The Girlfriends S5/Bonus Ep 1: Get Back Down Here Off Your High Horse

The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe

iHeartPodcasts and Novel

True Crime, Society & Culture, Relationships, Documentary

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2026

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the years leading up to Derek’s conviction, his victims sometimes came forward to the media about their experiences. But when they did so, the reaction from the public wasn’t always sympathetic. In bonus episode one, Anna takes a closer look at the stigma that surrounds romance fraud with journalist Rachel Monroe, who covered Derek’s sentencing for The Atlantic back in 2018. In this four part mini-series, we take a deep dive into our archive of never before heard interviews, to take a closer look at the key themes that underpinned Trust Me Babe. If you’re affected by any of the themes in this show, our charity partners NO MORE have available resources at https://www.nomore.org. To learn more about romance scams, and to access specialised support, visit https://fightcybercrime.org/ The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit https://novel.audio/. You can listen to new episodes of The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe completely ad-free and 1 week early with an iHeart True Crime+ subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “iHeart True Crime+, and subscribe today!

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.
0:07.4	Novel.
0:12.4	I started reporting on the case when Derek had been arrested but not yet sentenced.
0:22.8	This is Rachel Monroe.
0:24.7	In 2017, she was a reporter for the Atlantic,
0:28.1	and she set about covering a huge story unfolding in Texas.
0:33.0	They live in Texas, and so everything's bigger in Texas, including the crimes.
0:37.6	The arrest of Derek Aldred for scamming a woman in the colony.
0:42.4	This was kind of the first time that there was like a hope that this is all going to be connected.
0:47.8	You know, people are going to understand that this isn't just a bunch of individual crimes,
0:51.3	but like a larger pattern.
0:53.2	On the one hand, I think they wanted to share about the case
0:57.6	and make it really clear that this was a pattern of behavior,
1:02.1	but also at the same time, they were cautious
1:03.9	because he had been caught so many times before
1:06.3	and it hadn't really seemed to matter.
1:09.0	But the process of writing the piece wasn't exactly smooth.
1:14.5	A lot of women had spoken to the media before, in 2014, in 2016, before any arrest was on the horizon, meticulously reported pieces, alleging a long history of fraud.
1:28.5	I do want to give a ton of credit to Lauren Lamanchic, who's the reporter in Minneapolis,
1:33.3	who really broke this story and did a lot of the legwork.
1:37.7	So some of these women had told their stories publicly with some level of anonymity through
1:42.7	her, but I had a hard time tracking these people down.
	...

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