The Proxy Trap

What's up Rich People, it's me Haley aka Mrs. Dow Jones. Money is the thing that people least want to talk about, right behind sex and death. That is why I have taken upon myself to start a new podcast called Financial Tea. Every single week I will break down what is happening in money right now. Plus, I'm going to bring on experts, entrepreneurs and influencers to spill their financial tea. You're always going to leave with actionable advice that you can use to level up your own financial game because it's 2026, we're not playing around anymore, we are getting rich. And of course, you are going to be part of the show too. If I take a break from work to raise a kid, am I totally screwed when I try to go back? My son is paying half of his girlfriend's boob job plus 80% of their New York City rent. How do I stop lying to myself about what I can actually afford? Financial Tea drops January 15th wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. Blink is intended for mature audiences as it discusses topics that can be upsetting, such as drug use, sexual assault, and emotional and physical violence. This episode also discusses child abuse, child loss, pregnancy loss, and medical child abuse. Content warnings for each episode are included in the show notes. Resources for drug addiction and domestic abuse can be found in the show notes, and on our website, blinkthepodcast.com. The testimonies and opinions expressed by guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or affiliates of this podcast. This podcast is a story of a man who beat the odds. A medical miracle who survived an incurable brain disease after a life marked by sorrow, loss, and addiction. Each day, Jake pushes himself to rebuild, mind, body, and spirit, refusing to waste the second chance that he was never supposed to get. But this isn't just a story about recovery. It's a story about reckoning because Jake's return to life came with questions. Dark, unanswered ones. And so, he began retracing the steps that led to his collapse, revisiting every decision. Every silence. Every person who may have played a role. The truth isn't easy, and sometimes the answers aren't what you want to hear. But Jake is determined to make peace with what happened, or to seek justice through it. One such path of investigation led Jake into the deeply unsettling world of Munchhausen by proxy. And the possibility that his story isn't just one of illness, but of intentional harm. Munchhausen by proxy, known now in the DSM as factitious disorder imposed on another FDIA, is a rare and chilling form of abuse. It occurs when a caregiver, most often apparent, intentionally causes or fabricates illness in someone under their care in order to gain attention, sympathy, or validation from others. Though rare, Munchhausen by proxy has gained significant public awareness in recent years, largely due to the highly publicized case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. The case exposed how insidious Munchhausen by proxy can be, how abusers manipulate not just their victims, but entire systems of trust, from doctors to charities to communities. And so, how does Jake fit into all of this? The only reason I knew about Munchhausen by proxy was that movie at the sixth sense. I didn't think of it in the sense at the time, like she made me sick or was making me sick. I thought she enjoyed the attention of caring for me or the sympathy or whatever, so I did Google Munchhausen by proxy. Those thoughts went through my head because it was so strange for me that, you know, I wonder if I could survive, no one else had, and if I could, and it got through, then we could rebuild the life we had was thought about. And then that was actually happening in its infancy, and she started backing up and distancing herself, and I thought that was so weird, so this was going through my head and I'm learning new information day by day. So, I Google Munchhausen by proxy. And this is where Jake found Dr. Mark Feldman. Dr. Feldman, who has since retired, is an international expert in factitious disorders, including Munchhausen by proxy. He served as an expert consultant and an expert witness in cases nationally and internationally, and also, his website is the first one that pops up when googling Munchhausen by proxy. And so I sent to a generic inbox on website. I was like, Jake Handel, I'm in the hospital, I went through something crazy, I had a question, and then he kind of, I think with him 48 hours answered, which I was shocked, and then connect to me with a team of people. Jake received an email, which detailed a bit of what the process was to determine whether Munchhausen by proxy had been perpetrated on him, and any ensuing investigation. He was also asked questions about his access to his healthcare records, if he was still married, and other questions which detailed the concern and danger that he could be in, if he was in fact a victim of Munchhausen by proxy. And they needed a bunch of money from me to pursue the investigation at the time that was, you know, I was trying to get out of the hospital, that was the main goal that time. Jake's initial investigation into the disorder stalled when further inquiry required payment. However, I reached out to the organization Munchhausen's support, and through them, I was connected with Jordan Hope, a survivor of Munchhausen by proxy abuse and a powerful advocate in the field. Jordan serves on the MVP Committee Board through AppSack, the American Professional Society on the abuse of children, and their work is focused on helping survivors heal and navigate life after this abuse. They lead support groups, manage intake and referrals for those affected by MBPA, and they offer one-on-one coaching. Jordan