually genuinely co-opting people's stories here.

00:07:25 Speaker_05
At the time when Megan was in the groups, I was going through my own personal journey. I was going through a hard time. It was a bit tumultuous. It was a lot.

00:07:38 Speaker_05
When Megan was sort of at her peak, I was sharing some personal growth that I was going through. And Megan used a lot of those instances.

00:07:50 Speaker_05
and co-opted them into her own story and made them much more intense, much more draining, way more traumatic than it ever was even for me. Again, like this is a very connected group.

00:08:03 Speaker_05
And I've had a lot of internet friends over the years from those groups. And at the time, they were all going through something. I mean, everybody was experiencing something really, really difficult.

00:08:17 Speaker_05
I was in a lot of chats and a lot of group chats comforting people who had gone through loss or gone through a breakup or things of that nature, just to sort of hold them and make sure it's known that they might be alone in their living room, but they're not alone spiritually or emotionally.

00:08:33 Speaker_05
The biggest issues that she spoke to us about was her life in politics. She claimed that she was being sexually abused by her boss. She was

00:08:48 Speaker_05
saying that she was having these really long, grueling and emotionally draining days working at the statehouse, that she was going to have to go to events where her rapist was at, you know, these very intensive, scary situations, but they were mainly political leaning.

00:09:04 Speaker_06
There was a mention of an article around 2018, the Me Too movement is happening. And at this time, allegedly Stoner claims she was working with a journalist from the Indianapolis Star. Were you aware of that?

00:09:19 Speaker_06
And what did you know about that situation, if so?

00:09:23 Speaker_05
Yes, that was a huge point of discussion for Megan was her talking about what she was experiencing.

00:09:29 Speaker_05
There was somebody in the group who was going through their own Me Too journey and was sharing their own story of how conversations were going with their journalist conversations that were going on in their own community regarding the situation.

00:09:46 Speaker_05
Megan was also speaking out on her story with a journalist and was going also through harassment. And it was even more intense because it was the journalist who was harassing her.

00:10:00 Speaker_05
So that was a strange kind of flow of events that absolutely raised alarms for me.

00:10:06 Speaker_05
And I know it raised alarms for other people because Megan would say, well, I got sent this bulk sized pack of tissues from the journalists and they put in the note that these tissues were for my flashbacks.

00:10:21 Speaker_05
Which, I mean, what journalist, frankly, has the spare money to send somebody this massive passive-aggressive gift? And what benefit would any journalist have by harassing a subject and a source in that way? It really didn't make any sense.

00:10:42 Speaker_05
She specifically said that she was working with the journalist who uncovered the U.S. gymnastics abuse, Larry Nassar's victims. So these journalists have really made a name for themselves of lifting up voices of survivors.

00:11:01 Speaker_05
Why would they go out of their way to so sickly and disgustingly attack a source for something going on in their own state? Like, the math is not mathing. 2 plus 2 is not equaling 4 in this situation. But she kept going with that.

00:11:20 Speaker_05
I don't even really necessarily think that she ever admitted to lying about that specifically. She did admit to the fact that she was co-opting anybody's story in that.

00:11:31 Speaker_05
If you look at when stories or perspectives were being shared about what that person was going through and they were working really hard to share their story, a few days later, Megan was telling the same story with much more heat and much more intensity.

00:11:46 Speaker_06
Please note, at the time of this episode's airing, the Indianapolis star did not respond to my request for comment. How did the removal get handled and did she have a response to those accusations?

00:12:00 Speaker_06
I mean, I imagine it was a little bit awkward and sensitive.

00:12:03 Speaker_05
There was a group chat created of all of the admins and moderators of not just the Spice Girls group, but the spinoff groups from that. So there was a mental health spinoff group. There was a dating spinoff group.

00:12:17 Speaker_05
There was a online dating group streaming sharing different shows or movies or documentaries or whatever that you're watching that you have reviews on. There was a book one. There was a parent one.

