Member-only story
Trust Issues
Love In a Time of True Crime
Women are taught to fear the bogeyman. The real threat is closer to home
Last October, I married a Swede. The wedding, which took place the day after the New York Times broke the first Harvey Weinstein assault story, was a Viking whirlwind in a posh Icelandic Airbnb whose claim to fame is that the Biebs once stayed there. The honeymoon was a sun-dappled stay in Portugal. (There were castles. So many castles.) And eight days later, clad in my freshly espoused skin, I found myself smack in the middle of suburban Stockholm legally wedded to a man I didn’t know very well.
Stockholm in late October is an uninterrupted iteration of gray. The sky is gray, the silvered tree bark is gray, the tarmac is gray, the buildings are infinite shades of Brutalist gray. Gray as a bloated corpse fished out of Slussen, Stockholm’s landscape lends itself to eldritch imaginings, and mired in this gray, newly wedded and alone in the Stockholm ’burbs, I got hooked on Dirty John.
Dirty John, in case you aren’t one of the podcast’s more than 10 million listeners or one of the Los Angeles Times article’s many readers, tells the story of a vicious serial con man named John Meehan who romanced, occasionally married, and bilked a multitude of women. The series, which depicts the many ways Meehan preyed upon women, shows the escalating devastation a bad man can cause — and the ease with which we women can believe that the worst guy is actually Mr. Right.
The plot centers on Deborah Newell, a fiftysomething SoCal interior designer who met Meehan on Our Time, a dating website for people of a certain age. Like Newell, I am also fiftysomething, and, as she had, I met my man online. Listening to Dear John, hearing the details of internet courtship, I took notice of Newell’s words. As she told her story, one part of my brain racked up similarities between her story and my own: how John had seemed perfect, how he swept her off her feet, how he made her feel loved — utterly, completely, and thoroughly loved. I listened, and I waited for the other shoe to drop. This wasn’t, I knew, a love story. It was a true crime story, and therefore someone, somewhere, was going to get hurt. I wondered if maybe it would be me.