also travels the country giving presentations to professionals to improve the care and recognition of Munchhausen by proxy victims. After I reached out, Jordan's team was able to contact Dr. Feldman and confirm the correspondence with Jake, and with the professional he was referred to by Dr. Feldman. Through my conversations with Jordan, they really helped me better understand what Munchhausen by proxy can look like in real-life cases. My name is Jordan Hope, I also go by Joe, I use they-them pronouns, and I got into the field working with Munchhausen by proxy abuse because I actually survived this abuse. I did not know about it until I was 22 years old. I grew up thinking that I had asthma or rare blood disease, a severe like back disorder, many other ailments, broken bones, all these things. I grew up thinking that I was sick and that I was dying, and I had a spinal fusion of my L5-S1 in my back when I was 16 years old. Because I thought I couldn't walk, I thought I had all these back issues, and it wasn't until 2018 when I was 22, and I was in a normal psychology class, and we were just talking about Munchhausen's and Munchhausen by proxy, and suddenly I was just flooded with memory after memory of what had happened to me. I emailed my therapy team, and from there I reached out to Dr. Mark Feldman, and I was like, wow, I'm just really passionate about this, I wanted to do something in this field. Jordan was connected with many other experts in the field like Mark Weber, Beatrice Walker, and Andrea Dunlop, and from there was offered a position co-facilitating support groups, and Munchhausen's support has a lot of groups. Groups for an on-offending family, groups for people who have fictitious disorder imposed on self, meaning they're doing it to themselves, support for teens who've gotten out of unsafe homes and are looking for that community and understanding, and so on. I also do record review, so I read through records and help with putting all of the information together to be able to give to either other experts to write an affidavit or do expert testimony or witnessing and stuff like that, or just to help kind of have everything in one place to be able to give to CPS or law enforcement or other people that might be involved with these cases. Well, I cannot believe that Jordan, after having been a victim of Munchhausen by proxy themselves, could have this strength to revisit this daily, and to extend their support to other victims. It's very heavy. Yes, it is very heavy. So there's many terms that you've probably heard, there's Munchhausen by proxy, there's fictitious disorder imposed on another, and medical child abuse. There's honestly like 10 other ones, but those are the three main terms that are used still. So some people will just say MVP, I oftentimes say MBPA as the acronym to really emphasize the A being the abuse, so Munchhausen by proxy abuse, and just really emphasizing that this is a type of abuse. This isn't just some mental health disorder that someone is suffering with. This is abuse that somebody is committing. Munchhausen by proxy abuse is when a caretaker, typically a mother, induces fabricates or exaggerates illness for the purpose of gaining sympathy or attention from others. This is not something that someone is just suffering from. This is a choice that somebody is making. At some point when somebody commits this type of abuse, they are aware. There can be times where a person becomes unaware. Maybe they start to have delusions or start to kind of believe the story that they've created, but at some point within this type of abuse, there is awareness. There's other things that can be happening. We see a lot of times. There can be malingerings, so there can be trying to get other types of gains, so this might be withholding someone's social security, money, or things like that, or collecting that money for themselves. Starting to go fund me is doing all these different things to try to get money and doing that sort of stuff, but the whole thing underneath Munchhausen by proxy abuse is that looking for attention or sympathy. So how do professionals begin to identify this? What are the red flags that suggest someone may be a victim of this form of abuse? So there was guidelines created in 2017 by members of the MVP committee that created this, now what scene is kind of the gold standard of how to look at this abuse and what this abuse is, how to treat all of these different things, but in there they have a lot of the red flags, and one of the biggest red flags is of course that the reported symptoms, so mom, and I always keep saying mom because research shows that it's like 96% of the time. It is mom that commits this abuse, but we have seen many cases where that is, where it's not mom. We've seen it be dad, we've seen it be other caretakers, loved ones, we've seen it with nurses, we see this abuse happen to vulnerable adults that could be elderly or otherwise, animals are another big piece, or sometimes it'll shift to being on self, so suddenly the person might start making themselves sick or suddenly have cancer or all of these different things going on. I keep saying mom's, but it can be anybody, oftentimes, especially when it's cases with children, it's just typically more opportunity is going to come from mom. What's up rich people? It's me Haley aka Mrs. Dow Jones. Every single week, I will break down what is happening in money right now. You're always going to leave with actionable advice that you can use to level up your own financial game because it's 2026. We're not playing around anymore. We are getting rich. If I think a break from work to raise a kid, am I totally screwed when I try to go back? Jacob first learned of this from the