Celisia Stanton
Appearances
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...
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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?
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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?
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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,
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
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.
Something Was Wrong
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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?
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
There was this real social justice component to his messaging, racial justice, class inequities, all of those things.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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...
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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?
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
S22 E13: Truer Crime with Celisia Stanton
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.
Something Was Wrong
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.
Something Was Wrong
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.
Something Was Wrong
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.