This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of The What Happened to Her Podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it and the man they suspected wore a badge. "You never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform." And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait, head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today. "How do you know that cloud won't become manipulative?" "This is a constant worry." And you can actually catch the model thinking, "I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why." "I'm Walter Isaacson. I'm my new podcast, The Builders. I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Listen to The Builders starting October 13th on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast." Hey everybody, it's me, Debbie C'mon Bill. This season on my podcast, who's with me, I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that, you're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. "Listen to who's with me with Debbie C'mon Bill on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts." In 1986, a man named Scott McLean was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him, but now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. "I really didn't believe any of it was real, and I was like, "Well, if they're going to figure out this is not me, they're going to do their police job." As the wrong man been in prison this whole time, listen to examined the Backfire Effect on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. "Soskia had just learned the unimaginable that her husband had been secretly streaming videos of her, videos where she was naked and unconscious. Now, she was sitting across from a social worker, hearing one of the worst things any victim can hear. "There's probably nothing that we can do." Sasuke only had one thumbnail photo from Mike's webpage. It wasn't enough to prove he had done something wrong. To get a long-term protective order, the social worker said Sasuke needed video evidence, but she didn't have that. Sasuke was so shocked she couldn't speak. She did the only thing she could do, scream. "I just flipped out because of how wrong I knew it was and how traumatized I felt." Her friend, Colleen, was there. She let out this blood-curdling scream and ran down the hall. The mushrooms came sprinting. They didn't know what had happened. They just heard this scream and came sprinting down after her. Colleen ran after her, too. She found Sasuke in the hall crying, shaking. She was just in shock like what is going on. But Megan Sasuke's sister-in-law stayed in the office with the social worker. She thought those videos had to be out there somewhere. Nothing goes away on the internet. Once it's there, it's there. So she took out her phone. She had Mike's username. She scrolled and scrolled through pornographic websites, clicking through pages of graphic videos. Until finally, she found clips of Sasuke. These were previews, 10 second grabs from Mike's videos. In those short clips, Megan could tell, Sasuke was passed out, completely unaware, and Mike was violating her. She was being raped by her husband. After seeing that, it made sense why she wasn't functioning. She was being tortured. I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is Betrayal Season 5. Episode 4. The Full Picture Really quick before we get into the episode, I have a small favor to ask you. If you're enjoying listening to Betrayal, please take a second to hit the follow button on your podcast app, and please rate and review. We read all the comments and your voices help our show improve and evolve. I really mean it when I say thank you for listening and helping us grow. Also, if you want behind the scenes content or resources, follow @betrayalpod on Instagram or follow me at It's Andrei Gunning. All right, onto the show. These videos were the key to getting justice for Sasuke. Evidence of what Mike had done, and even in those previews, it was clear. His actions were criminal. The authorities confirmed this was enough for a protective order, and it was enough to launch an investigation, so Megan went into the hall and told Sasuke to come back in. I remember Megan saying it's Sas. Look, they want to talk to you again. If you don't calm down, they're going to admit you to a hospital, and I was like, I don't care. If they don't do anything about this, I will live in that hospital, because I will not be okay. Megan brought Sasuke into the office and started going through the videos with the social worker. Sasuke wanted to see for herself, to know the full extent of what Mike had been doing while she was knocked out. She looked over Megan's shoulder at the screen, and she saw her bedroom walls, her sheets, her own undressed body. I was just comatose, and he was having sex with me. Then I told myself like, I can't, I can't watch anymore. With the video previews, Sasuke was able to secure the protective order she needed, and the authorities had enough for a warrant to begin investigating. Sasuke handed Mike's computer to the police, and then she walked out of the building in a days. She got in Colleen's car, and they drove back to her house, the home she'd shared with Mike and their kids. On that drive, she reached a new low. I felt like a bag of bones that someone had thrown to the side. He was honestly the only person that I ever thought truly loved me, and so to realize that I wasn't anything more than a toy or a tool to him, it breaks you. Colleen looked over at Sasuke, crumpled in the passenger seat, and she could see Sasuke