Everyone who works or lives in the vast world of true crime always has a unique, compelling story to tell about a specific case that they worked on personally, or perhaps a traumatic experience that they lived through themselves. Some of these cases are high-profile national headlines that everyone recognizes instantly, while some are completely obscure cases you have never heard of before in your life. However, no matter their profile, they are all absolutely fascinating to study. Today’s case is about a massive Las Vegas mansion run by a man who openly admits to being completely obsessed and sexually attracted to plus-size women. Because of this intense attraction, he built an intentional community where these women could visit him or even come to live with him full-time. It raises many questions for observers: Was it a simple commune? Was it a cult? Was it just a group of consenting adults having fun together in a mansion? Many victims who have managed to escape that house say that they were constantly intimidated, coerced, and assaulted. It is a profound story about the blurry lines between genuine body celebration and deep fetishization, as well as the complicated question of legal and emotional consent. Furthermore, the survivors who chose to come forward publicly to share their experiences say that they have been aggressively sued in court to shut them up completely. Our guests today are the creative team behind this brand-new Investigation Discovery docuseries titled Big Girls Wanted: Escaping Paradise. This is a documentary event that closely examines if a place that claimed to be a safe haven for plus-sized women was really just a front for the organizer to allegedly violate women, an accusation which he vehemently denies.
To give you a clearer sense of what took place inside that house, here is a brief clip from the documentary series itself.
I want to feel loved. I want to feel desired, and that is not something that happens often to a fat girl.
I was scrolling on TikTok one day, and this guy holds up a pair of bathing suit bottoms, and he says, “If you can fit in these, I want you in my pool.” Welcome to Paradise.
Stefon is a TikTok creator living in this massive mansion in Las Vegas with all these plus-sized women. Everybody deserves to be treated with respect, but he is selling a fantasy. You will be loved here, and you will be worshiped like a goddess. But they do not tell you the true price that you have to pay. You have this older man living with women who are half his age, and that power dynamic is inherently predatory.
He says, “This is just a body-positive space, and I just love fat women, and it is totally innocent,” when it is totally not. There was absolutely no consent. Paradise is not a safe and positive place. This man is a predator. No one deserves to be a victim to him.
He gets off sexually watching people eat and gain weight. It can literally kill you.
911 emergency. Do you need to leave? Is it fire or medical?
Had it not been for Paradise, I would not be alive today. I need to finally tell my story. Are you a dangerous man?
Big Girls Wanted: Escaping Paradise, an Investigation Discovery documentary event, premieres June 10th on ID.
Joining us now on the podcast are the filmmakers behind this project: Tara Malone and executive producer Michael Hersshorn. Welcome, you two. It is such a pleasure to have you here today.
Thank you for having us. We truly appreciate it.
As I was saying before, this is really fascinating. This entire case is absolutely fascinating. I watched all three parts of the series last night in preparation for your interview because our producer, Will D, explicitly said to me, “You really have to see this to understand it, or you will not be able to do the interview properly.” And he was absolutely right about that. This is about a place called Paradise, uniquely spelled P-E-A-R, and it is specifically about how women are shaped like pears because the man who runs this entire operation in Las Vegas celebrates, as he says, plus-sized women. At first, when I started watching, I was like, what is this? Where is this docuseries going? But it is so incredibly layered, and it is so complex. I have to tell you, I think you two did a beautiful job of navigating a very difficult story to tell.
Well, that is a lovely introduction and a really perfect description of the project. The credit here really goes to Tara because I think Tara brought a lot of empathy, a lot of nuance, and a lot of thoughtfulness to a project that could very easily have careered off in a kind of random and sensationalized direction. So she should be the one to answer this first.
Thank you, Michael, and thank you, Anna, truly. It is so gratifying to hear you see what we see in the story. It is on every single level just a complex set of personalities and facts. Getting into it, we realized that to do it justice, we needed to find that exact balance. We needed to lean into the nuances, we needed to live with discomfort at times, and we needed to run with that. I think the project is all the better for it.
