I wasn't allowed to go to school. I was not allowed to date. I was not allowed friends. I was not allowed outside.

She monitored my emails. She would Google search my name every day.

Welcome back to other people's lives. I'm Joe Sanagato. I'm Greg Dybeck.

We just want to give a quick shout out to our patrons who are supporting the show at patreon.com slash opl show

if you do sign up, you get bonus episodes and follow up episodes from our previous guests.

Yes. Big shout out to all the patrons out there. We've got today's guest on the line.

I just want to say, we understand this is obviously a deeply personal, obviously,

traumatic experience that you'll be sharing today. Before anything, just thank you,

obviously, for your courage coming on. Thanks for being on the show today.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

So I want to start off a little differently. I think it's important to give a little context to what we'll be talking about today.

And when you emailed the show, you compared your story to one that has gotten a lot of media attention.

A lot of people might know. I think there's a documentary on it.

I think it's a good way to put your story in context kind of before we hear the details.

So you likened it to the case of Gypsy Blanchard and her mother.

And the extremely abridged version of that case was that Gypsy's mother basically took

any chance of normal life away from her daughter, I'd say, by claiming that her daughter had all these

medical issues that she couldn't walk, that she had cancer. She basically exerted total control

over her daughter's life through lies, manipulation, physical beatings, and abuse, constant monitoring.

And of course, just telling her that she was sick with the severe illnesses.

And experts believe that Gypsy's mother suffered from a month's house in syndrome by proxy.

So that's where the caregiver kind of makes up illnesses as a form of abuse to control the person

...