was broken. It was a betrayal of everything that she thought was secure. It was sexual trauma and assault. That was one of the most horrific things I could ever imagine for anybody. All I wanted to do was just scream at the top of my lungs, screamed all of the pain that I felt. As Sasuke and her community began to confront what Mike had done, so did the authorities. Detective Sherry Rull was tasked with the investigation. She declined our request for an interview, but around the same time, another key player was brought onto the case. My name is Ashley Inder-Firth. I am an assistant states attorney here in Montgomery County. At the time of this, I was a line prosecutor in the Special Victims Division prosecuting felony, Special Victims cases. Special Victims cases are those involving vulnerable victims. They deal with crimes like sexual assault, human trafficking, and child abuse. In these cases, detectives and prosecutors work closely in gathering evidence and figuring out what charges to file. Today, Ashley has spent 14 years as a prosecutor. Of the hundreds of cases she's managed. This is one of the cases that has stuck with me. It was so horrific in this unimaginable way to be living your life and then have everything that you know be different in a minute. Ashley met with Sasuke early on in the investigation. It's standard procedure and working with Special Victims. That first meeting is about explaining our role to them, helping them understand and what the court process might look like.
And then also getting to know each other a little bit because part of my job as a prosecutor is making credibility determinations and figuring out if I think this is a person who can testify, who can go into court and explain what happened to them. And before I can charge anything, I have to believe it beyond a reasonable doubt. And with Sasuke, there was never a doubt in my mind that this happened. She was extremely credible. She was willing to talk about her emotions about this entire thing and then she also didn't hide anything. Sasuke was open about her mental health history, about her prescriptions for psychiatric medications, and her use of alcohol on top of those meds. To Ashley, the prosecutor, these weren't reasons to doubt Sasuke's story. They were important details in explaining Sasuke's state of mind, how crimes were committed against her own body without her knowledge. Her honesty spoke to her credibility. She never acted like she was a perfect person or a perfect victim. After meeting Sasuke and watching the video previews, Ashley was determined to prosecute Mike to the fullest extent of the law. I'm going to work as hard as I can to charge as many rapes as we can prove. The ten second previews were enough to kickstart the investigation, but they feared they wouldn't be enough to make the charges stick. In order to have a case, Detective Rule and Ashley had to get a hold of the full length videos. They had Mike's laptop, but unfortunately, there wasn't much there. Mike was careful to leave no evidence. Detective Rule tried to purchase the videos from the porn sites, but that didn't work either. The purchases led to other random videos. So Detective Rule had to figure out how to access these videos from the dark web. It took weeks and a lot of digging in the darkest corners of the online world, but eventually. She was able to locate a little bit over 30 videos. Some of them were an hour or more in length. There was hours and hours of footage. In most videos, Sasuke was completely unconscious. In some of the videos, her eyes appeared to be open. We'll talk about that later in the episode, but in all of them, it was clear to Ashley that Sasuke was being recorded, and she had no idea. He did a lot of things to try to hide the camera. She'll cover it over periodically, and sometimes you'll see the computer move quickly. For the most part, though, there was no need to hide the camera. As Megan remembers from the previews, she was just dead, dead weight. Watching these clips, seeing her brother-in-law attack her friend, Megan was horrified. She could see that Sasuke was completely gone. The question was, how did she get that way? Keep in mind, Megan's known Sasuke since the first grade. She's seen Sasuke at all levels of drunk. And in all the years, she's known Sasuke? I've never seen her, like that, except for in those videos. It made Megan wonder, was Mike drugging her friend? When Sasuke first saw the thumbnails, she had the same thought. I started to question whether he was drugging me. You see, in the aftermath of her discovery, Sasuke did some digging on her own. Her friend, Colleen, was there. On the day she took Sasuke to the family just a center, Colleen remembers going up to Sasuke's bedroom. Sasuke was opening drawers, looking under the bed, searching for any additional evidence she could. And then, she found phenolbarbidol in the nightstand. And she's like, why is this here? Remember when Sasuke was hospitalized in the midst of her health crisis? The doctor's theorized that she could be having bad reactions to certain meds she was on. One of those meds was phenolbarbidol, a sedative that can cause unconsciousness and amnesia. Her doctors had taken her off of it. But here it was. Is this what was making Sasuke sick? That wasn't the only medication Sasuke had discovered. My cat is safe in their bedroom. I had no idea what was in the safe. He had told me it's like, passports, stuff like that. But when Sasuke got a locksmith to open the safe, we found a bottle of my sister's medication and about ten of my own prescription