And you know, on this podcast, we have examined a lot of situations where—and I use the term very carefully—whether it is like a commune live-in situation, which then sometimes members worry about, or the people on the outside can look at it and say, you know, there are some things about this that could be cultlike. That is kind of what drew me into this story because you have this man. So this is a man who starts posting all these videos on TikTok about his obsession with plus-sized women and how he has this home in Las Vegas, of course, where else would it be? He has made a lot of money, I guess, in chip design, and he is using this mansion as a party place, but it is also viewed as a refuge. He embraces women who are plus-size, and he fantasizes about them. Explain to me, tell us what this Paradise is. Take it away, Tara.
So, Paradise, regarding its origins, actually, it was very organic. Stefon found TikTok, and he was not a content creator before that happened. You know, he was a self-made nerd; he will describe himself that way, who in the middle of the pandemic took to TikTok, discovered what it was, and just put himself out there on the platform. In putting himself out there, he got a massive response over time. He has said that it was sort of the first time that the women he was attracted to were coming to him directly and were following him, and he was getting that validation. From there, it just built on itself and built on itself sequentially. That went from him getting attention online to then an online account forming, to the online account turning into “let’s have a party at the house,” to the party at the house being “come over and hang out.” The hangouts for some people became longer over time. There are some people for whom Paradise is very different depending on which woman you are and where you are located. There are local people in Las Vegas and around Las Vegas that come in and out every day; they do not live there full-time. There are others that will come and stay for a weekend, a weekend that turns into a week, and some will stay for months. It is really a “choose your own adventure” situation within Paradise. Over time, the content continues to churn out, churn out, and churn out during these parties and visits, and they built up a massive following. It reached around 250,000 and up followers, so it is sort of a community.
Millions of views?
Millions of views, millions of views, millions of views. So it keeps building on itself, and there continues to sort of be a new class of people finding it and finding their way to its messaging every single day.
So, Michael, in all these videos that, you know, he starts posting and it takes off, and then people want to join the party, if you will… Where I get kind of confused is what exactly is his home? Because these people essentially have these virtual relationships, and these women come to visit, and in some cases, they come to live there. It kind of reminds me of the Playboy model with Hugh Hefner and the Bunnies. It is just very… what the heck is going on?
That is exact… that is exactly right, and you know, a lot of people compared him to the plus-size Hugh Hefner. He has sort of said, “No, I’m just me. I’m not the plus-size Hugh Hefner.” I think a little step back will help provide context here. I think one of the things… You know, one of the reasons we made this is, I think, with a lot of empathy for the women. I think what you discover when you are speaking to a lot of these women is that they grew up in and are living in difficult environments. They are often excluded and mocked. They do not have employment opportunities. A lot of them are sexually fetishized. A lot of them, when they are in relationships, are in abusive relationships. A lot of them are very poor, and they go on TikTok, and suddenly in their feed is this rich tech guy in Vegas saying like, “Woo, we’re having a party, right?” And there is like a hot tub, and there is an indoor pool. Las Vegas is the global home of kind of the plus-size party scene. There is even this restaurant that… I am going to drop neutrality for a moment and say it is a pretty gross place called the Heart…
I thought the… Yeah, you know what? That bothered me, Michael. I didn’t like that restaurant. I didn’t like it. No, it just like, no bueno.
And it is called the Heart Attack Grill, and if you weigh over 350 pounds, you can eat for free. Like, none of this is healthy, right?
No.
But if you are a person living, you know, as one of the women was saying… says in the documentary, living in Alabama under, you know, in a pretty lower-class environment, the opportunity to come and live in a mansion at age 22 and be with a sisterhood of other plus-sized women where you no longer feel like an outcast, that is pretty powerful stuff. That is what this is about, right? This is about the question of, a, the way these women are treated in general; b, the kind of line between, as you sort of said, admiration and fetishization. So, as you get into this documentary, we go into some of the darker worlds of, frankly, fat fetishization. It is a fetish called feederism. Feederism is hard to describe, but it connects eating and sex, and the dynamic of it, not always but largely, is men watching women eat or feeding women, and there is a sexual component to it of some sort. Now, the dangers of that are kind of obvious.
