In 2020, the Hartmans grow even more isolated as Covid hits: Sophie pulls C out of school citing worsening health and breaks with the church community who’ve been supporting her and her daughters. Concerns for abuse grow as Sophie begins to push a new narrative that C has central precocious puberty (CPP), a condition that causes the body to go through puberty prematurely, After making an initial DCF report in 2019 and tracking Sophie’s demands for increasingly invasive procedures: Seattle Children’s Child Abuse Team files an official report to the Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Her daughters are subsequently placed in protective custody and Sophie is charged with assault of a child in the second degree. We hear from the Seattle reporter who broke the story, Olivia LaVoice and dig into the extensive documentation from the investigation with Detective Michael Lee, a major crimes detective in Texas and co-founder of the National Crimes Against Children Investigators Association.. Andrea also talks with Dr. Mary Zupanc, a pediatric neurologist and epilepsy specialist with over 30 years of clinical and research experience with AHC. She gives listeners a better understanding of AHC by describing the history of the disorder, the various symptoms, common environmental triggers, and how clinical diagnoses of AHC are made. *** Links and Resources: More about Dr. Mary Zupanc: https://www.childneurologysociety.org/awards/mary-l-zupanc-md/ Check out Olivia LaVoice’s podcast, The Bakersfield Three: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-bakersfield-three-128074552/ Chad Goller-Sojourner’s Sitting in Circles with Rich White Girls: Memoir of a Bulimic Black Boy will be adding show dates in spring 2025. Click HERE for more information. Preorder Andrea and Mike’s new book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy Catch Andrea and Mike at their Seattle Book Launch Event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/andrea-dunlop-and-mike-weber-the-mother-next-door-tickets-1097661478029 Learn more about our featured non-profit and mutual aid organizations: https://www.nobodyshouldbelieveme.com/nsbm-supports/ Check out You Probably Think This Story's About You: https://brittaniard.com/podcast Click here to view our sponsors. Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show! Subscribe on YouTube where we have full episodes and lots of bonus content. Follow Andrea on Instagram for behind-the-scenes photos: @andreadunlop Buy Andrea's books here. To support the show, go to Patreon.com/NobodyShouldBelieveMe or subscribe on Apple Podcasts where you can get all episodes early and ad-free and access exclusive ethical true crime bonus content. For more information and resources on Munchausen by Proxy, please visit MunchausenSupport.com The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s MBP Practice Guidelines can be downloaded here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What warning does the podcast give to listeners?
True Story Media. Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show, we discuss child abuse, and this content may be difficult for some listeners. If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to munchausensupport.com to connect with professionals who can help.
As 2019 comes to a close, Em, now 10 years old, is keeping up with her intensive gymnastics program, all while Sophie is taking C back and forth between Seattle Children's and Duke Medical Center in North Carolina. And her condition, according to this note in Sophie's phone, is dire. Quote,
This AHC and severe gastroparesis and autonomic dysfunction and intestinal dismobility is actually from the darkest pit in hell. But our citizenship is in heaven. So we rejoice knowing this won't be her forever. Then the pandemic hits.
Mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China. A new type of coronavirus.
Chapter 2: How did the pandemic impact the Hartmans' lives?
There are fears a rapidly spreading virus has reached Australia. This is a rapidly emerging situation.
The first US case has been detected.
The number of affected countries has tripled.
The World Health Organization has just declared that this is a pandemic.
In September of 2020, C is six years old and, like children everywhere during the pandemic, switches to virtual learning when the school locks down. A month into that school year, in October of 2020, Sophie writes a letter to C's school, which has a robust program for special needs students, explaining C's worsening condition.
She writes, Some new neurological, visual, and also endocrine issues have come up in the last few months, and there is worry among the team at Seattle Children's for a brain mass. She was recently diagnosed with central precocious puberty. Yes, she is in full-blown puberty, which is why she has grown so exponentially and is maturing physically and looks like a teenager.
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Chapter 3: What allegations were made against Sophie Hartman?
And the thinking right now is that there may be a brain tumor which is causing that. By the following month, Sophie would pull C out of school completely, saying that even virtual schooling was too much for her daughter to bear with her health.
On top of everything happening with COVID, Seattle, like many major cities, had large protests and civil actions around the Black Lives Matter movement, which saw a swell in support following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. there was a new scrutiny on the deep systemic racism that permeates every institution in America. And this was on Sophie's radar as well.