movie the sixth sense. I've heard a lot about it from true crime documentaries. And so I was curious. Due to the way that this syndrome has been portrayed in media and television and film, how has this affected their work? Oftentimes media doesn't consult experts in the field or people that have worked with this type of abuse or have a full understanding. And I think that that is obviously quite problematic. And there's also a lot of media that just really focuses on like the horror and you know, you think of like the sixth sense or sharp objects or the movie it really takes away from like how real it is, how not rare it is. But this type of abuse, the relevance is supposedly like 1%. However, we really think that that number is probably higher. It's so under reported. The cases are really hard to prove. There aren't many laws that make this abuse illegal. And so it's hard to prosecute and things like that. And so we do believe that the number is probably higher than that. And yet, while the media sensationalizes the abuse, the reality is far more terrifying. Not just because it's real, but because it's deadly. The statistics paint a chilling picture. 6 to 9% of victims die because of this abuse. And that's just what's reported, right? That is just like the research that has been able to be done shows that 6 to 9% of victims die. Which makes it, we believe, the most lethal form of abuse, of trial the abuse that exists. And yet, it's still the most misunderstood and pushed against type of trauma. A lethal form of abuse yet notoriously difficult to diagnose because the perpetrator often appears loving and attentive and deeply concerned when in reality, they are the source of the victim suffering. It's a manipulation of trust. And like Jordan said, for the 6 to 9% of victims, it's proved fatal. I think a lot of times when people think of men chasm by proxy, people think of medical. But there's also like psychological and educational. So at educational, we see a lot of mom saying that child needs an IEP, child is autistic, child has ADHD, teachers and everyone else in child's life do not see any of these things that are being claimed. With psychological, it's a lot of child has these different mental health disorders, child is acting out in these ways, child needs to go to the psych ward, beyond all these medications, things like that. Once again, nobody else has really seen these different things. All of this can be induced, fabricated or exaggerated. So in our more severe cases, that's typically where we start to see like the induction. And typically, that's going to be more in the medical cases. The abuser might be saying like, well, the person has a fever of 107 and then you take the temperature and it's like 98 or 99 or something like that. Just a lot of that sort of stuff of those incongruencees. There's oftentimes a worsening of symptoms when the abuser is with victim that tend to go away magically when the abuser is no longer around. You might see animals that are suddenly sick or have unexplained or unusual illnesses or conditions. That's a pretty big one. You might see pudding feces hand urine into a feeding tube or trache or into different things to cause subsist. You might see suffocating to make heart monitors go off, giving lethal amounts of medication to induce different symptoms. And those are typically more of, I think, where some of that lethality oftentimes is more likely because you don't know how one extra med will that be what causes death. And sometimes oftentimes I would say that that's not always the goal of the person that's committing this abuse. Like we said, typically this abuse is being committed for attention and for sympathy and sometimes goes too far. Jordan mentioned that the real number of cases is likely much higher than what's officially reported or documented. But it left me with one pressing question. Where is everyone? How does something this devastating happen over and over again and still go unnoticed by family, friends, even medical professionals? How does it slip through the cracks so easily? The caregiver is often or the abuser is often reluctant to provide medical records or to provide information to people that might better explain what is going on with the victim. They might say like, oh, well, I've talked to this in the specialist and all these things and then you read through the records and that never happened. We see so, so, so often with our child cases, it's like dad is accused of sexual abuse, dad is accused of domestic violence, dad is put in jail or put somewhere typically charges at some point and the beginning dropped. But not always, there'll be blackmailing, there'll be all these different things that happen to isolate the victim with a perpetrator so that it is just those two because then the abuse can keep happening. Then that victim doesn't know, doesn't think that there's anybody else thinks that it's just me and mom against the world, it's just me and this person and we're fighting this together and all these things and it's forced to rely on this person so it's harder to kind of come to the conclusion that there's danger. And another red flag that we have started to see especially as the internet has become bigger is use of social media. That is actually very huge in these cases. I think Dr. Feldman helped with this term but calling it Munchausen by internet and so in these cases sometimes you'll see a lot of really disturbing posts or photos or things like that that are being posted on Facebook or on other online platforms that sometimes the abuser will act like they are the victim and kind of speak from that lens of being the victim or there'll be a lot of sometimes pictures really gruesome like the pictures of the