Yes.
And that becomes a key part of our narrative where, you know, there is on the best side body positivity—it is great to feel good no matter what your shape is—but there is obviously, when you get into some of the darker aspects of feederism, a health danger kind of kicks in.
And very much so, yeah.
Yeah.
Tara, there are segments in your documentary where, you know, there are a few women who monetize this through OnlyFans or whatever social media platforms that they are using, where men will pay them to watch them eat. But what is so troubling, and the flip side of that, is while everyone has personal freedoms and the idea that consenting adults can do whatever it is that they want, for these women who are very heavy in particular, this constantly trying to make money by having people watch you eat, and the more you consume, the heavier you get… That is very unhealthy for some of them because that is pushing them tremendously into a different health zone, and I was just very troubled by that.
I think what was important to me in how we approached this from the beginning was I wanted to look at everyone in this without judgment. For me, it was more about understanding the why. When you see someone engaging in behavior that to the outside eye looks objectively risky, I want to know how they got there and I want to know why. Personally, I grew up plus-sized, so there is an empathy that I bring to this where I really truly wanted to understand: how do you get here? I did not know about many pieces of this deep, layered world myself, so it was a learning experience. Sitting and talking with the women engaged in feederism, you learn that it is a spectrum. There are the more, on the outside, harmless-looking exchanges, and then it can be taken to the extreme. I think when you take anything to the extreme, you are talking about danger. But sitting and talking to the experts that we have involved in this and hearing them help unpack this idea of: if you are someone that has a traumatized relationship with your body, that from childhood has been told to make yourself smaller, to take up less space, to obsess over everything that you are eating, to eat less… and you as an adult finally have someone telling you, “I find you attractive just the way you are. I find it hot when you are eating,” you can see how there would be healing there. These women will talk about not being sexualized as kids and as teens, and this is sort of their first chance to feel sexy in the eyes of someone else, and you see how that can be addictive.
So, I want to talk about the house because I think that is when you see some similarities with other situations that we have covered on this podcast. So he has something like what, six bedrooms? He has cameras everywhere. He is producing content. So he produces content, and then when you come into his world, either visiting or to stay, you are part of that production of the content. But then there are security cameras pretty much everywhere in the house. And here is the part when you show… You have got video of the women in the kitchen, and they are cutting up for the meals, and the understanding is that you can live here but you have to participate in the cleaning, the cooking, the grocery shopping. Again, kind of like this commune living that we have seen in other situations. Do they pay anything to be in that house? And if there are only six rooms, like, who gets the bedrooms?
It is different with each. It is funny, Stefon will refer to them as the “seasons of Paradise.” That is sort of how he is wired. Each group of women that is main characters, if you will, in Paradise at a given time… each one is a little different, it has evolved over time. I can tell you the women that are in there now and the women that we have spoken with have said they have contributed to living expenses, and it is like what you are saying: they contribute labor to each other in terms of cooking, cleaning. There is an element of it that is the sisterhood as well, that some of them will describe that as just feeling like they are doing their part. Others will feel that way on the inside and then will leave and feel very differently on the outside. One of the things that people agree on is that money is not Stefon’s main motivator or driver in this, that it is about something else for him. It is sort of one of the rare things that both sides of this story tend to agree on. But there is definitely a contribution to this shared collective, this… someone described it as utopia in the piece. You have to ask yourself then, like, why is it worth that? Why is it so important to them to then agree to those things and to want to do those things? What is missing, what is broken that needs to be fixed that lands them there?
