Celisia Stanton
Appearances
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, you know, actually, that's interesting that you kind of mentioned that because, well, it's almost like you would think it'd be the opposite, like somebody who is a really adept liar or perhaps has some kind of like personality disorder or whatever that like, you know, is somehow related to this crime that they've committed or these actions they've taken.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
You almost think that like they would be able to like sort of if they can compartmentalize so well, deceive people like pretty well. Yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And versus it being something that we can like kind of pull out and tease out, which is I think what a lot of us like to do listening to true crime is like, okay, maybe if I listen to this 911 call or I watch that video, then I'm, you know, I can kind of tell based on my gut feeling.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
But it does also remind me of my own experience just working with the financial advisor who had defrauded me and was defrauding all of his clients. You know, we didn't have one of those relationships where it was like, oh, you would – you know, you talk to them like once a year, like he was very involved with his clients and kind of just like helping with sort of financial health broadly.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And so I actually met with him, I don't remember if it was every week or every other week, but like consistently. And so it was so interesting, like in retrospect, because, you know, we would get on these calls and, you know, we would like talk about our pets or he'd ask about my husband. I remember the election, the 2020 election was happening at the time. So we would be talking about that.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And all the while, he knows what he's doing. He knows he's stealing all of this money. And he's not just having these conversations with me. He's having the conversations with all of his victims who I would eventually go on to meet a good number of them just through that whole criminal legal process. And
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And, you know, I think obviously everybody trusted him or they wouldn't have invested their money with him. And it's just so interesting to think, like, I definitely believe he had to have had a major amount of compartmentalization going on. And I also think he thought, oh, well, I'll pay the money back. Like, it'll work out.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Like, I think he was delusional enough to believe that this was all going to be OK. And so, yeah, just kind of an interesting an interesting connection there.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, I mean, this is obviously a super tragic, upsetting, upsetting case. And I think what's interesting, too, about, you know, this, you know, affair that she was having with this guy and him wanting to cut it off because he didn't want to have children or didn't want to be, you know, assume any kind of responsibility for her children was
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Um, kind of makes it feel like, you know, this story about, oh, I'm gonna take my own life. It's really about maybe she's, you know, kind of delusional enough to believe, oh, I can get rid of my old life and then enter into this new life. And then I don't have children anymore. So there's no baggage.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
There's no problem for this, you know, guy to then start to restart this relationship with me, which doesn't actually make any sense, right? Like, Even putting her wedding dress and the photo and photo albums in the car doesn't make sense because at some point they're going to come across this car and they're going to be like, why is this in here? Right.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
So, like, I think it kind of speaks to what we had already said about the sort of like delusion and compartmentalization that had to have been happening.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
But I also think it's interesting that she didn't kind of come clean even now it sounds like she's sort of lying even after she's admitted to it she's lying about you know what her intentions were you know maybe she's hoping to garner some sympathy or something like that but you know it's just it's really upsetting because you would hope that at the point that all right I've done it she could at least you know be honest about why.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, well, I'm really excited to be able to chat with you today. My show, Truer Crime, I actually created it just sort of as an outgrowth of my own personal experiences. In 2020, I actually, long story short, was defrauded of my life savings by a financial advisor who turned out he was defrauding all of his investor clients.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, I think what's interesting to me about, you know, her accusation – well, actually, you know, they did it – they ended up doing a police sketch based on her description of this perpetrator. And, you know, folks can look it up online. It's a pretty generic – it's a side profile, which is interesting. And it's just kind of a pretty generic, you know, looking guy. He's wearing a cap.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Like, it doesn't look – Like there's nothing about him that I think is like, oh, this is like super distinguishing. Right. And then also there was like kind of, you know, descriptions circulating in the media. And one of them said that they were looking for a black man in the in his 30s or 40s, five, nine to six foot tall. And he was wearing a shirt, blue jeans and a knit cap.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And I'm like, how many people could that description possibly have matched? Like, so many people. And so that means there's potentially, you know, so many Black folks, Black men in that area who are potentially being, you know, called in about or accused or, you know, kind of are on – you know, on high alert because they might be accused of having executed this crime.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And police actually said that they received thousands of tips, you know, in the there was such a media frenzy around this, you know, and they were on TV so much. And it was in all the papers that they received so many tips. And you got to imagine that Well, literally all of the tips were incorrect since she did it herself.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And you just kind of have to wonder about those individual stories to the people who were maybe like called in by their neighbor or person walking across the street or however it may be. And so that to me is like super disturbing. And I remember I actually covered this case on like a just like short tick tock that I did online.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
um a few years ago and one of the things that kind of stood out to me when i was looking into the story was just like nobody was really focused on this um angle of like she had accused somebody that didn't exist she had made up a fictional character and there are real lives impacted by that so i just thought that was kind of an interesting part of it was that you know this case got so much attention but that angle of it was so sort of like overlooked um you know in the
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
He was actually a fiduciary, meaning he had like extra legal financial responsibilities and he still chose to kind of use this money for his own personal game, like vacations and homes and cars and things like that. And so that was obviously a super jarring experience for me. And after I had found out about this, like, you know, all my life savings was gone.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, I think it's interesting, too, because it's like, there are so many cases that when you hear them, they sort of like defy logic. It's like, how could that even have even been possible? And I feel like I have such little faith in you know, the criminal legal process just from, you know, just covering enough stories that it's like somewhere something like this has happened, I'm sure.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And, you know, somebody has, you know, been pursued in this same dynamic of maybe a white woman accusing a Black person that didn't exist. And then, you know, you have other kind of similar cases. I know that, you know, one case I'd covered this season on True crime was the case of Alice Siebold, the author of The Lovely Bones, and Anthony Broadwater, who was the man who was convicted of her rape.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
She was raped when she was in college and she had identified him on the street just a few months after her attack. And then Anthony was, you know, put to trial and ultimately convicted. He served 16 and a half years in prison. And we just found out in just the last few years that he was actually wrongfully convicted.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And in that case, it's a little bit different because Alice Siebold was actually attacked. She just misidentified her perpetrator. But I think there were so many holes in that case as well insofar as like, for example, Alice was presented a lineup that included Anthony Broadwater and a bunch of other people, and she didn't pick the right person, or she didn't pick Anthony, I should say.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
