14 episodes
Dirty John Los Angeles Times | Wondery
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- True Crime
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4.6 • 3K Ratings
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All episodes are available for free, with remastered ad-free episodes available for Wondery+ subscribers.Debra Newell is a successful interior designer. She meets John Meehan, a handsome man who seems to check all the boxes: attentive, available, just back from a year in Iraq with Doctors Without Borders. But her family doesn’t like John, and they get entangled in an increasingly complex web of love, deception, forgiveness, denial, and ultimately, survival. Reported and hosted by Christopher Goffard from the L.A. Times.
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The Real Thing
Debra Newell, an interior designer in Southern California, meets John Meehan on an over-50 dating site. His profile looks exciting: Anesthesiologist, divorced, Christian. She falls in love fast. But her children dislike him and warn her that his stories don’t add up. A psychologist advises Debra to set firmer boundaries with her kids, saying she has a right to be happy.
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Newlyweds
After an intruder appears in John and Debra’s livingroom, John insists that they install security cameras. Debra begins to wonder whether he is spying on her. Her nephew, Shad, looks into John’s background and confronts him with what he finds. Debra’s vision of an idyllic marriage is shattered when she discovers a stash of paperwork in John’s home office.
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Filthy
Debra grapples with the question, “Who did I marry?” The story of John’s mysterious past unfolds through the eyes of his sisters, his law-school housemate, his ex-wife, and an Ohio cop who hunted him. The origins of John’s nickname are revealed. Bed-ridden in an Orange County hospital, he pleads with Debra to take him back.
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Forgiveness
Debra is in hiding, living out of hotels and disguising herself with a wig. Debra fears she will meet the fate of her sister Cindi, who was killed by her husband as she tried to escape a bad marriage. John has explanations for the accusations against him. He weeps and apologizes. Three decades earlier, that had helped Cindi’s killer walk out of prison.
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Escape
Episode 5: John finds a lawyer and plots to unleash a blizzard of lawsuits against his enemies, with the aim of proving to Debra that he is the victim, in case after case. The lawyer believes her life is in danger. As her painful isolation from her family deepens, she secretly plans her escape from the marriage.
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Terra
Jacquelyn and Terra Newell suspect that John has been watching them. When Jacquelyn tells her mother that he is in town, her mother believes she is mistaken. Jacquelyn warns Terra to carry her pocket knife. But Terra is preoccupied by a country-music concert, and she is watching for the wrong car.
Customer Reviews
One of the best
Well researched, beautifully presented and a remarkable portrayal of an important story.
Coercive Control
Wondery is very good at covering true crime cases using this format of storytelling over a handful or two episodes with episode being very digestible in terms of content and length. As someone with a particular passion for understanding and improving how our society responds to domestic violence, there is a very real and urgent need to educate the public and the stakeholders about the element of coercive control as it is only very slowly making it’s way into legal discussions. The mainstream media in particular almost always fails to even mention the concept of coercive control even when covering crimes in which the element of coercive control is such a glaringly obvious and textbook feature that they could have presented perfect opportunities for the media to promote better public awareness of coercive control (the Gabby Petito case for example). There have been some exceptions (coverage of the Hannah Clarke case & a few others in Australia which have brought the element of coercive control as part of the domestic violence cycle to the attention of the wider community very effectively which has in turn led to actual legislation beginning to be rolled out to address coercive control in some Australian states, and in other states such legislation is currently underway. The response has been much quicker and clearer than tends to be the case with these sorts of things).
This podcast did a really good job of covering this perpetrator’s crimes and especially how effectively he used coercive control in committing them. Well done!!! The only thing I would have done differently would have been to introduce the concept of coercive control a little earlier and maybe to mention it a bit more regularly throughout, however the discussion at the end of the last episode was soooo fantastic and helpful. And every listener will have made it to that part given how well the early episodes were constructed, so I’m not mad lol. I’m still giving five stars and begging for more of this in the true crime podcast genre more generally.
Scary...too close to home
I have only just begun listening to this podcast and already, the story of this supposed perfect guy is EXACTLY THE SAME THING that’s happened to me twice in the past month (Feb 2021) - exact same job as an anaesthesiologist, also for Doctors without Borders, also had been working in Iraq, and I did a super quick social media check and saw absolutely nothing to support those claims. He had very few friends or posts. This set off my alarm bells and I shut him down and blocked him. Then a couple of weeks later he somehow found me on LinkedIn and tried again! Unbelievable. I don’t even want to know what could have happened!