And I think… I mean, I just want to pick up on what Tara was saying. I mean, he is having sexual relations, not with all of them, but with a lot of them. So that is a significant part of what’s happening at the house, right?
Right.
And so the question becomes: is it or is it not consensual? Is there manipulation or pressure or other things? You interviewed women who had radically different experiences on that very question, some who claim that they were violated, others who said that they were not.
What I did not see in the documentary, and I do not know whether this is something you can speak to, is for the women who claim that they were sexually violated or assaulted, did they ever go to the police? I didn’t see that.
You want me… You want to take it, Tara, or you want me to take it?
No, you can go ahead, Michael, yeah.
So, you are correct in saying that, as far as we know, nobody went to the police to attempt to press criminal charges. What happened was a number of them went to an internet influencer named Kimmy, who started posting pretty relentlessly allegations of sexual assault and sexual abuse against Stefon. Stefon sued Kimmy and a number of the other women who appear in the documentary for… Tara, maybe you can remember exactly what he accuses them of, but basically of making false charges against him, slander, and defamation.
Slander and defamation, yeah.
So they then file a countersuit, an anti-SLAPP suit, which is often used as a tool to kind of shut down potentially expensive and reckless allegations. The judge rules in their favor and in the favor of the women, that they have the right to say what they are saying.
That’s right, that’s right.
And that there is sufficient reason to believe either that what they are saying is true or that they are making those charges in kind of good faith, right? So from Stefon’s point of view, he has never had a proper day in court. He has a lot of evidence that he shared with us as recently as two days ago, that also appears in the documentary, to show from his point of view that the women were acting consensually. I think this is also interesting culturally, that there is a kind of gray area in between total consent and sexual assault, and that he says, “I’m not perfect.” Yeah, I mean, it’s a truly interesting question and a difficult question.
Well, I was very fascinated because you asked him multiple times to get his side, and he clearly sat down with you to tell you from his perspective what happened. You hear him say that it was consensual, and he denies any wrongdoing. However, he does leave some space there of almost… if this is how I interpret what he said, that “if I misread the cues or I stepped over a boundary that I didn’t mean to, I apologize for that.” Is that kind of accurate?
Precisely, precisely accurate, yes. And that he believes that there should be a space for that to happen, right? But you know, the other questions, all of which are super interesting, are: what are your expectations if you come into this house? You know, it’s a kind of freewheeling commune, you might very logically believe that you have an expectation that you should behave in a certain way. A number of the women say they did not have any idea that any of this was happening, or that basically sexual availability was expected of them. Then on the flip side, there is the kind of broad sense that if you are a large woman, you sort of in a way in society should be thrilled that any man is interested in you. Sort of that’s the context in a way, right? Where we were looking to get at some of the problems with the way in which a lot of these women say they’ve been treated by society as a whole.
And so to be clear, Tara, Paradise still exists, even with these accusations, these counter-accusations, the lawsuits that have been settled, or tossed out, I should say, is probably more accurate. But he’s still doing his thing, whatever that may be?
He is. He’s still living in the same house that we filmed in, and he’s on live constantly. It’s just, you know, a normal day for Stefon is to be on his phone, on the computer, on the internet. It’s how he breathes.
So when he’s streaming, or whatever content he’s putting out there, is all of it what I would call, I don’t know, PG, or is there also for those who want something a little bit more hardcore… is that part of this, and is that for payment, or how does that work?
No, Paradise itself, the accounts that he manages outwardly and that you see branded with the Paradise logo, it’s the more “day in the life.” You know, “get up and eat breakfast with me, go for a drive with me, be at this party with us.” That’s what he takes ownership of. I think there’s questions to be asked about what you see within it and who may or may not be hiding within the viewership of some of it. Stefon will tell you that his viewership goes up every time that they’re eating dinner at the table, and that, in Stefon’s perspective, that’s people wanting to share community with them and be together. But I think you have to ask yourself who else is in there and what else are they looking for? And then the women, not all of the women but some of the women, have their own separate streams when it comes to things like OnlyFans and other platforms that they engage in themselves.