She picked a different person out of the lineup. So red flag number one, right, that maybe she's misidentified Anthony. And there's a number of sort of other things like that, but it goes to trial. She sits up on the witness stand. She points him out when she's asked to point to the perpetrator, and
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
She's given a lot of sympathy and sort of like can just sort of paper over the things that they don't want to believe, you know, are red flags in order to kind of like get to justice. And I think a lot of times, too, it's not always an instance of like just in general, whenever there's misconduct with policing or anything like that, I don't think it's always or even often that it's.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
there's like a willful intent to railroad somebody. Oftentimes it's like just feeding into whatever biases you already have. It is, you know, not taking the time to actually do things properly. And so when you have this feeling of like, okay, well, my job is to get justice. Here we go. We have somebody who looks like they could be the perpetrator. Sure. Let's, you know,
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
signed, sealed, delivered, they could be the one that we convict and send to prison.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And I think that that's kind of interesting that it's like we do have to kind of consider these biases when we're examining these cases because it can allow for innocent people to sort of be wrapped up in, you know, just a narrative that feels familiar to us, even if it's not true and even if it's obviously not true.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
He actually had stole over $2 million total from all of his clients. But after that, I was kind of like, you know, navigating this whole criminal legal process and also just, you you know, it was 2020. So there wasn't a lot going on. I've been a wedding and portrait photographer for many years. And so winter in Minnesota during the pandemic, not a time of a lot of business.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And so I was like literally just binging true crime all day. It was kind of like a coping mechanism for dealing with this thing that, you know, I'd never kind of seen coming. And Um, and then sort of, you know, just constantly pausing those shows and complaining to my husband about things I felt like were missing from a lot of true crime narratives.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Um, you know, obviously I found that the sort of like listening to them, you know, interesting and engaging. And there was something, um, that was really drawing me in for episode after episode. episode, but I also felt like a lot of these shows really didn't dive into race or gender or sexuality or the root causes of crime.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And so I kind of just started having so many conversations with my husband about that, that he was eventually like, why don't you start your own podcast? And I was like, yeah, I love that idea. Let me see if I can do it. Give it a try. And so that's how Truer Crime came to be. And I just produced that first season kind of independently, put it out in the spring of 2021.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And it really grew from there. And I found that a lot of people also resonated with like wanting to hear true crime, you know, told a little bit differently with more nuance and empathy. And just kind of like diving into, you know, why do these things happen? And so, you know, I've been working on the season two after that first season.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
No, definitely. Definitely. Do we know if Susan Smith, like if they had her like assessed or anything like that for the trial?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And so that's 10 additional episodes that, you know, we started releasing in January. And yeah, it's been an interesting ride. I'm excited to kind of continue and put out more episodes down the road.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah. I mean, insofar as she was assaulted by her stepfather and, you know, like just it doesn't sound like that ever was resolved in a way that, you know, would have been healing for her. I imagine that, you know, her whole life probably would have been different had that not happened or had she received the proper support.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And then you got to imagine that she's the child in the vulnerable position when you're talking about, you know, her stepdad assaulting her. So I Not to say, oh, yeah, like had that not happened, then this wouldn't have happened. But I imagine like her whole life would have been different had that not happened. So I think in her case, it's like certainly it doesn't mitigate her culpability.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
But like I do wonder about that playing into things, especially if it seems like based on her psychological assessment that she – you know, had some sort of like would become extremely distressed if she was alone or whatever.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And this sort of like something is wrong about her attachment style or her, you know, clearly she's very attached to this guy that she's having this affair with, right, that she's going to go to these extreme lengths. And I imagine that her relationship with a step parent who's supposed to be, you know, a safe and guiding figure in your life would would maybe impact some of that.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
So I kind of wonder if, you know, things could have been different.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, I mean, I don't I'm not really an expert in like sentencing and like what the guidelines would have been and like what the alternatives were.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
I think that oftentimes somebody might get 30 years and then they become eligible for parole, but they still end up serving life or far longer when then that sort of minimum number of years because they're not granted parole over and over and over again, especially in cases that are particularly heinous or somebody isn't showing parole.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
remorse or when you haven't had, you know, you haven't actually shown that you are ready to reenter society. I don't necessarily have a problem with the idea that someone is eligible for parole, even in heinous crimes, mostly because I, you know, I think that there are instances where maybe somebody could be rehabilitated. You know, there are instances, there are realities where that's true.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
There are also times where people, you know, are wrongfully convicted, like the Alice Sebold-Anthony Broadwater case I was talking about earlier, you know, Anthony was innocent. He was up for parole many times and was denied parole over and over and over again. But had he gotten out on parole, that would have been, you know, one of his only ways to sort of like free himself.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Eventually, when he did get out, it wasn't because he was exonerated. It was because they were like, OK, you've served the time that you need to serve and now you got out. He wasn't exonerated until years after he had spent, you know, plenty of time on the outside labeled as a sex offender.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
So all that to say that, like, I always tend to think when it comes to sentencing, it's like, what's the worst possible scenario? This, which is, you know, an innocent person is in there, you want them to have whatever options possible. I feel similarly about the death penalty, where it's like, even if we could agree that some certain people might be deserving of the death penalty or might not have
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
be able to be rehabilitated, there's always going to be people who we are going to execute who were innocent. And so I'd rather just not have the death penalty purely because those innocent people shouldn't be killed. So I kind of view that in a similar way.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And I would hope that if she's up for parole and she's not actually able to reenter society, that she's not going to be granted the option to reenter society. But, you know, I think that it's fair for people to have an opportunity to prove that they've changed.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah. I think it's interesting that she is still not just kind of coming clean about her actual motive. Yeah. Right. Because like after the crime, after she commits the crime and after she confesses to it, she says, you know, this initial thing about the murder suicide. We all know that's probably not true.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
I mean, it seems to be pretty clear what her motive was, which is to sort of get rid of her old life so that she could enter into this relationship with this man that she was having an affair with. I don't know why she's not admitting to that now, 30 years later, you know, at this point. you would think that it would just kind of serve her to say, that's what I was trying to do.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