person in the hospital bed with all the tubes or all these different things and doing these things to really elicit that sympathy and attention and so the internet has really made things a lot more challenging in a lot of ways because obviously people can hop online and say anything they want and it can be really hard to know what to trust or to believe. It's also kind of helped sometimes in these cases being able to look at people's social media to be able to see all of the different things that are being posted. Jordan tells me something that really stuck with me. When an abuser loses access to their victim the abuse doesn't always stop. It just shifts. The control, the manipulation, the need for attention. It finds a new outlet. Usually at some point either the child miraculously heals or the child dies and those are oftentimes the two places where a person can get pushed to when they feel like they don't know what to do. If a child gets better it might be that there's another child that now becomes sick or sometimes all of a sudden an animal becomes sick or maybe people were starting to notice that something was going on with one child and so now it's like okay I have to take a second this child's going to get better and then it shifts to another child or just another being. Sometimes you can see like these things appear and disappear and kind of go back and forth and might suddenly start to appear in another person so another victim. We've spent some time talking about what the abuser does and Jordan made it clear. The key word in munch hasn't by proxy abuse is abuse but I found myself wondering from a psychological perspective are there any common threads, any patterns or traits that show up again and again in these perpetrators? I think that there's still a lot of research that needs to be done on this but I think that typically what is seen is these perpetrators tend to have cluster B personality disorders underlying so there might be narcissism or borderline personality disorder or anti social personality disorder. I always give a disclaimer that cluster B personality disorders do not mean that a person is dangerous or bad or is more likely to abuse people or anything like that. I think that there's other things that have to be going on, other characteristics, other traits and things. A lot of times we see some of the stuff start playing out and you kind of hear about maybe this person and their teens was lying and started to lie about different things or got caught in a bunch of different lies or I always have these big stories or dramatic or manipulative. Eventually they have a child or maybe they have a lot of miscarriages first or they have trouble with birth. A lot of these cases the child is born premature which we don't know but suspect that there might be things that are happening to kind of induce earlier pregnancy. It's really important that we kind of like recognize that again like we don't always know the underlying like why someone is doing this. Sometimes it might be that a person is wanting to cause harm, isn't feeling empathy, doesn't feel scared or sad that their child is sick or hurting and might be getting something like pleasure or that sympathy and all that attention and that's just like all they're focused on. But sometimes a person has found that they have to over exaggerate in order to actually be taken seriously or things like that and maybe it's gone many steps too far or sometimes maybe a person is overly anxious and has some sort of illness, anxiety or OCD and they're still abusing their child but they might need different types of support than somebody who is purposefully causing harm for the means of getting attention and sympathy and like having that knowing deception, it's really important to recognize when a caretaker when there's knowing deception they know what they're doing and are aware that they're abusing their child versus when there isn't that knowing deception. If they don't know that they're being deceptive then it's not going to be much as my proxy abuse but oftentimes nobody's going to tell you yes I know I'm doing this thing, so most of that doesn't make it difficult. Jordan touched on why it's so hard to take legal action in cases like this but I wanted to dig a little deeper. What steps, if any, have been taken in the legal system to better support victims of this kind of abuse? There's currently no laws really that criminalize this type of abuse. I know detective Weber is really trying in Texas to get a law passed currently. I think there's a bill kind of moving through at the moment. They've tried a few times before so still trying to do that but oftentimes that is the hardest piece and there can be, you know, you can have videos surveillance of somebody doing this abuse of someone literally smothering their child or putting feces in their traker things like that and that sometimes will help in these cases but sometimes that's even still not enough or the child gets taken out for a short time and then gets put back because people don't understand the type of abuse or the severity of it. I know we're exploring this path because Jake once questioned whether something like this could have happened to him in some form but I have to be honest, learning about this is really hard. Jake already survived the unimaginable. His story is drenched in darkness revealing the fragility and at times the cruelty of human nature and yet his search for the truth keeps peeling back layers, exposing some of the ugliest parts of humanity and it really hurts to think about the victims, children, the elderly, the medically vulnerable, even animals, trapped in unsafe conditions with so few options for help. It makes the work that Jordan, Munchhausen