The author is an Emmy Award–winning journalist whose career spans more than twenty years in some of the largest and most demanding news markets in the country, including Los Angeles — the nation’s second-largest television market. She has worked as a correspondent, an anchor, and a newsroom manager, delivering coverage across every major format of broadcast news.
Her career includes reporting for The Weather Channel, during coverage of wildfires, tornado outbreaks across the Midwest, and multiple hurricanes along the coasts. She has also appeared on CBS Network News. Her work has placed her on the front lines of natural disasters, national stories, and unfolding crises—experience that shaped a deep understanding of evidence, accountability, and public trust.
Despite her success at the highest levels of the industry, the author ultimately chose to return to a smaller market to give her young son a stable, grounded childhood. It was there — away from the pace of major-market broadcasting — that she found herself at the center of a very different kind of investigation, involving nearly a year of secret recordings made without her knowledge.
Drawing on the investigative discipline developed over decades in journalism—and with guidance, review, and support from fellow journalists across the country—the author examines how secret recordings were introduced into a family-court proceeding and how critical safeguards failed along the way. In doing so, she exposes a pattern of manipulation, secrecy, and danger that even decades in journalism could not have prepared her for, with the hope that sharing this investigation will help other single mothers and women reentering the dating world recognize warning signs early, trust their instincts, and better understand the systems that failed her until a judge ultimately revealed the truth.
This book examines how reliance on limited third-party information, despite the availability of neutral witnesses, led to investigative failures later addressed by the judge.