This is where I'm going to get emotional because if the complaint is coming from this hospital, I am so, like, I am so over Seattle Children's. I have a call in a few days because they have this whole investigation going on with systemic racism.
The investigation Sophie is referring to followed the resignation of a beloved Black doctor named Ben Danielson, who was the director of a clinic that served mostly Black and brown families in Seattle.
Danielson resigned in protest in November 2020, saying that Seattle Children's wasn't upholding its commitment to racial equity in a variety of ways, pointing to the lack of translation services and the frequency with which security was called on people of color. This led to an internal investigation and the firing of at least one person in senior leadership.
Seattle has a reputation for being progressive, but the truth is far more complicated. While you're likely to see plenty of Black Lives Matter signs driving around town, the city has a shameful history of redlining, school segregation, and, well, just all of the things that plague every city in America. And of course, how this all intersects with medicine is especially complex.
The medical system is extremely fraught for Black Americans, who get worse care overall and who died at much higher rates during the pandemic. This was the background in which Sophie's building tension with Seattle Children's Hospital was playing out.
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Chapter 4: How does systemic racism intersect with medical treatment?
But the ways in which systemic racism in medicine affect Black parents of Black children is not the same as how it plays out for white parents of Black children. as we discussed with our expert on transracial adoption, Chad Golder Sojourner.
Chad is the Black adopted son of white parents and chronicles his own childhood medical odyssey in his one-man show, Sitting in Circles with Rich White Girls, Memoirs of a Bulimic Black Boy.
I assume when my mom advocated for me, I got the same treatment as if a white mom was advocating for white children. What I don't know, it's just in cases, did I get better treatment than a white, you know, wasn't elevated. So there's like.
Because like they're looking at her as like, oh, not only is she a white mom, she's a white mom who did such a good thing.
Good job, exactly. So we're going to sort of, yeah. I don't know that.
Like a sort of halo effect a little bit. Interestingly, during this time, Sophie leaves Pursuit Northwest, the church that had raised thousands of dollars for her in a single day to help purchase a wheelchair-accessible van and which, by all accounts, had been very supportive of her family.
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Chapter 5: What evidence was collected in the investigation?
The purported reason for her departure is that she was unhappy with Pursuit's response to the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 and said that she no longer felt that the church was a safe place for her Black children. I don't know what the church's response was in the summer of 2020, so I don't have much of an opinion on it.
Their Facebook page from June of 2020 includes a post saying, Black lives matter to Jesus. Will they matter to us? As well as a post celebrating Juneteenth. Now, a couple of Facebook posts don't tell us that much.
There's also no reason to believe that an institution with this church's very evident political leanings, again, leanings that Sophie, by all accounts, shared, would have some kind of full-throated support for the Black Lives Matter movement. I suspect that there may have been another reason Sophie might have wanted to distance herself from the people who she'd been close to at church.
Her lies about C's health were about to come completely undone. Prior to the pandemic, back in mid-2019, fears that something was very wrong in the Hartman household began to ratchet up, and the doctors at Seattle Children's Hospital began to track their concerns, making an initial report to the Department of Children and Families, citing, quote,
a pattern of parental requests for increasingly invasive procedures based upon undocumented signs and symptoms reported by the parent. In a journal entry from this time, Sophie recounts her frustrations with Seattle Children's, writing, No matter if I advocate to my death in this very room, no one is going to listen well enough to change the approach to how we treat her.
People believe their eyes. That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.
Just a quick reminder that my new book, The Mother Next Door, Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy, is on sale right now wherever books are sold. The book was an Amazon editor's pick for nonfiction, and the Seattle Times called it a riveting deep dive into MVP. And if you are an audiobook lover and you like hearing my voice, which I'm assuming you do since you're listening here...
you should know that I narrate the audio book as well. If you have already read the book, which I know so many of you have, thank you so much. Please let me know your thoughts and questions at helloandnobodieshouldbelieveme.com and we will bring my co-author, Detective Mike Weber, on for a little book Q&A and post-retirement tell-all special. Thanks for your support.
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Chapter 6: What psychological patterns were observed in Sophie?
Q13 News reporter Olivia LaVoie joins us live from the newsroom tonight with his exclusive details. Olivia.
Well, Aliana, this type of criminal case is extremely rare, and it began with a series of doctors who started to feel a local child was being given unnecessary medical treatment at the urging of her mother. My name's Olivia LaVoie. I was a local news reporter here in Seattle, and I originally broke the Sophie Hartman story. I happened to be in the right place at the right time.