support and other advocates are doing not just important but essential. In my own story, my mom always had something going on. She at 17 told her parents that if they didn't sign the papers for her to get married, that she was gonna move out of state with this guy and they would never see her again. She dropped out of high school and told them that and you know, they did sign it. She had a lot of this manipulation and things like that. A lot of these different red flags that we see and around that time got in a release of your car accident where I believe the driver died. I want to believe that that's kind of where this behavior started. After that she was always sick. She always had something wrong. She started suing places. She would get injured at work wherever she worked. Then she had me and suddenly I was always sick and had all of these things and I left the house and then she was still sick all the time. I do think that at times there is kind of this thing that can happen, that can trigger this like wow, this is a way for me to get attention and care and get all these unmet needs met. And we've seen cases two though where there isn't. There isn't some trigger or something that causes it or an event that happens. The child grew up in a healthy home, had healthy attachments, had all of these different supports and care and all this stuff and then still does commit this type of abuse. When I think about Jake specifically, it raises a complicated question. Jake had a real diagnosis, acute toxic progressive luchoencephalopathy. There's no denying it. It's rare, it's often fatal and Jake had the medical records and the brain scans to prove it. His condition was the result of inhaling a toxin, something very real, very physical and very deadly for most. So with all of that being true, would munchasmiproxy even make sense in a case like his? Could both be true at once? Or does the presence of a legitimate illness or disease rule it out entirely? A lot of times in these cases, people think that either the victim is actually sick or they're fully healthy. People really, really struggle to understand that oftentimes in these cases, a victim does have a real illness, something that is actually happening and that doesn't take away from the abuse. Like in my case, I recently learned that I'm autistic and if I look back at my childhood, I can see so many ways that my mom used different, very clear, autistic traits to try to say that I had medical stuff going on or tried to use it as reasons that I was actually really sick and needed medication or needed to be hospitalized or needed all these different things. It's like interesting, right? Because it's like, oh well, if you would have just said like, I think my child is autistic, like that would have gotten you attention and sympathy and like all these different things, but that wouldn't have been in her control. She didn't have control over my autistic behaviors, over like head banging or like things like that. That wasn't in her control. So she neglected those things because that wouldn't fit with her narrative. She didn't have control over that. She had control over giving me pain meds or overdosing me on medication or convincing me I couldn't walk because then I was sick when she needed me to be sick. I was sick when we would go to the doctor. I would be sick when we would be out and about, but then I wouldn't be sick when she didn't have time to care for me or when she wanted to be drinking or doing other things. So we see that a lot where a child will have an actual illness that's being neglected, but then these other symptoms or these other things are being induced or fabricated or exaggerated for the attention piece. Survivors also want to believe like, okay, well, I must be fully healthy then. If I'm not sick, if these things weren't real, then recovery healing must equal being fully healthy. And I think there's also a pressure from society that that is what healing is, that that is what recovery is. And there's this whole big grief that a lot of people have to go through of, oh, well, maybe I actually now have chronic illnesses because of the abuse that I endured or I have chronic illnesses that were missed. But some of those things, right, like having to look in the mirror every day and see I have these scars on my body that were when my mom abused me and having to take medicine or having to do different things daily to care for these illnesses that were fully induced by this person that supposedly loved you and cared about you and things like that and having to face that every single day and really like reckon with I do have these things now. I'm still healthier than I thought I was. I still can heal in many ways and obviously healing is more than physical. But you still have to work through all of these different things and recognize like, okay, so now I have to somehow navigate on my own. What was real? What was fabricated? What is actually happening in my body? Is this dizziness that I feel physical? Does it mean that I need medication or to go to a doctor or need to drink more water, or does this dizziness? Is it fully psychosomatic? And my mom just told me that I had this disorder. And there's nobody to help with that. There's no doctors really at this point that you can be like, hey, can you like look through my 20,000 pages of records that like make no sense and help me navigate what's real and what's not. The then survivors are just kind of forced on their own to try to navigate all of these different pieces while grieving and trying to come to terms with what's real. After living in a whole world of being told all of these lies that you took in and that you thought were reality and now you're having to question