00:12:30 Speaker_05
We created a big group chat to basically more or less get all on the same page because we realized that we all had sort of the same ideas about what was going on with Megan, but none of us were on the same page.

00:12:44 Speaker_05
And so if one group removed her, then we figured that other people would have to deal with the fallout from that. So we got in a group chat and we compared notes and said, what have you noticed? What's going on here? What's the situation?

00:12:58 Speaker_05
How is she acting in your group versus how is she acting in this other group? And from there, it was sort of all decided we were going to remove her from everything.

00:13:07 Speaker_05
I can't remember if she was removed then added back in or what the plan was, but in the Spice Girls group, one of the admins allowed her to do an apology post.

00:13:18 Speaker_05
It was an apology that wasn't an apology in the sense of if you hadn't been in the discussion, hadn't been following along, you would look at that and go, I have no idea what she's talking about. She apologized for lying.

00:13:32 Speaker_05
She said that she was going to be seeking out mental health services and that she appreciated the support that she received from the group.

00:13:41 Speaker_05
But when people would go and comment and say, hey, you did this or you hurt me or this doesn't make any sense, those comments would get deleted and then Megan would promptly block them.

00:13:55 Speaker_05
And my comment, I'd said, where did you get this particular story from? And the comment was deleted. And then Megan promptly blocked me on just about everything. So it was very strange about why an apology was even allowed.

00:14:09 Speaker_05
But she apologized, and there wasn't any sustenance to it. And she just, after that, got removed from the group.

00:14:20 Speaker_12
As time went on, he did sort of get phased out of the campaign world.

00:14:25 Speaker_06
That's Justin. We heard from him in episode one and two. He's a former political acquaintance of Stoner's.

00:14:33 Speaker_12
I actually met. with her one-on-one in 2018 or 19, and it was when I was sort of getting out of the political world myself. She, in 2018, and again, she wasn't really around politics much for the 2018 cycle.

00:14:52 Speaker_12
After the 2016 cycle, she was very much sort of phased out, and nobody really saw her much in 2018. But she did have a very big social media presence, because that was the year of Me Too.

00:15:06 Speaker_12
And she was constantly tweeting about how she was a sexual assault victim and how she had been assaulted by a very powerful man in the state of Indiana. And she made that very clear.

00:15:16 Speaker_12
And she would often interact with women on social media as like a sister survivor and made that a very big part of her personality. That had already happened by the time I met her.

00:15:27 Speaker_12
But again, after Me Too sort of cycled out of the news, Meghan very quickly kind of dropped that. I did not know at the time who she was referring to. Just knowing of her and knowing about her, I always suspected it was not true.

00:15:42 Speaker_12
I couldn't imagine anyone would have done that to her just because, frankly, she was never important enough to have been alone in the room with a powerful man.

00:15:51 Speaker_12
Like, she was a very grassroots-level volunteer who would come in and out, but I didn't think that was plausible, but she did make a very big deal of it on social media.

00:16:01 Speaker_12
But Megan had reached out to me a couple times and wanted to get coffee, which is, you know, a thing people do. I went mostly as a joke because we had followed Megan and her crazy Facebook posts and her exaggerations for a long time.

00:16:17 Speaker_12
The funny thing is when I first remembered it and I went back to look through my DMs, I think she canceled on me like four or five times before it actually finally happened. I wasn't even really that serious about it.

00:16:29 Speaker_12
Well, I went and it was the first time I ever spoke to her beyond a, Oh, hi, how are you? At a big event. People laugh at me when I say this, but I always say she's not foaming at the mouth.

00:16:40 Speaker_12
you sort of think you would instantly know this person is really unwell or disturbed. That's not the impression you get when you meet Megan.

00:16:48 Speaker_12
You think she's perfectly nice, she's maybe a little off, but not anybody that should be disregarded or in the way that she was often spoken about.

00:16:57 Speaker_12
I came away from it having a little bit more compassion for her, having participated in some trolling of her and some memes and stuff that had been made and sent around different group chats.

