Trust Issues

Love In a Time of True Crime

Women are taught to fear the bogeyman. The real threat is closer to home

Illustration by Shreya Gupta

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…