I was at the Renton Police Department covering another case and one of them sort of said, you know, you might want to be on the lookout for a case that we're investigating that is I believe the way they described it was a case that's unlike any other, which really intrigued me, but I had no idea what to expect.
And I remember really trying to push like, well, you know, I have to know what I'm looking for to some degree. And the response I got was, you'll know, you'll know, you'll know immediately. And so I knew that there was a search warrant involved. So that was my way in.
Olivia noted the high stakes of reporting on a case like this.
I mean, it just was so crazy looking at it from either lens, right? If she wasn't guilty of these allegations, if she was not doing what this search warrant was alleging, you know, how horrific. I mean, she seems like a saint, right? She seems like a saint. So how horrible.
On the other hand, if she is guilty of these allegations, that's just so crazy that she adopted these children and brings them to America. I mean, just the whole thing. There were clearly several layers to the story that just made it seem almost unbelievable.
And the warrant was just the tip of the iceberg. The evidence collection included hours and hours of interviews, medical records and timelines from the hospital, and journal entries written by Sophie that were collected during a search of her home, several of which were excerpted in the investigative summary.
She allegedly had this journal entry that talked about how she had an issue with lying.
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Chapter 7: What role did Detective Michael Lee play in the investigation?
This entry reads, When it comes to suffering, I am a compulsive liar slash exaggerator. To be cared for means to have significance. Have to have it the hardest for it to be worthy. I have looked through documentation for many medical child abuse investigations at this point in my career, and I have never seen anything like what's in this case file.
The investigative summary alone, which is the detective's narrative of the investigation, is more than 250 pages long, and it reveals some of the most disturbing material I've seen. In particular, the narrative around C's impending death, which is just everywhere in the lead-up to this investigation.
Many people recall Sophie describing C as terminal and making comments such as, As the family becomes increasingly isolated during the pandemic, this fixation on C's death seems to grow. In January of 2021, Sophie imagines herself in the throes of grief over her daughter's death, writing to a friend, quote,
was thinking, if C died, I would call Cassie and make her come sleep in my bed with me while I cry my life away. Such is the life of a medical mama, I suppose. The forensic examinations of Sophie's devices reveal that during this time, Sophie was searching for songs for sick kids and funeral songs. Chillingly, Sophie had deleted this search history.
These police records were overwhelming, so we brought in an expert to help us understand what we were looking at.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Olivia LaVoie provide about the case?
My name is Michael Lee. I'm a major crimes detective in south, southeast Texas. I started the National Crimes Against Children's Investigators Association along with very successful child abuse prosecutors and investigators. And my job is to be an objective fact finder, to recognize patterns, to go get evidence, to compile all that in a format in an organized fashion.
As Detective Lee looked through the documentation in this case, Sophie's pursuit of the escalating feeding interventions struck him.
Yeah, when we talk about the elevation from, you know, like the NG tube to the G tube to the GJ tube to the TPN machine, right, and that whole track, that is a very context-specific type of behavior that we do see, right, in a pattern.
What we're really looking for is inconsistencies with what should be or inconsistencies between behavior A and behavior B, statement A, statement B. That's really the job of the investigators whenever they're working through this case. The G-tube cases are the ones that track hardest towards death.
They're the ones that in the medical literature, you know, that when they talk about just how deadly this type of abuse is, the fact that it is arguably the most deadly of all types of abuse regarding children, that those are the cases that lead to it.
It's noted in the records that C knew a lot of medical terminology, and Sophie appears to have made no secret of her dire predictions for her daughter. In December of 2019, Sophie writes a letter to one of C's equine therapists, who Sophie seems to have grown especially close with. Sophie describes a recent trip with C where she had many episodes, including some nearly full-day episodes.
She writes, quote, We often talk about how someday in heaven she will have a new body and no more episodes. She often says she just wants to go there and not have this body anymore. She always says she just wants to go where Jesus is.
The fact that she is telling the child things, that she is presenting these things from multiple angles is very indicative of this psychological drive towards what we believe to be likely a child that will die or will be very close to death.
It is not uncommon for these offenders to induce things, especially under times of high stress, and especially if they're being questioned about it, especially if the child's making improvements. If there's a separation and then they go back with the mother, all of a sudden we got to go even harder, you know, on whatever medical emergency is fixing to arise now.
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