00:17:08 Speaker_12
Like, I felt a little guilty that I'd been a part of that because she was nice. I think this would have been directly after the 2018 midterms. And that was when I was sort of done with politics personally.

00:17:21 Speaker_12
I just, I had some issues and didn't feel like it was the place for me anymore. And I sort of said that early on in the coffee. And I did notice she very much lost interest in me and was not looking to stay for a long time, which was fine.

00:17:37 Speaker_12
And she was pleasant. But I didn't notice when she realized she wasn't going to get anything out of me. I couldn't be an end to events anymore or whatever. She was kind of hovering.

00:17:46 Speaker_12
Then, she got very into her religion and churches, specifically the Itown megachurch, which is a very large network of megachurches. They have a couple of campuses around the Indianapolis area.

00:18:03 Speaker_12
And she went to, I think, their main campus, which is in Fishers, which is close to where she lives. And she very quickly, like, gets in this big pissing match with the church. And it sort of triggered, like, this year-long feud that she had online.

00:18:18 Speaker_12
I think what happened was she sort of found the church-hurt community online.

00:18:24 Speaker_12
people who have had trauma relating to the churches they grew up in, and people that have had bad interactions with pastors, people who had Me Too issues in the church that weren't dealt with the right way.

00:18:35 Speaker_12
There's a big community and space for that online. And I think she sort of came across that, and so she needed to sort of find a reason to hate her own church. And so she got into this really deep

00:18:47 Speaker_12
feud, or I always say it was a pissing match, with iTown, which is a very big church. I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of members. I never fully understood, it was very unclear just from her social media posts, what she was mad about.

00:19:01 Speaker_12
It almost sort of seemed like she found the church hurt community, so now I have church hurt, and my church is terrible. And she started a podcast of her own called The Sinking Ark.

00:19:18 Speaker_02
Hi everyone, welcome back to our first full episode of The Sinking Ark. I want to make a disclaimer to everyone that in the past few weeks there have been many allegations made about me on social media.

00:19:31 Speaker_02
I just want to reassure everyone they are not true and in fact they are unfortunately how the church has responded.

00:19:36 Speaker_03
Well, Tavener, hey buddy, we got a problem here. You chose to have the affair. You had daughters when this happened. And I, as a journalist, am supposed to feel sorry for you now? I never will say that harassment is okay.

00:19:52 Speaker_03
And I'm not saying that everyone should go harass Tavener. As someone that I've been harassed myself, it's not fun. But my situation, I didn't make, I didn't have an affair. I didn't do something egregious to warrant that behavior.

00:20:07 Speaker_12
The most bizarre story was Megan has a DUI on her record, and she posted on Facebook that night that she got run off the road by somebody who went to I-Town churches, and that's why she got a DUI.

00:20:22 Speaker_12
She posted the sex toys online and said she thought someone from I-Town had sent them to her because they thought it would be funny to send that to somebody with sexual trauma.

00:20:32 Speaker_12
Funny enough, in that picture of the dildos, there's tickets to a Christian concert on the table, and if you zoom in, the date is not right.

00:20:43 Speaker_12
So either she went and bought them all herself, and then took the picture, or she found the picture online, or this was somebody else.

00:20:52 Speaker_12
I don't know exactly what the deal was, but I found that very interesting that the date of the tickets on the table were not the correct date that she's saying she got this.

00:21:02 Speaker_06
When I viewed the photo, too, on one of the Twitters, somewhere on the web where I saw the picture, I was just like, and I apologize, Justin, I'm going to be a little crass with you here. These seem like dildos from the 1980s.

00:21:15 Speaker_06
Like, I don't know where she would have ordered these from, but it also struck me as like, this feels like something that has been lying around for a while. It looks like the clearance section. These were not your modern woman's equipment.

00:21:29 Speaker_12
This is not top of the line.

00:21:31 Speaker_06
Even that just felt so odd to me. It felt like she found this old box in a warehouse or something.

00:21:37 Speaker_12
Exactly. It was like something's not right here.