And the other thing, Anna, that’s crazy—and this is also, you know, I knew nothing about this—there are a number of platforms, the most prominent of which is called Phoebe, which is essentially a kind of Facebook that is for feeders to connect with feeds.
So kind of like a very specialized OnlyFans just for that precise…
Well, yes, but… I’ve never been on OnlyFans so I couldn’t tell you precisely, but my understanding is it’s literally, someone is like, “I’ll pay you $30 to watch you eat Chinese food.” Yeah, and then it escalates from there. So I think what Tara said earlier is that part of the problem is that there’s a kind of, let’s call it psychosexual satisfaction that can come from being a feed, but there’s also a straight economic tethering, right? If you don’t have a nine-to-five job and you’re making reasonable money through a website like Phoebe, you’re in that life, and it’s hard to get out of that life. That’s sort of part of the problem here that we’re looking to kind of get at.
Tara, I’m curious, what was the feeling when you walked into the house? Like, what’s your takeaway? Because some of that stuff just doesn’t quite fit into a documentary in the sense that it’s your impressions.
I wanted to go in very open-minded. You cannot watch a man like Stefon and watch an account like Paradise and not just be curious about what it really is, how it works, what makes it tick, and what is for real. So I tried to go in with a very open mind to meet him and to meet the women that were in his circle right now. It’s a disorienting feeling, I think, especially as a plus-sized person myself, to suddenly be surrounded by plus-sized women and only plus-sized women, and be in a space where you aren’t worried about if a chair will break when you sit down, where you could borrow someone else’s bathing suit if you wanted to go for a swim. It’s hard to miss why that is attractive to people when you are in the space. I was taken aback to talk to some of the women there and hear how convicted they were about what this place had brought to their lives. It sort of confirmed the approach that we took in the end: every woman’s journey through Paradise is unique and different, and it is a real range, and we needed to acknowledge that and really look into those gray areas to do it right.
Did you get a feeling of the bedrooms or how things operated? Was it organized, was it chaotic, or is it just organic?
It’s honestly an average house. That’s the interesting thing of walking in the door, and Michael has been there as well. When you watch, it’s prolific on TikTok in terms of how much you can take in and how constant it is, so you kind of go in expecting, I don’t know, Willy Wonka, a fun house. And it’s just a house. You know, it’s a mansion in a cul-de-sac in Paradise, Nevada, just outside the strip. It was organized. I mean, there is definitely a collective energy there in terms of everyone making lunch together, working together. Stefon has his bedroom upstairs. There are the other bedrooms where people will stay and come for a few days or a few weeks. The girls that are staying in the house longer term had their rooms. But what was fascinating to me was to get there and look around and say, “Oh, this is just a house. There’s so much going on here, but this is just a neighborhood.”
But I think we have to say that most nights, at a certain point, the stream stops and the party starts. That is not a live stream on YouTube. I presume a lot of it is recorded internally, but people are naked, and they’re in the hot tub, and stuff is happening, right?
Yeah, I think Michael is dead on in terms of… we saw inside the house, but we saw what we started to call “Paradise before dark” and “Paradise after dark.” A lot of, if not all of the women, sort of shared the same rhythm of a day at Paradise and a night at Paradise, where everything on the live stream while those cameras are on is PG at best. It is welcoming; it is body-positive messaging forward. Then there’s a moment when the live streams turn off, and sometimes other people come in, and it’s not always clear who these people are. So, you know, if you’re a 22-year-old who’s not hugely experienced, that can be pretty shocking. It can be scary, absolutely.
Yes, absolutely. Especially if you feel pressure. Can you… Do you have an opinion here on, you know, is this a compound? Is this a commune? Do you see some cultlike behavior? What do you think this is?
Well, I would…
Go ahead, Tara, no, no, it’s fine.