I see now through therapy and whatever else that that was wrong. And I've developed XYZ coping mechanisms to prevent myself from harming people in the future. That, to me, would be what accountability looks like. I totally agree with what you're saying. It seems like it's more of a performance. And then also not to mention just like kind of what's been going on since she's been in prison.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Sort of interesting. She's had all of these like inappropriate relationships with the different prison guards, you said it was. And I think that that, you know, it's sad because it seems like it's sort of mirroring some of the other things in her life where she is perhaps she is sort of dependent on you know, really needing a relationships, particularly maybe a romantic one.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And that these sort of like inappropriate relationships are kind of appealing to her in some way, like whether it be an affair or, you know, what happened when she was initially assaulted, you know, wrongly by her stepdad. And now, you know, and let's be clear as a, like as an incarcerated person, the, the guards who were engaging in this, you know, sexual relationship with her are the most
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
aggressors here because she's the vulnerable person in that and so far she's a prisoner that's not to say that she's not involved that she doesn't take any she shouldn't have any accountability for like inappropriate relationships but it's like kind of disturbing that these guards were even that there were multiple guards that were like entering into these relationships with her and that's something that does happen in prison
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And so anyways, all of that to say that, like, I feel like all of those behaviors since she's been in prison sort of indicate that maybe, you know, the necessary growth hasn't happened. And, you know, that's just kind of furthered by those statements that she's making.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't think about the – I was thinking about like the 30 years and then eligible for parole, not so much the like frequency that she gets to kind of like plead her case every two years. That's super frequent. Yeah. And so, yeah, that is definitely one of those things where, yeah, you have to re sort of live that experience and trauma.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
That's one of the things I've been kind of thinking about. We did in season two, the two part episode on the Manson murders and, you know, the women who were who had committed this murder alongside Manson.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
and were imprisoned you know like have had these very widely talked about parole hearings over the years and it's just been kind of interesting to hear what the family has had to say about that about how it's just so you know they have to like kind of go back into the spotlight every single time especially in that case because it's been covered so much and then they're sort of like fighting to essentially you know keep these folks behind bars because they feel like that's
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
you know, justice for their family member. And yeah, that's just definitely one of the like, the far reaching impacts of her initial Susan's initial actions. You know, we think about the victims, like she killed her kids. And that's so awful for even just those two boys, right, who were killed, but then the ripple effects go on and on and on. And the parole hearings is just one example of that.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, that doesn't fit with any framework with which I view the world. So I don't even know where to start with that. I mean, murder is murder is murder. And I think that there are differences, of course, in terms of the factors and what
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
and why it happened and whether or not it could have been prevented and whether or not the person who like pulled the trigger or in this case drove the car off the the dock has 100% responsibility or perhaps there are other people who also have responsibility but like if you kill somebody you killed somebody it doesn't really matter what your intent was but I would say that you know like her intent was to get rid of her children so her intent was malice I don't
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. I think that and, you know, similar to your point, I don't necessarily think that she should have gotten the death penalty anyway or that any of these people, you know, should they have committed the crime should have gotten the death penalty. But like, I do think it is worth acknowledging the differences in how people are treated. Yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
So it kind of it makes me think about the case of Joanne Little, which I covered in season one of my show True Crime. You know, and this is also a case in South Carolina. And this was a young woman who was being held at a local jail and she was attacked by the prison guard that was on duty and she ended up in defending herself.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
killing him um he was trying to assault her and so then she was like on the run essentially because she was like oh my gosh here i am a black woman i've just killed this guard like i'm toast essentially she takes off and it kind of is like hiding in the community and then she ends up
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And kind of like igniting this whole sort of movement because, you know, folks who had been working on civil rights, women's rights activists, prison rights activists all kind of rallied behind her. But they were really trying to get her on the death penalty for killing this guard.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And, you know, it's just shocking to think that, you know, there are some people we sort of think, you know, deserve death and then other people who we think are, you know, worthy of more leniency. And, you know, I think empathy and also a belief that we should try to rehabilitate people is important, but it's like be great if that could be extended to, you know, all types of people. Yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
No, definitely not. There would be no discussion of mental health. But I do think it's interesting how the mental health conversation even happens both ways. Because it's like, sometimes, you know, in this case, we're talking about it as her defense of like, maybe she has less culpability. And then in some cases, it's sort of weaponized against women of like, you know, you're crazy.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And therefore, that's like proof that you did commit a crime or something like that. Like I think of the
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Darlie Rudier case that I was talking about earlier one of the big things that the prosecution was kind of pushing against her was this idea that she maybe she was suffering from postpartum depression and you know that's why she had killed her kids and it was sort of like instead of that being sort of like a point of empathy or understanding it's like oh well you know this actually proves that she's like an evil terrible person so it is interesting.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, this is great. It was interesting to sort of dive into this case and hear how we kind of can intersect with our kind of different perspectives in the genre. And I really appreciate it.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I feel like you never know how anyone would react in a situation like that. You know, everyone probably is a little bit different. But I think, you know, anybody could watch that and just feel like so much, you know, stress of like, oh, my gosh, like what had happened to these kids. And, you know, for these parents to kind of be without their kids is super alarming. Yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, it just in general, I feel like there's so many true crime stories that come out of the 90s that are especially like really, you know, well known that folks are talking about. I mean, I think about like also JonBenet Ramsey happening in this kind of similar era. This is actually in 1994 is the year before I was born.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Um, so, you know, like, I don't have like a ton of memories of this time, but just being in the true crime space, it's like, yeah, there's so many stories kind of like this. And I think, you know, I think of even in Minnesota, you know, we have the Jacob Wetterling case. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Um, but you know, and this happened before, uh, before the nineties, but you know, it was just like a time where I feel like it was like, oh my gosh, like something could happen to your kids. Like a stranger could come out of nowhere and just take them. And I think that created, you know, a lot of panic.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Yeah. Yeah. And I think for me, like, I think that obviously, you know, knowing what we know now, there is something to the way that she's reacting to things. Like, it's just true, right? If you're – if it's like you can watch it back and be like, oh, she seems kind of flat or maybe she seems like she's kind of smiling in some of those.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
That probably is happening to some extent because we know how the story ends. But I think for me, I always – like, when I was – when I watch those sorts of videos, I, like, really just –
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
don't know what to think of them usually because i feel like any sort of like uh assumption that i'd have about how somebody should react could be incorrect um i think the amanda knox case is a great example i also think about like um darlie rudier you know she was accused of killing her children she's um in prison actually now for killing two of her kids um