00:21:47 Speaker_04
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00:22:12 Speaker_07
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00:22:35 Speaker_12
One of the most bizarre things you're going to find is you're going to come across people talking about a murder-for-hire plot that she got involved in. There was a guy named Jeff Thompson. He was a pastor in Canada.

00:22:50 Speaker_12
He had dealt with Meghan, and you also come across Julie Royce, who is a prominent person within the church-hurt community. I think the two of them were trying to sort of bring some reforms within our churches.

00:23:04 Speaker_12
They came across Megan, but essentially Megan told Pastor Thompson that there was a murder for hire plot out against him. And it was coming from the other pastors within our churches. And he said it got so serious and she was so convincing.

00:23:23 Speaker_12
that he had to put his kids in the car and think about leaving the house one night.

00:23:29 Speaker_12
And it was just because Megan was playing so many different characters in a world that she had made up, texting him from multiple different numbers about these conspiracies within the church, that he believed it.

00:23:43 Speaker_12
And I've heard him say, she is incredibly good at it. Creating a false world in which she is a central player.

00:23:53 Speaker_10
My name is Julie Royce and I'm an investigative reporter and the founder of The Royce Report.

00:23:59 Speaker_10
I used to be a talk show host on the Moody Radio Network, but discovered a lot of corruption there and blew the whistle and got fired as a result from my radio job, which I knew would happen. But what I didn't expect was on the heels of that,

00:24:15 Speaker_10
I had a number of people coming to me begging me to report their stories of abuse and corruption within the Christian community. And for the past six years, that's what I've been doing exclusively.

00:24:27 Speaker_06
When did you meet Megan Stoner and what was the nature of your relationship?

00:24:33 Speaker_10
Well, it was when I was reporting on the Association of Related Churches, or ARC as they're known, one of the largest church planning organizations in North America.

00:24:44 Speaker_10
And she kind of piggybacked off the back of some of my reporting, and she began doing her own, as she called, sort of citizen journalism. She's not trained as a journalist, but she had some connections at a church, I believe, in Indianapolis.

00:25:01 Speaker_10
and was able to get some people to talk to her. And so initially, she just reached out and she connected me with some folks and she seemed to know a little bit about the background of what was going on there.

00:25:14 Speaker_10
And so she was not somebody I ever interviewed as a source, but she connected me to some other sources and seemed to be helpful in what she was doing. And I remember in particular, she did a podcast with Jeff Thompson, who was

00:25:29 Speaker_10
a pastor within the Association of Related Churches at ARC. He was just a phenomenal interview. I remember listening to her podcast. I didn't think the podcast itself was that well done, but I thought he as an interview was an incredible interview.

00:25:44 Speaker_10
And so I reached out to Megan and said, Hey, I'd love to get in contact with this guy if you don't mind. and she was helpful.

00:25:50 Speaker_10
She put me in contact with Jeff and Jeff and I ended up recording a podcast and it's still one of the most insightful podcasts that I have about how these arch churches operate and how they train their pastors and how they launch large and all of this, their whole philosophy behind what they do, which was really, really revealing.

00:26:07 Speaker_10
At that point, I just thought she was concerned and helpful citizen who wanted to see the truth exposed.

00:26:15 Speaker_03
Hey everyone, it's Megan here with The Singing Art. Welcome back to a mini episode of The Singing Art. It has been quite, quite the busy week. Julie Roy, someone that we have mentioned in this podcast in the last episode was Jeff.

00:26:29 Speaker_03
She broke a story with Jeff about the 2% that Jeff said is obligated to give back to ARC, the Association of Related Churches.

00:26:38 Speaker_03
You take out these interest-free loans and then after you pay them off, you have to give 2% back to ARC and I believe that's like every month or so. And anyway, that story has absolutely blown up. Julie Royce has done a great job covering it.

00:26:54 Speaker_03
And I plan to have some exciting guests on in the near future. I've taken a bit of an exile from all of this because I've been making the rounds in the media.