No, I think it is very much different for each and every woman that is in and out of that house, and I would go so far as to say it’s even different for those women depending on where they are in their journey. There are women that will defend and fight for Stefon one day, and then they will find themselves on the outside later and pivot, look back at the way that they were living or the things that were going on, and have a whole new understanding of them. So for me, it’s never really been my place to make that judgment for them. I think one of the most telling exchanges I had was with a young woman named Shea, whom I asked, “Do you see yourself as a victim?” And she said, “I am not a victim. People need to ask me why I want to be here.” That became sort of a guiding light. I wanted to know from them what they felt it was, why they wanted to be there. I want to be careful not to say, “Yes, this is a cult.” It definitely is a form of a commune, but there was a lot of attention paid by the women to how Stefon is feeling at any particular time, right? And there are hierarchies within the house. There are sort of the inner circle, there’s the outer circle. There are people that are invited to stay; there are people that are not invited to stay. Stefon… a lot of the documentary is about, and it’s a really tragic story, a woman named Cass, who is kind of the… to pick maybe a dated reference, kind of the Marilyn Monroe of the plus-size set. I mean, like stunningly beautiful and sort of whispery, inspirational, and empowering. It was beautiful, and she was the favorite one, right? She stayed in Stefon’s room. Then, over the course of the documentary—and to be very, very fair to Stefon, a lot of this happens after she leaves Paradise—she sort of goes from being plus-size but active, vivacious, and seemingly healthy, to quite unhealthy, and then eventually she dies. We don’t know precisely what her cause of death was, but she was deep into the world of feederism and was almost certainly being exploited by somebody in some way, in a way that ultimately led to kind of a tragic end for her. So there’s… it’s fair to ask a bunch of questions, but in a way, it’s too easy to just give a pat answer.
Well, that’s what I found so interesting about this series, because it was very layered, it was very complicated, and you presented many, many different sides and many versions of experiences there, which I think is what further complicates the answer. Like, I watched it and there’s a bunch of stuff I still don’t know or understand, and maybe that’s just it, you know, we can’t always know everything. Did Stefon… did he willingly open his home to you also knowing that you’re talking to women who are accusing him of sexually violating them at the very least?
Well, what we said to him was… and I had an initial meeting with him, this is now a year and a half ago, before Tara was involved in the project. The first time we met with him, we didn’t know everything that we know now, but I said to him very carefully, “You know, there are allegations that are made about you and about your behavior. We are duty-bound journalistically and as documentarians to explore those and to approach those people to speak to them. But if anything that we find out… we will not be reckless about using allegations because sometimes people make false allegations, and we want to give you an opportunity to respond.” So he was well aware, or should have been well aware from the start, that we were not… this was never a puff piece. It was: we will give you an opportunity to show your world, show why it’s interesting, show why it matters. I mean, he advertises Paradise as a place of acceptance and love, right? And we give him the opportunity to show Paradise as a place of acceptance and love, but we also show the other side.
You know what I found offensive towards the end of the third episode? This is when it’s more of a conclusion of what happened with the lawsuit, and you know, while the allegations still stand, I was very repulsed by the way he referred to the women who say they survived horrible things in that house. I mean, when I hear him referring to women who lived in his house prior as “bitches,” I had a real… for me, that was an insight into this man. The man with the goofy Hawaiian shirt and the tie-dyed t-shirt or whatever, you know, haha, having a fun time, and then you kind of see that. I understand he was sued and he believes that he was unfairly accused, but it’s not just one person that’s making allegations; there are multiple allegations. I know he denies it; I just was like, “Ooh, that’s nasty.”
Yeah, I mean, I think… I can see why you feel that. I think the reason we included what we included at the end was that he would put up a very polished front.
Oh, I’m glad you included it.