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And I covered that case actually for the first episode of True or Crime. And one of the things that really stood out to me about her case and just sort of the media frenzy before the trial and during the trial was that there was so much attention placed on how she was reacting to things. It was like, for example, her son, one of her sons who had been killed,
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
um, his birthday was like a few days after the murder. And so they, her and, um, a bunch of family members had gone out to his grave or a few days after the funeral, I should say. They'd gone out to his grave and they like had, you know, had, I think, cake and balloons and things like that. And like had sang happy birthday and like had kind of like put up some confetti and things like that.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
And the media had gotten some of that on film and it was just everywhere. I was like, oh, wow. You know, woman dances on her son's grave. That was the, you know, the headline, which to me, I was like, oh, that's so odd, because not only did I not, you know, think it was that weird, but I'm like, it, you know, beyond that, it's just like, everyone reacts differently.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
But also, it's like, to me, it did seem a little bit normal. It's like, you know, you want to try to celebrate the life of this person that, you know, her and her family deeply loved. And Also, her family was there too. So for me, that case really just being early in sort of my own journey of true crime media kind of solidified this idea of like, I don't know how anyone's going to react.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
I don't know how to interpret it. I'm certainly not an expert on that. I have an undergrad degree in psychology. And so, you know, I could pretend I know a thing or two, but really that's just me. I would just like utilize my abnormal psych class to try to diagnose my friends, but I have no credentials. But yeah, so I don't know.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Case Files 14: Susan Smith and the Impact of False Accusations with Celisia Stanton
Like I'm sure there is something to how she was reacting because we know that she, you know, was responsible, but I don't know how to read into it myself.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I don't remember the specifics of this part of the timeline, but sometime that winter, they end up charging him and they do kind of like a virtual hearing, which I was able to go to, and then he did end up pleading guilty. So then at that point, they scheduled a sentencing hearing, but...
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It actually wasn't scheduled for months until the summer of 2021, which is actually really fast for this whole thing for him to have turned himself in to a sentencing hearing in less than a year is pretty fast. But for me, it's also a long time because that whole time between when he had pled guilty and what his sentencing hearing in that summer, he was out and about.
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And it was weird because his wife might post things online. It's like, here they are in front of their big house. Here they are in their nice cars. Here they are living life, acting like normal. This was a good lesson for me that social media is so fake because it's like, this has got to be the worst time in these people's life. He had a sentencing date.
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I had to decide if I was going to give any kind of victim impact statement. But I just didn't feel like writing a victim impact statement, mostly because I just didn't want to give him any more energy. There was so much energy that I'd gone towards this. If I was the only victim, I probably would have written an impact statement. But I knew that there were a bunch of us.
Something Was Wrong
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He had stolen over $2 million from a bunch of different clients. And so I knew that there would be plenty of other people reading their statements. And the purpose of the statement is to be cathartic for people or it could be an opportunity for him to have to sit here and hear the impact of his crime, but also to guide the judge in their sentencing process.
Something Was Wrong
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And so I felt like that I wasn't going to get any kind of like catharsis out of that because I just didn't want to give him more energy. And I felt like the judge would have the information that they would need from how I had already participated in the investigation and everyone else's statement. So I got there.
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It was so surreal to like kind of like see the other people and then also to see him for the first time since the last time I had seen him would have been when I thought everything was fine. Like one of our last meetings in the fall before. It was just interesting because the victims were all different types of people. I feel lucky that this happened when I was young.
Something Was Wrong
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And while it was a big financial hit for me, this wasn't like I had moved my whole retirement and was investing with him and was about to retire. That was the circumstances of some of the victims of this crime. There was one couple in particular who I ended up connecting with and having several conversations with. They were about to retire, had invested their entire retirement with him.
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And the woman, her sister had early onset dementia and was in a long-term care facility, which was super expensive. I think it was something like $7,000 a month for her care. They had invested all of her money as well, the money that she had earned prior to her diagnosis. Having early onset dementia, they were like, she could live for a long time.
Something Was Wrong
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This isn't necessarily something that she's going to pass away in the next few years. So we have to consider her care for potentially 10, 20 plus years. That was part of the reason I actually started working with this financial advisor. And he sold all that money. And to me, I'm just like, how could he have looked... in those people's eyes over and over again and did what he did.
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It's just mind blowing to me. Going there was just like people from very different walks of life, all different experiences, all different amounts of money. And then hearing everyone's victim impact statements as well. It was just helpful for me to know this is the first opportunity I really got to just hear that wasn't just me and to hear other people's experiences.
Something Was Wrong
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It was really wild to see not just that myself and my family and friends who never thought anything was up, but also all these other people fall into this scheme was really alarming. For myself and the other victims of this financial advisor in particular, it was like this wasn't some random person who didn't actually have the background and skills to be a financial advisor.
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You know, this wasn't me falling into this really basic scheme. This was complex. He was a fiduciary, meaning that he had extra responsibilities to do what was best for his client legally. He had that training and background.
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That's one of the things that I feel like as somebody who works in true crime media, just getting exposed to so many different types of stories, whether we're talking about cults or scams or whatever it might be. I think it's super easy to feel like I would never fall for that or I could never be a part of that. Really, I think this experience was learning for me, too.
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It's like anybody can be the victim of these sorts of things. It's set up oftentimes people who are successful at deceiving others are highly skilled manipulators. He ended up being sentenced to about 15. seven years of prison time. He isn't eligible for parole, but I do keep getting emails that like his release date is getting moved up and moved up and moved up.
Something Was Wrong
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So I'm not really sure what's up with that. The victim advocate I had really wasn't helping me through that process. And then he was given months to report to prison. It wasn't like he was sentenced and they took him right away. He had months out until he finally went into prison, I think about three months later.
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For some people, I'm sure that can be helpful. It can feel like closure. But to me, I just don't think I was ever going to feel any sense of closure from the American criminal justice system. I just don't think it's set up for that.
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I think I felt more closure from working on Truer Crime, from getting to make meaning out of this in a different way and getting to tell these stories and find a deeper purpose and take my life in, honestly, a whole different direction. That... was closure for me. That was healing for me. This was procedure. In these cases, people don't get their money back.