00:27:03 Speaker_03
I appreciate everyone that has listened to this podcast, that has shared it, that has reached out to me to let me know how much this really means to everyone. This has really been quite the experience to say the least, honestly.

00:27:19 Speaker_03
Not only has my life changed due to all the harassment, but it's been quite the honor to really be the vehicle for stories and to hear people and to talk with people. And really getting to the bottom of this, I have suffered very vicious attacks.

00:27:36 Speaker_03
Um, but I promise I don't want to make this about me. So I will just say that I appreciate everyone reaching out to me. I love the idea that we have surpassed 100,000 plays. Um, it has been absolutely insane.

00:27:51 Speaker_03
Um, the amount of listens that we've gotten since Julie mentioned us. Um, I'm going to link everyone to the article Julie Roys did, um, where she mentioned this podcast.

00:28:01 Speaker_03
Um, and when she had Jeff Thompson on and really dug into all the scandals that ARC's been a part of,

00:28:08 Speaker_06
Did you ever meet with her in person or was your relationship mostly digital?

00:28:13 Speaker_10
It was all digital. Either email or I think we probably talked on the phone a couple of times. That's all. We never met in person now.

00:28:21 Speaker_06
Did she ever share with you anything about her qualms with iTown Church? Specifically, she's made some claims online from her being ran off the road by them to them mailing her a box of sex toys. I'm curious if she shared any of that with you.

00:28:35 Speaker_10
Oh, the sex toys is new.

00:28:38 Speaker_06
Truth is stranger than fiction, right? But her truth is stranger than any fiction I could imagine. Yeah.

00:28:44 Speaker_10
She did share with me some of the bullying and intimidation. And I know to a lot of listeners, you might think, oh, that should have been like tipped me off that that that's just crazy talking, right?

00:28:54 Speaker_10
If you look at my website, it's not necessarily crazy talking. In fact, Ark has been sued multiple times for bullying and intimidating people. or for covering for sex abusers within their network.

00:29:07 Speaker_10
So that sort of thing doesn't surprise me, unfortunately, because I've seen a lot of that. So she did talk about that with me. iTown was the church in Indianapolis, our church that we initially connected over.

00:29:18 Speaker_10
So, I remember her mentioning some of those things. I always rely on documentation and I have to see the original thing. So, I don't believe she ever gave me the sort of documentation I would need to report anything. I never reported any of it.

00:29:33 Speaker_10
But again, I think she did connect me with some people, some other people that I talked to about that particular story.

00:29:39 Speaker_10
I remember she reached out and said she wanted to come to host these Restore conferences, primarily for survivors who have been through some sort of church hurt, a place where they can come for healing and safety.

00:29:52 Speaker_10
She had reached out and wanted to come, but said she didn't have money. And so I had actually connected her to somebody within our organization who helped get her a scholarship so she could come.

00:30:03 Speaker_10
Again, at this point, I didn't know anything about some of the terrible things, really terrible things that she's done and participated in and some of the hoaxes that she's been a part of.

00:30:14 Speaker_10
But I remember Jeff reaching out, very concerned for me, saying that there was a murder-for-hire plot, that the Association of Related Churches was involved, and that they had threatened him and that they were threatening to do something to me as well.

00:30:29 Speaker_10
And my first response to Jeff was, well, if that's happening, we need to file a police report immediately. And I think that was maybe a new thought to him. Of course, he's in Canada.

00:30:40 Speaker_10
So, you know, maybe he was, I don't know whether he was thinking that jurisdictionally it's different because she's in the United States. But yeah, that was my thing.

00:30:48 Speaker_10
And I said, you need to talk to her right away about going to police with what she has, because he was saying that he had texts and documentation and all these different things. And I'm like, well, that's crazy.

00:30:57 Speaker_10
But again, she needs to go to police and I'm going to go police, too. I mean, that's just not something I trifle with. And it's not the first time that I've gotten these kind of threats or hearsay of threats.

00:31:07 Speaker_10
And, you know, as an investigative reporter, you can be a target for things. And so I just don't trifle with that stuff. So my recollection is that he called her back, and then there began to be, it seemed like some waffling on her part.