bottles, a lot of them sedatives. Many of these were medications Sasuke's body couldn't tolerate. And her sister's medication, she had no idea why Mike would have that. Sasuke turned all this evidence over to the authorities. We asked Ashley the prosecutor for her thoughts, having reviewed all of the evidence in the case. Could he have drugged her short? But we'll never know. Mike has denied ever-drugging Sasuke, and there is no definitive evidence that he did. As part of the investigation, detectives conducted a toxicology test. Sasuke gave a hair sample to test for drugs that entered her system in the last 90 days. The results of that test were inconclusive. The only substances identified were the psychiatric medications she knew she was taking. This could mean a few different things, one that Mike wasn't drugging Sasuke. Two that the levels of drugs still in her system at the time of the test were too low to yield a positive result. Or three that Mike was drugging her using medications she was already prescribed, double dosing her. For Sasuke's sister, Marisa, the inconclusive toxicology results were a blow. They left a big unanswered question. One Marisa has turned over and over in her head. It's one of those things that you just kind of have to answer that for yourself. I'll never know if he were spoon feeding her extra medication or if he acquired different medication and added that to the mix. Or if he just sat and waited for her to get there herself. After all, over the last three years, Sasuke was doing anything she could to get a solid night of sleep. Her goal was to feel better and sometimes more often than I would have liked that included drinking to excess and then taking her medication. What matters to Marisa isn't why Sasuke was passed out. It's about what Mike did to her sister while she was in that state. No matter how she became unconscious, this wasn't her fault. Sasuke's friend Heather agrees. When she learned about the videos, she remembered all the times Sasuke had been blackout drunk at parties, unable to stand by herself. Mike did not seem worried at all, ever. Even when some of our friends approached him with concerns, he was like, she's fine. Whether or not Mike drugged Sasuke? It was to his advantage to keep her in this drunken, drugged up bad mental health state because the more vulnerable she became, the easier it became for him to take advantage of her. Sasuke's community rallied around her. To them, how she became incapacitated, did it matter? Rapping Sasuke was a crime. Initially, the prosecutor agreed. She could have taken all the drugs she wanted herself voluntarily or he could have drugged her. It doesn't change our analysis from a legal perspective as to whether she was physically helpless or able to resist any sort of unconcented to sex act. In other words, when it comes to drug facilitated sexual assault in Maryland, it doesn't matter how the drugs enter the victim's system. What matters is the perpetrator's actions when the victim is under the influence. The videos were just one piece of evidence in the case against Mike, but then there were the chats. Chatterbait, the live streaming website, sent the authorities everything they had on Mike, hundreds of pages of chat logs, and thousands of messages and comments from viewers, going back at least a year before Sasuke's discovery. The chats coupled with the videos really put this together. From these records, the authorities could tell Mike was on Chatterbait multiple times a week. I can't say he was on that site every time doing things to Sasuke, but there were numerous times where people were saying things like, "Is she asleep?" and he would respond, "That's how we like to do it," and somebody said, "When my wife plays a sleep like that, and then makes a sexual comment about what he does to her." Ashley is paraphrasing the messages here. somebody said to him.
My girls passed out, too, PM me. A lot of people telling him what to do to her body. A couple of times, people say, "Hey, even if she's fake asleep, that's against the terms and conditions. You could get in trouble for that." And he just says things like, "She likes it like that." These chats put Mike's crimes in a whole new light. It wasn't just that he was filming what he was doing to Sasuke. He was sharing it with thousands of real people live. When she heard about the chats, Sasuke's sister in law Megan was disgusted. People in the chat, she alive. She okay. People thought she was dead. And the records revealed something else. Not only was she being raped by her husband, people were paying to see this go down. I'm Melissa Jeltsin and in my new podcast, what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place. With a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these grave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. I never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Derio Ammanade, Alex Carp, Feifei Lee, Palmer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliché thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us. But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, who's imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to the builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or ever get your podcasts. I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the host of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around, but why should you listen hours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world, and we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had, or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over. We'll hypnotize them to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good France. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to examined the Backfire Effect. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Chatterbait Records showed that this crime went far beyond Mikealone. People were paying to see this go down. Chatterbait has a token system. Users can buy tokens to tip performers or pay for private shows. Based on the records we received, users tipped Mike 347 times. People thought she was dead and they were watching it and paying for it. It's like, what the hell is going on in society? It was one thing to know these videos existed online. But to read the chats, and to see the tokens exchanged, was sickening. Mike didn't commit this crime in a vacuum. He was rewarded for it by thousands of viewers. People who got off on watching Sasuke suffer. There was one more important thing authorities found in the Chatterbait Records. Imagine the chats up with the videos, Ashley, Inderferth, and Detective Rule were able to establish a timeline of Mike's actions. They brought the dates of the videos to Sasuke. And. There were many, many dates that lined up with my decline. In the three years leading up to her discovery, Sasuke's health had been in freefall. She was passing out, picking at her skin, pulling out her hair. And sometimes, she was unable to get out of bed. Sasuke, her friends and family were grasping at straws to figure out why she wasn't getting better. Was she drinking too much? Was she having bad reactions to certain meds? Or was this just a full-on mental breakdown? No matter the intervention, Sasuke only seemed to grow worse. And there was no clear cause of any of it. All of the videos that Detective Rule recovered were from the last year. And when Sasuke saw the dates of the videos, she wasn't just looking at the dates of Mike's crimes. She was looking at a timeline of the worst year of her life. The first video that was recovered was from October 28th, 2017. That date was right or random. Time that my friends came over with Lasagna, because my mom had just died. There was another video on November 10th, 2017. That was the day before my son's birthday party that I had been so excited about, but I couldn't get out of bed. And another on October 13th, 2018. My high school reunion was October 13th. That morning I had woken up with the worst black eye I had ever seen. So I couldn't go. These were some of the lowest moments in Sasuke's life. She had no idea why she was so sick, why she had to miss these moments. She thought she was failing as a sister, a friend, a wife, a mother. She thought, like her dad, she might never get better. But looking back on those years, knowing what Mike had been doing, it clicked. I was a basket case for those years and crying on the shoulder of the person that was doing all this to me. Her body knew something her brain didn't. Mike had been using her. In the light of day, he was a loving husband. He brought her love letters, cared for her children as his own. But when the lights went out, he was someone else entirely. Seven years of my life were with this person who never cared about me and humiliated me and enjoyed it. Sasuke only has vague memories of the weeks that followed. She took time off work, so she sat at home on her couch, staring at the wall. I felt like I could not even breathe. People came in and out of the house trying to comfort her, but no one could really understand what she was going through. Even when she was surrounded by friends and family, she felt alone. I remember people wanting to bring me dinner and I didn't want to eat. Mike was gone. She was no longer being abused.
But realizing that this abuse had occurred, that she had been blind to crimes happening against her own body, was earth-shattering. There were still many mornings when she couldn't get out of bed. "I felt like this is it, you don't move on from this." One of the hardest parts of this reckoning was that the videos remained accessible online. She knew that her sister-in-law Megan had seen the videos. Surely she thought other friends would search for them too, and strangers all over the world could access her rape with a few simple clicks. During this time, she got coffee with another co-worker, Vera. Like Saskia, Vera had spent years working in child welfare, helping survivors of child abuse. Saskia explained to Vera what Mike had done and walked her through her discovery. "And then she says, 'Vira, have you seen the videos?'" Vera hadn't. "Imagine what she's carrying thinking that everybody now has seen these videos. She broke my heart." Hearing Saskia's story pieces started to come together. Over the past three years, Vera had seen Saskia's decline first hand. "The hair picking, the face, the skin picking, she was fidgety, she was anxious, she was nervous, she lost weight." It wasn't until this moment that Vera realized those symptoms could be signs of abuse. She often saw similar behaviors in the abused children she worked with. "Hids sometimes will act out in so many ways, and they don't know why. This is not that uncommon that people behave or act out because of the trauma they're dealing with. Her body knows that it was going through trauma. Even though consciously she didn't know, her body knew." The signs of Mike's abuse had been there all along, but no one, not even Saskia was looking for them. Why would they? A couple of weeks after she reported the crime, Detective Rule contacted Saskia. There was an update in the case against Mike. And she