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It's one of those things where if there is a criminal prosecution. Maybe there'll be a punishment for the person who did it. And in this case, there was and he did end up getting sentenced to time in prison. He's in prison now. He owes restitution. The likelihood that that's going to be paid back in any like significant way is very low. He's in prison, so he's not making money really right now.
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And they did liquidate some of his assets. That took a really long time, though, like over a year. and distributed it amongst the victims, but it was a really small amount of money. I was somebody who had a lot of opinions about the criminal legal process and about justice and prisons and policing.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
So that was a really tough thing to reconcile alongside now being the victim of this financial crime and having to go through that process myself. I live in Minneapolis. After George Floyd was murdered, I started posting on Instagram about racial and social justice, sharing my perspective as a young Afro-Latinx woman living in Minneapolis, gay parent. I did debate in high school.
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I coached debate for 15 years. And I always like to think about things critically. So I was like, can we talk about issues of racial and social justice in a digestible way on the Internet? So I started doing that. And I had a lot of those posts really resonate with people. And several of those things go viral. And I really grew a platform and kind of a community on Instagram initially.
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After that, I kind of was like, I know I want to do more things in this space, but I don't know what that's going to look like. I knew that long term, I didn't want that to just be Instagram because there's a little bit less space for nuance on social media than there is and maybe something long form like podcasting. For me, all of that was in the backdrop of this happening in the same year.
Something Was Wrong
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And so dealing with the emotional experience of getting defrauded and also like having these feelings about knowing that the criminal justice system, maybe it operates how it's intended to, but it does not always serve out justice or what I would consider to be justice. Being in an era of a lot of criticism of policing.
Something Was Wrong
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And then having to rely on that same system to get me what I needed, whether that be some amount of money back or accountability for this person who had done this. It was kind of a lot of nuanced, complicated feelings for me. I think that's kind of how I ended up in this situation where I started my podcast, which is I was just listening to true crime episode after true crime episode.
Something Was Wrong
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And I was constantly pausing it. to basically complain to my husband about different things that I felt like was missing from so much of these true crime narratives. So many different shows I was listening to about race and gender and sexuality and why do people commit crime? What does it actually mean to be victim-centered?
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Because I was like, victim-centered isn't just, oh, this victim was beautiful and wonderful and had a great personality. Victim-centered for me would have meant, what can we do to ensure that this doesn't happen again? I think that that's something that's common amongst victims of... all types of crimes.
Something Was Wrong
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And I just felt like, why was so often the takeaway of true crime things like, you should just be afraid of everyone. Anyone could be out to get you. I didn't feel like that was very affirming. I just felt like that made me feel more scared. And at a time when I felt already so anxious and fearful... I wanted something that felt connecting.
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And I was like, couldn't these stories be used to generate empathy, to be nuanced, to make us feel safer and bring us together? I just had been pausing these shows so often, kind of complaining to my husband about it. And eventually he was just like, you know what? Why don't you start your own podcast?
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He's the kind of person he's always kind of like pushing me to do something new or take on a new project. I'm like, I don't have time for that. It's too much. But this one I was like, not only can I not say I don't have time because I'm just sitting here doing cat puzzles and listening to podcasts. But also, it was like, wow, actually, this is a great idea.
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Like, I do feel like I have a unique perspective. even just being a Black creator. Of course, there's some great Black true crime creators, but there aren't very many. But then also, you know, having my experience navigating the system, but then also having the views that I did and the experience I had around racial and social justice advocacy,
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I was like, maybe I could create something that would kind of mesh all those things together. For a lot of people, when you're consuming true crime stories, it is about entertainment. I wouldn't be listening to episode after episode after episode if there wasn't something entertaining about it. It could be comforting or cathartic and all those things can be true too.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
But also there's something about the way that we're telling these stories, especially in true crime podcasting, that's compelling to people.
Something Was Wrong
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And I felt from the very beginning that if I was going to create a show, I wanted to take the things that I really did like about the true crime genre, which is these ability to tell these really compelling stories and merge it with some of these things that came from my own perspective. I didn't ever want to create a show where it'd be like, that's that podcast hosted by that black woman.
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That's that social justice podcast. That's that history true crime podcast. No, no. I wanted to be a true crime podcast, to sit firmly in that genre, tell a compelling story, but to have the takeaway be a little bit different, to have the nuances show through. And so that is how I ended up coming up with the concept for Truer Crime. I just dove headfirst into that.
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January of 2021, literally just started writing my first episode. And I was like, let's see what I can come up with. Then in the spring of 2021, I released the first season of Truer Crime completely independently. I had no podcasting experience. I didn't know what was going to become of it. But yeah, it just allowed me to funnel all of these feelings into something tangible and
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and hopefully to help gain visibility for stories that really did need attention.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
That episode is pretty different in format than my other episodes. Being my own story, it was just a little bit more off the cuff versus my other episodes are scripted. And usually I'm not covering financial crimes or scams. It's a lot of murders, some sexual assault. So it was different to put that one together, but it felt important to share some of my experience and reflections.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And it was really cool. I think a lot of people reached out to me and shared their own stories. A lot of people have had experiences of being a part of a financial fraud scheme or being the victim of a financial crime. And I think there's a lot of shame around it because this feeling of only a stupid person is going to fall for that.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I think it was just kind of validating for people to hear my experience, to be able to connect with that. I feel like it kind of raised questions for people.
Something Was Wrong
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Like it just opened a dialogue that I thought was interesting just around financial crime and the impact that it can have on people because financial crime isn't the same as any other crime that you could be the victim of, but it is deeply impactful. There was a study actually on the Bernie Madoff victims and they found a lot of the same outcomes in terms of mental health, depression, anxiety,
Something Was Wrong
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suicidal ideation, all these things amongst those victims as they found amongst victims of violent crime. I think a lot of that's because money is everything, especially in the United States, in a capitalist world. This is how you survive. This is your home. This is your future. This is your dreams. It's your legacy. And it's a major point of stress for people, too.