00:31:22 Speaker_10
And then he called me back, I think it was the next day, and said, Julie, this whole thing is a hoax. I am so, so sorry. She just totally had me duped. And that's when I was like, oh man, this is really, really not good.

00:31:36 Speaker_06
Pastor Jeff Thompson forwarded to Julie Roys his statement that he sent his congregation in regard to Megan.

00:31:42 Speaker_06
Quote, out of love for the church and because she has repeatedly attempted to insert herself into the victim community, I feel the need to make a public statement regarding the credibility of Megan Stoner.

00:31:54 Speaker_06
I interacted with Megan over the course of several weeks and appeared on the second episode of her podcast after meeting her on the AllAboutCoff subreddit.

00:32:04 Speaker_06
Our interactions rapidly devolved into a bizarre situation in which Megan attempted to impersonate multiple pastors from the Ark and the Governor of Indiana. Yes, really.

00:32:17 Speaker_06
She created multiple fake phone numbers to text from, forged multiple phone screenshots, attempted to impersonate the governor of Indiana on a Skype call, and created entirely fictional narratives with no basis in reality.

00:32:32 Speaker_06
While I cannot speak to Megan's mental health, I can attest to her desperate desire for attention and her willingness to prey on vulnerable persons, including victims of abuse, in order to satiate it. I pray she gets the help that she needs.

00:32:48 Speaker_06
I have spoken with multiple individuals who have had similar experiences. all have cut ties with her. The all about cough sub also quickly figured out what she was doing.

00:33:00 Speaker_06
Simply put, Megan's testimony cannot be trusted and neither can any screenshots she produces of anything.

00:33:08 Speaker_06
To be clear, I am only releasing this statement because it has been brought to my attention that Megan has not repented and is once again actively trying to insert herself into the victim community.

00:33:20 Speaker_06
I would encourage anyone considering working with her to see if she can produce character references from those who have been pastoring her in a local church for the past three years.

00:33:30 Speaker_06
Again, don't trust their text messages or any screenshots provided by Megan. Ask to speak to the pastor via Zoom. If you're considering working with Megan and would like to discuss my testimony further, please feel free to reach out to me.

00:33:45 Speaker_06
Blessings, Jeff Thompson, Pastor, Gospel City Church. I reached out in September to Pastor Jeff Thompson, but he did not wish to be interviewed for this podcast.

00:33:57 Speaker_06
I also reached out to iTown Indianapolis for comment, and at the time of this episode's airing, have not received a response.

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00:35:06 Speaker_00
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00:35:33 Speaker_10
It had been a while since she had reached out and said she was coming to the conference. I'm involved in all these different stories and I'd given it to a staff member. So I forgot about the fact that she was coming to the conference.

00:35:44 Speaker_10
And I remember one of my staff reached out to me long after and said that she was coming and she was going to stay with somebody. And I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We cannot do that.

00:35:54 Speaker_10
And that's when I reached back to her and said, I'm sorry, we're going to have to talk about this.

00:35:58 Speaker_10
And then I basically said there was going to be a problem with her coming to the conference because, again, it's a safe place and we don't want somebody that behaves like that at the conference. So this was April when I reached out to her.

00:36:10 Speaker_10
I sent an email to her, and she had said something about her father had just died. So I was like, take as long as you need to get back to me.

00:36:18 Speaker_10
But I did say to her that I have some concerns about you coming to the conference based on some information relayed to me by Jeff Thompson. And then she said, oh, I think you and I have the same goal. You've been an inspiration.

00:36:30 Speaker_10
And kind of this very flattering talk to me and then said, can you send me my questions and I'll respond to them when I'm able. And I'm like, I don't have time for this. So I just said, I can't commit to a process like that.

00:36:43 Speaker_10
I just think we need to go our separate ways. So I just basically cut it off at that point. And I hoped because I know Jeff had talked about trying to get her some help that that would happen.