Yeah, and I think we wanted to make sure that you saw him in a slightly less guarded fashion. I think this is sort of, in part… I mean, we wanted to put the women at the center, for sure, but it’s also a fascinating character study. He’s said this himself, and one of the accusations about him is that he’s a narcissist and that he is not really able to see past his own nose at times. So there’s always like a little bit of a gap between how he sees himself and how other people see him. But of course, that’s what makes people interesting, and as documentarians, those are the people you’re drawn to.
I wanted the audience to see Stefon as Stefon, just no filter. Just, that is the experience of what it is like to be in Stefon’s presence, having a conversation with Stefon. You need to feel that. You need to sort of see the never-ending quality of it at times and the lack of filter to really make a decision about what you’ve just seen.
Yeah, exactly. And again, these are allegations; he denies them, you know. There was a legal battle involved, so I just, again… Here’s what I can’t balance here: he claims in so many of your interviews, he claims, “If I did anything wrong, I’m really sorry. I didn’t realize. I apologize to them.” I’m like, “If I did anything wrong”—like that kind of growth, if you will. But then at the back end of episode three, where he calls them all “bitches,” I’m like, “Okay, then I think we know how you feel about these allegations.”
Fifty percent of the viewers are going to come out of this the way you do, and then another fifty percent are going to come out of this and go, “You know, they’re just bitter, and everyone’s too sensitive these days, and everyone needs to grow up, and this guy… it’s obvious who this guy is, and if you don’t want it, you could leave. No one was being held prisoner there, so you could come to that conclusion as well.” And I think if we did our job right—and the audience will tell us—I think you get a really full picture of this world and why people make the sets of decisions that they do.
Yeah, I think I do believe it was balanced. And there were some things… like, I wrote this down because I just love this quote, and I think everyone can just totally understand this, when one of the women you interviewed said, “Quit waiting to live your life until you’re skinny.” That’s Cass. And I loved that because I think we’re all, you know, wherever we are in our world, we’re always trying to be, oh, maybe my tummy could be smaller, maybe I could lose some weight, or maybe if I were younger, or if I had fuller hair, or I were taller, or I was shorter… Do you know what I mean? We all go through that process of figuring out our best selves, and in doing so, life is just passing us by while we’re so busy with these things about ourselves that maybe we’re not happy about. So when she said—again, I wrote it down—”Quit waiting to live your life until you’re skinny,” I just loved that.
Well, I’ve seen the ending of this obviously like thirty times now, and I cry each time. It’s like a really emotional ending, so it’s… hopefully, Cass, not just because she was so glamorous, but because of who she was and what she went through… It just, you know, when she dies, it’s just a very powerful moment and devastating moment that it should happen at all.
Yeah, again, I think there’s just so much, so much that you all touched on. Well, this has just been truly a fascinating conversation, and I again, I’m not just complimenting you for the sake of complimenting you. I thoroughly thought that this was brilliantly done because of how complicated and layered your storytelling was and how compelling so many of the people were. I think you did it… the tone was just right and as balanced as could be, and you were very sensitive to the survivors. So thank you.
And thank you for sort of seeing it in the way we intended to make it. That’s very powerful that you read it as deeply as you did, so thank you.
Oh no, thank you. So we want to remind everyone that this is an Investigation Discovery docuseries called Big Girls Wanted: Escaping Paradise, spelled P-E-A-R in case you’re looking it up, but it’s streaming on HBO so that’s where you can find it. I really recommend this, I really recommend this. It’s so nuanced and well done. Michael and Tara, thank you so much. Where can people either follow you if they’re interested in more on this? Do you have a website dedicated just for the docuseries, or where should we send people?
There is the Escaping Paradise on ID hashtag that I think is going to be an aggregator of everything and all of the energy collecting online, which is growing. That is the one thing to remember about this story: it is such a social media online story. So, you know, there there’s a storm cloud that just keeps going and going and going, and lots to dig into. So, hashtag EscapingParadiseonID.
Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you again. This has been a special episode of True Crime News, the podcast. I’m your host, Anna Garcia. As we always say, crime never stops, and neither do we.