Something Was Wrong
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When people have enough money to survive and take care of themselves, they're much happier. So I think it was just cool to kind of open up that conversation about the impact of financial crime on people and just think about it in a different way. I, like I said, had no clear expectations about what was going to happen.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
Started putting out the first episodes and then I guess it had just fallen into the lap of an agent who was able to connect me with a few different people, set up some meetings. And that's how I ended up getting connected with Tenderfoot TV and just kind of resonated with some of the other podcasts that they had had, stories and topics they covered.
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S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
As an independent creator who was fully funding this myself and didn't have the show season one monetized in any way, It was like, how could I make these stories better? How can I move people more with the storytelling? And I was like, I really would love to have music that helps amplify a moment.
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S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And I'd love to have the resources to maybe reach out to more people, do more interviews and have better editing and production and all of that. So I was excited about the opportunity to partner with a network that helped me do those things. I ended up working with Tenderfoot and I started working on some of their other shows. I hosted The Vanishing Point, which came out in 2023.
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And that was a really cool experience to get to host on a show that wasn't mine, to be a part of a very different story. That series is about Hoopa Valley, which is an area in California. It's a tribal land that a ton of people have gone missing from. The idea of The Vanishing Point is that every season really investigates a location.
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And in this season, it was like, what are the systems at play that are causing all of these Indigenous folks to go missing or be murdered? And it's really a broader story about things that are playing out in reservations and in Indigenous communities all across the country.
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I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and chat with you about the shows and also about my experience and give people a little bit of a look about what it actually looks like to experience a financial fraud. I was a wedding and portrait photographer. And that's work I'd been doing pretty much since I had graduated from college.
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So that was cool, too, because it was a little bit more investigative in that we actually got to go and talk to people there and connect with the families. Whereas, you know, true crime is episodic. Every episode is a different case, different story. And sometimes I get to connect with the families and victims, which is amazing. It was just a cool opportunity to kind of get to do both things. But
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For me, then it was like, all right, what's next? And that was True Crime season two. So that's what I've been working on for the last several years is pulling together a group of new stories to share with folks. So this new season just came out on January 20th, which is MLK Day, actually. And we premiered with two episodes, one of those being an episode on
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the assassination of MLK and specifically the untold story. A lot of folks, if you ask them, what do you know about MLK's assassination? They'll tell you not much, like maybe that he was shot at a motel or on a balcony, maybe that the guy was convicted and got sentenced to life in prison. And all of that's true.
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He was killed while in Memphis, while he was standing out on a balcony by a single shot. This man named James Earl Ray would eventually go to prison. He'd plead guilty. He was convicted. He was sentenced to 99 years. What a lot of people don't know is that the King family has always sort of doubted that official narrative. They don't think that James Earl Ray was the person who killed King.
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And in 1999, Coretta Scott King, alongside her children, sued in a civil trial a number of people, including entities of the United States government, saying that United States government, some organized crime groups and a bunch of individuals were all involved in a conspiracy to kill MLK. And they won that civil lawsuit. And that happened in 1999. And people don't know about that.
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I didn't know about that. So we wanted to do a story that really hit at what is that narrative? What is the narrative that the King family believes in? It's truly baffling because King is probably one of the most celebrated heroes in American history. Yet you ask anybody and they know so little about his assassination.
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But then to think that the United States government or entities like the FBI could have been involved in his killing. And that's something I had heard floating around. I asked a lot of people while writing this episode, like, what do you know? And every once in a while, someone would be like, didn't the CIA kill him or something like that?
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But that's pretty much the extent of what a lot of people know, unless maybe you were a little bit older at that time or were very plugged in because the U.S. media did not cover the civil trial, which is absolutely mind boggling to me.
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I'm definitely interested in hearing what people think about that episode and just engaging with that case on MLK Day because so much of his legacy as a civil rights leader has been sort of sanitized in the decades after his death. But then we have nine other episodes which are on a variety of topics, all different types of stories.
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And I'm really excited to get those out there for folks to be able to hear the truer crime telling of them.
Something Was Wrong
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And I always had wanted to have my own business, didn't know exactly what it was gonna be. Photography kind of fell into my lap. And so I took off with that and that was going smoothly. I think I started that in like 2016. And then in 2020, as you can imagine, there wasn't a lot of events going on with the pandemic. And so I had a lot slow down in a lot of my work
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Doing an episodic show was always my priority because I felt like episodic true crime is so popular. What would it look like to kind of bridge those worlds between episodic true crime and like a limited series where you have that level of deep research and nuance, but you do try to condense it into the episode because I felt like there was just so much room in the episodic world for that.
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It's tough, especially doing a story like Jonestown. which is complex. And on that episode in particular, I really wanted to do right by the few survivors that there were because they've just been really brought through the ringer in terms of the media. So many of them are very, very fearful to talk to anybody. So I just wanted to try to do justice by that story.
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And it's tough in a single episode, but hopefully we accomplished some of that. Trying to do cases that are maybe infamous or covered a lot in the true crime world I wanted to see like, okay, can we do a newer perspective or telling on that? With Joe and Stan, most people don't know that the large majority of the people who died in Guyana were Black women or Black folks in general.
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There was this real social justice component to his messaging, racial justice, class inequities, all of those things.
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One episode I'm really excited about that we're doing on season two is actually a two-part episode on the Manson murders, which is another super infamous case. A lot of people don't know the details around the fact that Manson was trying to incite a race war. And that was very tied up in what ended up happening in those killings.
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He tried to pin these killings on the Black Panthers, left all these red herrings at the crime scene trying to like push authorities in that direction. Those were elements that I had never heard before. I always kind of was like, oh, yeah, Manson isn't like a bunch of crazy hippies that went on some killing spree. And it's like, well, there's a lot more to it.
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In that first episode, we really cover the rise of the Manson family leading up to the murders. And then the second episode is really that trial. That trial at that time was just covered everywhere. And this was decades before O.J. Simpson. If there was any kind of precursor to the coverage that O.J. Simpson's trial got, it would be this trial. It was just...
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So many news reporters swarming on that building. People had come in from all across the country just to see what was going to happen. That's a two-part episode that's coming out that I think folks will be interested in hearing. I try to do cases sometimes that get relegated to like the history category. In our first season, we did the Tulsa Race Massacre, for example.