00:36:53 Speaker_10
I mean, I was really concerned for her, to be honest, because of her behavior and what I had seen about her mental stability, all those things. And I was hopeful that him as a pastor, he might be able to help her.

00:37:06 Speaker_06
So then fast forward, David Morrill, who blogs at Protestia, had started making claims, I believe it was on Twitter, that he had some breaking news about you or this big bomb he was going to drop about you.

00:37:22 Speaker_06
What do you recall about that and what was the impact it had on you?

00:37:26 Speaker_10
David is very much in the camp of John MacArthur, and he doesn't really do real journalism. It's kind of a tabloid type thing. And he doesn't follow the ethical rules of journalism that we do.

00:37:40 Speaker_10
For example, that you always reach out and you don't report hearsay, but you reach out to the person. If there is an accusation, give them a chance to respond.

00:37:50 Speaker_10
It's something that purports to be journalistic, and it's not journalistic, and it's not run by journalists who have been trained in journalism. And they really are unbelievably loose with the facts and always making these accusations.

00:38:01 Speaker_10
But the number one defense against slander and libel is truth. And the problem is they publish things that aren't true.

00:38:07 Speaker_10
We're very careful about fact-checking and documentation and not reporting hearsay, but going to the firsthand witness and hearing it directly from that person. These are the sorts of things that we do.

00:38:18 Speaker_10
And we double-check the documentation and all those sorts of things, but they just don't do that. And normally, I just ignore what Protestia does because it's so off the wall.

00:38:28 Speaker_10
But this, the way he was saying, oh, I have something about Julie Roy's exposing her as unethical or immoral, and that's going to come out soon, and all his threats. And then he's posting like, see you tomorrow, Julie.

00:38:39 Speaker_10
He was taunting me on Twitter at that point, it wasn't X, but he was taunting me about it. And so, yeah, that's a little bit unnerving. And I'm trying to figure out, again, I knew I hadn't done anything wrong,

00:38:51 Speaker_10
But what I've noticed is you don't have to do anything wrong necessarily. If people can craft a lie and sell it to people, that's the age we're living in right now. Yeah, I was nervous. I was just like, what on earth is he going to drop?

00:39:04 Speaker_10
What is he going to say? So yeah, the whole weekend I'm waiting. And then on Monday, he drops another taunt, you know, see you tomorrow. Like, I guess something had happened where he wasn't going to publish the story on Monday.

00:39:15 Speaker_10
Now, after all, he's going to publish it the next day. And then, as you said, then he came out with a retraction. And it turned out that Megan Stoner had reached out. He published the emails he got from her.

00:39:26 Speaker_10
It's not even that good of a fabricated email that she sent. It looks very cut and pasted. But she crafted a narrative.

00:39:34 Speaker_10
with these fabricated emails saying that I encouraged her to come forward with this juicy information that wasn't true, but just because I was into like the juicy information. And I would never do something like that, ever.

00:39:51 Speaker_10
That's what he began to realize. And I forget exactly what tipped him off to it, but he began to realize that he might be taken in.

00:39:58 Speaker_10
But again, for three days, he's publishing that I've done something immoral, that I'm this awful person, and with no documentation at that point, again, being duped. And that's just shocking.

00:40:12 Speaker_10
It's shocking that somebody who purports to be a journalist, again, I wouldn't call him a journalist, but that purports to be a journalist would behave in that manner. And it was an awful thing to do. It was somewhat traumatic for me.

00:40:24 Speaker_06
Please note at the time of this episode's airing, David Morrill could not be reached for comment. How closely have you followed Megan Stoner's legal charges since this event took place?

00:40:37 Speaker_10
Hardly at all, to be honest.

00:40:39 Speaker_06
Have you had any further conversations with her or any contact with her?

00:40:43 Speaker_10
No, I cut off communication with her. The last time I remember having any conversation with her is that I did reach out to her at the point where she was just publishing some false things about me on social media.

00:40:57 Speaker_10
I remember reaching out and just asking her to stop doing that, that I was concerned for her and the way that she was behaving. and that I would have to publicly say the stuff that she did.