was like, "We've got this son of a bitch, big time." She told Saskia, "Mike was going to be charged with rape." "When I was told that they were going to be able to charge him with crimes against me, I felt relief. I wanted him to be in jail." Ashley, the prosecutor, was ready to get the case going. We have to show that she was substantially cognitively impaired, mentally incapacitated or physically helpless, and that the defendant knew or reasonably should have known of her condition. The authorities had videos of Mike violating Saskia when she was completely unconscious. To Ashley, this would normally be considered rape. Initially, I had been like, "Okay, we're charging all of these." But then, when Ashley and Detective Rule went to file the rape charges, they made a discovery. Detective Rule called Saskia again. It was a call. Saskia would never forget. She said, "I can't believe I even have to tell you this. We can't even believe this. We're watching these horrible things that he's going to on tape. We all know it's wrong. And now we hear about the Marital Exemption, and we don't know if we're going to be able to prosecute him for it." Marital Exemption. Ashley, a detective rule learned that in 2018, according to Maryland Criminal Code, at the time, raping your sleep in wife was okay. To Ashley, this was clearly incapacitated rape, but there was a catch, because in the state of Maryland. You can't rape an incapacitated spouse. You can't rape an incapacitated spouse, because according to Maryland Law, that wasn't rape. This is the Marital Exemption. If Saskia was dating Mike, or if Mike had been a stranger who'd attacked her while she was sleeping, this would be rape under the law. But because she signed a piece of paper, a marriage certificate, what Mike did wasn't clearly illegal. Here's Debbie Feinstein. She runs the Special Victims Unit of the Montgomery County State's Attorney's Office. She supervised Ashley. "At the time, the spousal defense to rape was in effect for rapes that occurred when the victim was mentally incapacitated." Legally, that's when someone is unable to make or communicate their decisions. Which is really the primary thing that was happening in Saskia's case. Saskia was knocked out when Mike filmed these videos. She'd consumed alcohol and taken her psychiatric meds. She had no way of knowing what was happening to her, let alone telling Mike to stop. Here's Saskia again. "My brain couldn't handle that he would not be punished for what he did or be held accountable." But there was still hope, because the authorities kept at it. We could argue that there was force involved. Under the law, it wasn't rape if the wife was unconscious. But if it was clear that the husband was using force on his wife to have sex, that was rape. So Detective Rule and Ashley went back to their strongest evidence, the videos. If they could just find one moment, a time when Saskia tried to shield her body or move away from Mike, maybe they could argue that Mike was using force. We looked at every time you could see Saskia do something that could show that she was not consenting. And they did find moments where Saskia seemed to resist. Sometimes, she'd wake up in a haze, mid-attack. She'd roll over, replace her hands over sensitive areas. Then, she'd pass back out, and Mike would keep going. He continued to violate Saskia, even as her body said no. There were even a few moments in which, with what little strength Saskia had, she tried to push Mike away. None of this was force exactly, not in the traditional sense of the word, but it was enough to charge Mike with a crime. The authorities brought 31 charges of surveillance in a private area, based on the video content, and on top of that. We were able to identify three charges of completed vaginal intercourse and one charge of what was an attempted vaginal intercourse that we felt we could show to a jury and argue that there was force involved. Finally, on December 18, 2018, two months after Saskia's discovery, charges were filed against Mike Levingood, and he was arrested. I'm Melissa Jeltson, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories of survival. This is that everyone else called closed. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that, and we were babies. She did all of these grave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. I never know who that devil is because he's wearing the skies, sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to What Happened to Her on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Elon Musk, Derio Amade, Alex Carp, Feifei Leap, Omar Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they feel, and where they think this is all headed. But when you say us, who's us, is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Listen to The Builders on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know. There's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world. I swear. I know. Bold. But why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were, or if we tip them or not, come and find out. Things will talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about. Trust me. Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground or drama and music or TV shows or the Med Galan, what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out, anyone, wherever you're from, whatever you're like, you're welcome. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up, over and over. So we went into a good France. I really didn't believe any of it was real and I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. Listen to examined the backfire effect on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Two months after Saskia reported the videos, Mike was arrested. But he didn't spend long behind bars. He was able to get out on $10,000 bail. Based on the sentencing guidelines, Mike was looking at up to nine years in prison for each of the four rape charges and up to a year for each count of illegal surveillance. He could spend the rest of his life in prison. But first, there would be a trial. Ashley and her team at the state's attorney's office would have to prove that Mike was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And that was no easy feat. They'd have to convince a jury this was a crime because of the marital exemption law. But on top of that, they'd be going up against a strong defense team. Ashley the prosecutor remembers. He immediately hired a really well-known, high-powered criminal defense attorney in Montgomery County. Mike's legal team knew how to get their clients off. They did it all the time. Before the case even reached the courtroom, they tried to plant doubts about Saskia's story. And before charges were brought while the detective was reviewing the case, his attorney sent detective rule for an email saying that Mike Levin Good is this family man who has a great relationship with his ex-wife in this great career. And then he sent pages of things that are "wrong" with Saskia. Mike claimed that Saskia was a willing participant that she knew about the videos and consented to them. His attorney ran with it. This wasn't Ashley's first sexual violence case. She'd seen this all before. You get your attorney involved and you try to get in people's heads about the victim right away. Luckily, the detective rule and I didn't fall for it. Mike's defense team failed to get the charges dismissed, but they weren't going to give up yet. They were going to come at Saskia hard. That's almost always the defense's strategy and a rape case, to put the victim on trial. In the months that followed, there were several pre-trial hearings. That's when both sides go before the judge to argue what evidence should or should not be admitted. Good morning, Your Honor. Rebecca McVity on behalf of the state. I'm Andrew Jessica and Dave Bowie on behalf of the defendant. You're listening to real audio from Mike's court proceedings. In these hearings, the lawyers went back and forth about one thing, the video evidence. Here's Rebecca McVity. She worked with Ashley as one of the prosecutors on the case. Your Honor, the state has a motion and lemonade to exclude any of the, what I would refer to as pornographic images or videos or photographs that were not charged in this case. Rebecca asked the judge to admit only a portion of the chatterbait videos. The ones where the prosecution could argue force to get around the marital exemption. Mike's attorneys had other ideas. They wanted to show the jury as many videos as possible. Here's one of Mike's attorneys. We don't want the jury to think that she is just somebody who woke up on October 25, 2018 and realized, oh my God, my husband has been secretly filming me for the last year and streaming me to 10,000 people because we aren't allowed to show the whole picture. They may actually think that. There are a lot of videos where it's very, very clear that she is playing to the screen and playing to the TV and playing to the camera. Mike's attorney pointed to a few moments in the footage where Sasuke's eyes were open. He wanted to use those moments to argue to a jury that Sasuke was awake, aware and consenting. Ashley and her Firth has prosecuted dozens of rape cases and she reviewed these videos. So we asked her for her professional opinion. Did Sasuke know what Mike was doing? There's no doubt in my mind that Sasuke had absolutely no idea what was happening to her. Ashley was familiar with the med Sasuke was prescribed and she consulted with medical experts. In our reporting, we did the same. We spoke to psychiatrists who confirmed that Sasuke's gaps in memory made sense. Her use of these meds in combination with alcohol could explain how she was completely unaware of her surroundings, unconscious, even with her eyes wide open. It's a similar effect to when you get wheeled into the operating room before surgery. You might be awake and talking to nurses while you're going under. But when you wake up, any memory of that is gone. Ashley knew all of this, but more importantly, she knew the facts. This woman was raped and was just finding out about it. I think we all want to believe that things like this can't happen. We could all sleep better at night if Sasuke was a crazy person who, for whatever reason, was out together husband and made all this up. But the evidence in this case is so strong when you have the full picture of what happened that what we don't want to believe is what we have to believe. So that's what happened. That's the truth. There's absolutely no way that Sasuke knew what was going on. Ashley and her team weren't swayed by the defense's arguments, but maybe a jury would be. If they had any doubt in Sasuke's story, Mike could walk free. That's how our legal system is designed. The jury has to believe it beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if they are 75% there, their job is to acquit. The defense's strategy is always to make the jury feel uncertain, and they weren't just going to sow doubt using the videos. They were prepared to use every shred of evidence they could find to discredit Sasuke. Here's an example. At that same pretrial hearing, Mike's