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And that's a story that I think most people don't really know the details of that because it's not told in a format that's really accessible to people unless you're like a history buff or really interested in the history of racial injustice in this country. I was like, what would it look like if we told stories that are typically considered history, but in a true crime format?
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What would these stories sound like if we told them like they were a true crime story? And they are true crime stories. I also like to tell stories that play around with this idea of culpability and who is the perpetrator and who is the victim, because I don't think it's always as clear as some true crime would make it out to be. Oftentimes, it's much more complex.
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I was like, okay, let me use this opportunity to work on other areas of my business and development that I wanted to be doing. And one of those things was I was really hoping to kind of work on building out my financial future.
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One of the cases that we're covering, this should be out when most people hear this episode. I'm doing an episode on Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater. Alice Sebold is the author of the book, The Lovely Bones, which was adapted into a movie. Before Alice Sebold wrote The Lovely Bones, she wrote this book called Lucky. And Lucky is a memoir. And it's actually about her own rape.
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that she was the victim of in college and the subsequent trial that convicted her rapist. The man convicted of her rape was Anthony Broadwater, just a man living in Syracuse, New York at the time. And it turned out Anthony Broadwater was not the person who had assaulted Alice Sebold.
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And he was convicted and sent to prison, served out his full term, and in recent years was exonerated because of a whole series of wild events that we get into in the episode that involved them trying to adapt this memoir into a movie and running into lots of issues because there were problems with the prosecution against him. Alice Siebold was raped. She was attacked. That did happen.
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She wrongly identified Anthony Broadwater as her attacker. And that's actually a really common phenomenon, especially cross-racially, which it was in this case. That's a case where it's like, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? It's really confusing. I really wanted to dive into those nuances.
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We have another case about a man who is currently on death row in Alabama, who I firmly believe is innocent and whose stakes are literally life and death. His name is DeForest Johnson. So we hope to get his story out there and lots of others too.
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At the time everyone listens to this, there'll be three episodes out. That MLK episode, another episode will come out on the January 20th and then we'll be releasing weekly after that on Mondays.
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I felt like being a self-employed person, I didn't have a really clear idea of how I was going to retire one day or what exactly I should be doing most strategically to set myself up for success, set my business up for success. I had other goals. I wanted to buy a house and hopefully get married and save for some of these bigger purchases in life.
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It's been awesome. And a major part of the reason I'm super excited about this season two, I really feel very proud of the episodes. I think these stories really need some visibility, all different stakes. Some of them are like literally life and death. And in other instances, these families want these stories to be out there. They want people engaging with them.
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So it's exciting to have been able to do that with some more resources and to just feel really, really good about the end product. I can't wait to hear what people think and the conversations that they might generate.
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Of course, I really appreciate, you know, your thoughtful questions and diving into it. It's been almost five years since this all happened. And so it's just crazy to think about the direction that my life has taken because, you know, I never would have imagined that I'd be doing this or be talking to you or be in the true crime space. So It's cool to get to reflect on all of that.
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Truer Crime, my podcast, is available wherever you get your podcasts. The Vanishing Point as well. If you listen, you like it. Rating and reviewing helps so much. Beyond that, though, you can find me on Instagram and TikTok at... Well, we'll see if it's on TikTok, but whatever. At Salicia Stanton. And then you can find Truer Crime on... Instagram and X at Truer Crime Pod.
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S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And then I also have a weekly newsletter that I do called Sincerely Slicia. That's on Substack. It's sincerelyslicia.substack.com. And that's where I do kind of musings, cultural commentary, reflections, and then share what I'm into. Like the podcast I've been listening to, articles I'm reading, recipes I'm trying, all that good stuff. So lots of places to find me and keep up with me.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And I hope to connect with your listeners for sure.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And I just figured that keeping it in my savings account wasn't the only way I could go about doing that. I knew I could be more strategic. I just needed somebody who could help me know what that strategy would be. And every time I felt like I was trying to look things up online, it just wasn't giving me the clarity that I wanted, especially on the investing side.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And so I started working with this financial advisor in the summer of 2020. My mom had been working at this financial company and he came in and spoke to the Black Employee Resource Group, did a whole presentation. I think my mom had said that he had these like infant twins there or toddler twins there. So, you know, he's coming across as this really charismatic guy, family man.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
She just had told me about, hey, there's this guy. He seems cool. He's local. It would maybe be in alignment for you. So that's when I had reached out to him. And this was somebody who was pretty well known in the Minneapolis Twin Cities community, especially within the Black community, because this was a Black financial advisor, which was something that was exciting to me as a Black woman myself.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
We really connected. He would explain that part of the mission that drove him in his work was helping people to access this system, the financial system that were traditionally excluded, that didn't normally get access.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
Obviously being a black person himself and then also having his own small business, he was working with a lot of other black folks that don't typically necessarily have that institutional knowledge because of how our society is set up. So I really resonated with that I felt like, oh, this is perfect. He's super aligned with his approach and style.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And so that kind of sealed the deal for me where I was like, you know what? This is a perfect time to get started with this. So we started working together in August of 2020. He was great. He was encouraging me to get certain investments going. He was much more of a coach than like I think I had read about other financial advisors being like. He really took a more holistic approach.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
It wasn't just about, okay, here are the investments I was going to make. It was also like, what could you be doing in your day-to-day life and your budgeting and your day-to-day finances to set yourself up for success? He was super warm, bubbly, charismatic. He would go around and do lots of different speeches, go on podcasts.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
He had a YouTube channel, active on social media, just a really warm person. He was a father of four young kids and just seemed like just a great guy who cared deeply about the work that he was doing. And he really wanted to help give other people access to that world.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I had sent him a few different lump sums of money to put into an investment account. And I had a portal I could log into to like see where the money was, see how it was doing. Later, I would find out he was kind of manipulating behind the scenes. Those numbers weren't real. You know, I didn't think anything of it for a bit, but then his communication had gotten really poor.
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S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I was following up and not getting any response. I was just feeling like something's not right here. And I just had this gut instinct. What if he had stolen all of this money that I had invested with him? And it was something that was really odd because I just had that feeling, right?