00:41:08 Speaker_10
Again, at this point, I was really concerned for her mental state and for her as a person. I was really reluctant to go public with some of the stuff that she had done because I just didn't know how that might impact her.

00:41:21 Speaker_10
But it became clear when she's praying on a lot of people, not just me, that she needed to be exposed and people needed to be warned. And so at that point, that's when we did.

00:41:32 Speaker_06
Thank you so much. I cannot thank you enough for your time and energy. And I'm so sorry for how you've been impacted like the other victims by Megan. Is there anything else that you'd like to add or go back to?

00:41:45 Speaker_10
Well, I think the reason that Megan's able to wreak the kind of havoc that she does is because there are too many people out there, self-described advocates without training, self-described journalists without training.

00:42:01 Speaker_10
who are not acting professionally, who are not going back and checking to see if things are true. The harm to me by Megan was done by people who repeated her lies and didn't do due diligence to find out whether or not what she was alleging was true.

00:42:20 Speaker_10
If I behaved that way as a journalist, I would not have the platform I have. The reason that I have the platform I have is because we do our due diligence and we publish things that are true.

00:42:32 Speaker_10
And when we make mistakes, which everybody makes a mistake, we always immediately own our error and we put it out there and we let people know.

00:42:41 Speaker_10
We've never had a story debunked in the way that these stories should be and have been debunked because we do our due diligence. This kind of reporting by people who don't know what they're doing just needs to stop. It really does.

00:42:55 Speaker_10
And they need to either get trained as journalists and do their due diligence and do their job right, or they just need to get off the Internet because they're doing a lot of harm.

00:43:04 Speaker_06
I really appreciate you being willing to speak with me.

00:43:07 Speaker_10
Well, thank you. I appreciate speaking with you as well and appreciate your work.

00:43:16 Speaker_06
Next time on Something Was Wrong.

00:43:20 Speaker_13
But then when I realized what she had done, that's when I hit it into high gear and I was like, no one deserves to be treated like this. No one deserves to put trust in someone and then have someone completely ruin that trust.

00:43:32 Speaker_13
And that's what she had done with him and it was scary. I started texting her and shortly after that is when she met me for the first time and I actually saw her in person.

00:43:43 Speaker_11
A Hamilton County woman is facing serious charges accused of scamming several people out of rental homes. Logan Gay talked to one woman who says this scheme cost her more than just money.

00:43:56 Speaker_06
On this Fishers Police Department report, it says the suspect, Megan, bit Abby in the hand. Thank you so much for listening. Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media production, created and produced by me, Tiffany Reese.

00:44:15 Speaker_06
Thank you so much to our associate producers, Amy B. Chesler and Lily Rowe. Thank you to our audio engineer, Becca High, and our social media marketing manager, Lauren Barkman of Luxury Media.

00:44:27 Speaker_06
Additional thanks to our partners, Grant at Wondery, Marissa, Travis, and our team at WME, Jason and Jennifer at KSCO, our cybersecurity team, Darkbox Security, and my lawyer, Alan.

00:44:41 Speaker_06
And to all of you who make our show possible with your support and listenership. Special shout out to Neon Honey and Gabanes for covering our theme song, Gladrag's original song, You Think You, this season.

00:44:54 Speaker_06
For more music from them, check out the episode notes or your favorite streaming app. In the episode notes, you'll always find content warnings, sources, and resources with links to our websites and social media as well.

00:45:08 Speaker_06
Thank you so much to every survivor and ally who has trusted us to help share their stories. We are forever grateful. Until next time, stay safe, friends.

00:45:26 Speaker_06
If you like Something Was Wrong, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.

00:45:39 Speaker_06
Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

00:45:47 Speaker_08
They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant.

00:46:02 Speaker_08
When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, There were many questions surrounding his death.

00:46:10 Speaker_08
The last person seen with him was Laney Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry.

00:46:22 Speaker_08
But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder.

00:46:34 Speaker_08
Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.