attorney alleged that Sasuke fulfilled chatterbaits consent requirements for performers. In order for her to be seen on the screen as she's having sex with her husband, she needed to sign an agreement and put her passport up on the screen and essentially say, "I know what chatterbait is. I agreed to be on this portion of the screen live being seen by tens of thousands of people worldwide." And she signed that in October of 2017. The defense attorney had a copy of the written agreement and a picture of Sasuke's passport held up next to her face. I know Sasuke, and I know what she went through, but when I first heard this, there was a moment when I questioned her story. In our culture, that doubt is never far. We are trained to question rate victims. But then I listened to the rest of the pretrial hearing. Here's Rebecca, one of the prosecutors again. As defense counsel mentioned, chatterbait requires a photograph picture with your passport visible. That photograph defense counsel mentions is actually a picture of the victim smiling at the camera with the defendant's arm behind her. You can see it.
it's his arm by the watch that he's wearing holding the passport. It was Mike's hand, Natsesia's holding up her passport for the camera. And as for that signed user agreement. It is a electronic signature. And the return on that is to the defendant's email address. Mike was holding the passport. The signed agreement could be traced to his email. In other words, all roads point back to Mike Levin Good. Prosecutors worked for months prepping answers to every one of the defense's allegations. They secured experts to speak to Sasuke's state of mind. They wrote opening statements. And they prepared to talk about the content where Sasuke's eyes were open. After the pretrial hearings, the judge ruled that Sasuke could be asked about the other videos if it came up in her testimony. If the jury found Mike guilty, he could spend decades in prison. But in order for that to happen, the jury would have to believe Sasuke. "For good, for bad, for ugly, I knew that it would lie on me." The trial was delayed to June the October. And finally, a date was set for December 2, 2019. A full year after Mike was charged. As the day approached, Sasuke was nervous. What if the jury bought Mike's story? What if they couldn't see the truth? But none of those questions changed how she felt about taking the stand. She was ready. "I wanted him to be in jail. And I felt like testifying against him and holding him accountable would give me back some of my power." On the next episode of Betrayal. On the next episode of Betrayal. "I'm going to face 135, 06, 30, stand now, if it's Michael, all 11 good." "I was very familiar with the statement of charges. But knowing the facts of the case is very different from watching those videos." For resources on sexual violence, visit RAIN.org/betrayal, that's R-A-I-N-N.org/betrayal. You can also get free confidential 24/7 support through RAIN's National Sexual Assault Hotline. Just text Hope to 64673 or call 1-800-656-HOPE. You are not alone. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your story, email us at
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[email protected]. We're grateful for your support. One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to rate and review Betrayal, five star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason, hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning, Written and Produced by Caitlin Golden. Our Supervising Producer is Carrie Hartman. Our Story Editor is Monique LeBord, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Olivia Hewitt and Leah Jablow, production management by Kristen Melcuri, additional support by Curry Richman. Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Crine Check, audio editing by Tanner Robbins with additional editing and mixing by Matt Delvecchio. All thanks to Saskia, her friends and family, and special thanks to Will Pearson and Carrie Lieberman. Betrayal's theme is composed by Oliver Baines, music library provided by MyB music. And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of The What Happened to Her Podcast. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait, head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. How do you know that cloud won't become manipulative? This is a constant worry, and you can actually catch the model thinking I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why. I'm Walter Isaacs, I'm my new podcast, The Builders. I'm going inside in the minds of the people shaping our future. Welcome to The Builders, starting October 13th on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey everybody, it's me, Debbie Cmell-Bill. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. We're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to who's with me with Debbie Cmell-Bill on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is there an epidemic against literature? More specifically, Black literature. I'm Jack Wiespiece Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lits Podcast, we're outside asking why. They don't want a whole bunch of little elevators, Malcolm Axes, and Martin with the Kings on their own. Look at a lot of different cultures, feel like we need to know where you came from. And considering this is Black Reading Month, the only real question is, what are you reading next? Listen to Black Lit from the Black Effect Podcast Network on our iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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