everything and try to find what's actually real. It's so interesting to try to come to terms with all of it and I think I'm grateful for what we have created and are still creating at Von Chazen's support to be able to help survivors on this journey. And I really hope that as we continue to do this work that there can be earlier support so people don't have to go decades without any help. But it is currently Von Chazen's support is the only organization in the world that exists for anything related to this type of abuse or trauma. Von Chazen's support is the only resource of its kind and because it's online, it's also the most accessible. They're able to reach and support people from all over the world. If you believe that you are possibly a victim or survivor of Mon Chazen by proxy abuse or if you believe someone that you know is a victim or survivor of Mon Chazen by proxy abuse, reaching out to the website so www.monchazensupport.com and filling out the contact form, I get all of those emails. I will respond from there with resources. We have support groups like I said for many different types of people, groups of people and if there isn't a group that's already going on for whatever it is that like you're going through related to Mon Chazen by proxy abuse, we'll probably create another group. So there's always groups happening in which are a free peer-led support option. We do consults, one-on-one supports like coaching support and just access to other resources, training and things like that. We're starting to have some legal sort of resources and support as well. Really anything that you need I can hopefully help you try to start to find a way to get there. If you're listening and want to support the cause even if you don't personally need the resources, Mon Chazen's support is a non-profit so they do accept donations to help keep their work going. We also have a survivor fund for survivors that the only thing that's keeping them with their perpetrator is a financial reason so donations can really help so we can actually build the survivor fund to help more people that reach out as well as we have a legal fund to try to help dads that are in this situation that again the only thing is that like they need that financial support to be able to pay lawyers or to be able to get the record reviewed on or things like that. Most survivor adult survivors that reach out for support also want to help, want to do something and want to give back in some way, want to have their story heard, want to like be seen and validated and give back. I think like giving back is such a big thing that we see and I think like so much of that is because there's been such a harmful narrative that's been put out there and there's still so little information especially for adult survivors if you try to type what do I do as an adult survivor like not much pops up and there's not like research on adult survivors there's just not a lot of resources in general. I am grateful for like the opportunities and the ways I get to give back and help aid in research and do these different things. You can find the link to Manchester's support website in our show notes and on our website. After everything we've learned from Jordan and with Jake's ongoing efforts to understand the motives of those around him, I wanted to check in. How is he feeling now? Digging deeper into the possibility of Manchester by proxy isn't off the table for Jake but it's not where his focus is right now. There is a lot more unfolding behind the scenes still I have to ask if it ever did come to light that he was in fact a victim would that shift the way he sees everything that happened? So my head went two different ways I never thought I was malicious like I don't think she wanted me dead. I don't know I mean maybe anything's possible you're in true crime like that stuff happens she really liked the attention she really liked the control so I believe you ask me would that change things and honestly I'm gonna point my life for everything just is so I don't think it would change much if we find out for a hundred percent certainty she in fact did this to me like yeah that's fucked up for sure is that gonna change how I live my life or think no I don't think so do I want her to spend the rest of her life in jail no not really but if she did do this like that's dangerous Jake's search for answers has taken us to dark and unsettling places into the minds of abusers the failures of systems and the blurred line between care and control but through it all he keeps going he's not just surviving anymore he's rebuilding reclaiming and in many ways redefining what it means to live after coming back from the dead next time we will step into Jake's world today what does life look like for someone once trapped inside his own body how does he navigate recovery therapy and the weight of everything who's uncovered will take you inside his daily life into the small victories the setbacks and the strange new reality of being seen as a miracle man and just one thing seemed to have settled will open the door to something unexpected a new effort to unlock communication for those still locked in and an update on our efforts to reach someone who's side of the story we have been dying to hear thank you for listening to Blank this podcast is hosted and produced by me current VN alongside my co-creator and survivor Jake Handel our original music is composed by the brilliant and talented Michael Marguer or so grateful for your support if you enjoyed this episode please consider rating reviewing and sharing this story with others for additional resources updates and behind the scenes content visit our website blankthepodcast.com Blink will return with a new episode next Sunday