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And I was telling my now husband, my mom, other people who were close to me, and everyone had the same reaction, which was just, no, there's no way that that's what happened. Like, I remember my husband was like, this man does not want to go to jail. If it's true that he stole your money, I mean, he's going to jail because he's a fiduciary. You can't do that.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
The paper trail he left behind is so clear. So there's no way. Did you second guess yourself when you started having those gut feelings? I would say like temporarily, I would have a conversation with somebody and then I would feel a little bit better about it for like a few hours or something. All of this really ratcheted up over the course of one weekend or just a few days.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
It was just constantly on my mind. I'm feeling terrible. I want to throw up. And I've been texting him too. And he wasn't responding at all. And I was texting him being like, hey, I really need this money back because he had told me like, hey, at any point, if you need money transferred for whatever reason, that process should only take a few days. And it's pretty simple.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
Like, you know, you just let me know we can get that initiated. So when I started really feeling weird about it, I was texting him every day, multiple times a day, like I need to get this money. It needs to be moved. I told him, you know, I have this family emergency, whatever I needed to do to get any kind of response out of him and nothing.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I ended up waking up in the middle of the night, started doing a bunch of research, and I just felt like things weren't adding up. The information I should be able to have access to if I had invested in these accounts he had said that they were invested in. I would go into the portal and be like, it's missing certain information I feel like should be there.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
So then at that point, I had convinced myself, I was like, I'm pretty sure that this man took this money. And then just wildly, I ended up getting a text from him that same morning. He just said, I've turned myself into the FBI. You can reach out at my email if you have any kind of further questions about this. I don't remember exactly what I said back.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I sent some sort of text message back trying to get a little bit more information. I don't think he ever responded to that. That's when I started trying to just contact whoever I could contact at the state first, because I was like, if he's turned himself in and he was maybe under investigation, there's got to be somebody's working on this case. I ended up talking to somebody.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I basically started telling my story on the phone and she was like, oh, I know exactly who this is. I guess she had gotten some other calls or something or she was just familiar with this case. And so she ended up getting me connected with one of the investigators who had been investigating him.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And then I talked on the phone with her and just kind of had to answer some questions on my experience was like when and how I invested with him, what the process of working him had been. She asked me questions like, if you can't
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
receive any of these funds back how would that impact your life but nobody ever said to me yes your money was stolen so it's still confusing because it's like obviously it was because he said he's turned himself in and he's not responding to my questions about getting that money back
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
Talking to the investigator, I don't think she could technically outright say like, yes, your money was taken and here's what we've uncovered. I was very much in the dark from the very beginning about what he could have used that money on, where that money could be, what the chances were that I was going to get the money back.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
If the money had even been stolen, which is like a weird thing to say, no one will confirm to you that you have actually been defrauded. You just kind of have to infer it. I had to like send this investigator basically everything that I had, like all of our text messages, email exchanges, screenshots of that portal that I was talking about that I could log into.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
Because I guess all of that would have been able to be a part of the investigation and utilized in a case against him. I was assigned a victim's advocate. Okay. I don't remember if that was the exact name, but that's essentially the function. It was wild because I was like, wow, this is I'm getting nothing from this person.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
They sent me a pamphlet in the mail of things to do to cope with being defrauded. The things on there were sort of like ridiculous. They were just so unhelpful. If I wanted any information, I was like, I had to follow up via email. Like nobody was actually advocating, I felt, on my behalf or making sure I had the proper information to know what was going on.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I didn't know at that point who the other victims were. There wasn't any ability, obviously, to connect with those people until later. And I only found out who those people were through social media. It's a very isolating experience because you're just so confused about what's gone on. So you're just stalking him on the Internet.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And he had left a big old paper trail because he had started his own financial app business that he was trying to get off the ground. And he was a part of like several different incubator programs and had gotten featured in a bunch of different business and tech programs. publications and was going on a media tour on podcasts and YouTube channels and the like.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
So it was plenty of things for me to kind of like watch and take in and be like, what was he really thinking and try to speculate, but no clear information about what exactly he had been doing all that time. This is now winter of 2020. So it's a shit year, but it's also winter in Minnesota. So it's a shit time of the year. I was like, I don't really know what to do.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I don't have a lot of work things going on because it's the off season because people really don't know what to do. summer and spring and fall here. And it's the holidays. So I started spending literally all day every day doing cat puzzles and listening to true crime podcasts. The reason I was listening to podcasts was because I have ADHD.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
If I'm going to be doing a puzzle, I need to also be listening to something. It's not enough. I need like the extra stimulation. I don't know why I was like, let me listen to a bunch of true crime when I'm already feeling stressed out. But that's what I did. And I do think there's something to that. There's probably something weirdly therapeutic about hearing other people's stories.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I had a lot of anxiety and fear post this happening around what he might actually do, because it wasn't like he was arrested or anything like that. Like him turning himself into the FBI basically means that he's now cooperating with the investigation. They're probably going to press charges against him, but it wasn't like they were carting him off to jail. So he was just at home living his life.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And I felt very anxious about that because I'm like, oh my gosh, he has all of my personal information. He has my address. He has my social security number. You know, all the things that you would be giving to a financial advisor because they're dealing with such sensitive information. And he is irrational. Any thought of, oh, a normal person would do this is now out the window.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And it's kind of like when my husband had said earlier when he was like, oh, you know, this man doesn't want to go to jail. Clearly that did not stop him. The fact that he very seriously could face prison time or go to jail for doing this did not stop him from doing it. He's a little bit delusional in that he genuinely thought he was going to be able to get away with it.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I really do think he thought that he was going to like earn the money back through his business and then everyone be none the wiser. Obviously that didn't happen. But now knowing that I'm dealing with somebody who, yeah, they are not a rational decision maker. And now, yeah, they're in like probably the lowest point of their life. I don't know what he's going to do.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
I just felt unsafe in my own home. What is it like to try to reconcile that emotionally? First, a lot of shock that this had happened. I had invested basically all of my savings with him, like all of the life savings I had had accumulated to that point. So that was really devastating. If you're working with financial advisor, like the whole point is you're planning all these things for your future.
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S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
And so this was all suddenly gone overnight. For me, that was like tens of thousands of dollars. And it was a representation of myself as a business owner, like all of the work that I had put in to get to the place that I was at in my business, which had taken years. That was definitely a tough process. And then also it was tough for my family as well, because what can they really do?
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
You want to be able to like help and there's not anything that can be done anymore.