Chapter 5 — Faith in the Truth 56:25

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After going through the first three years of the blog and fact-checking everything I could, I put together a log of everything that I did. All the steps, anytime I talked to someone, I logged it and kept track of everything. And then I contacted San Jose Police Department, the Financial Fraud Division, Detective Jose Martinez. I sat just directly across from Amanda. And she says, oh, so you're Martinez. I go, I am. Nice to meet you. ♪♪

I'm Charlie Webster. You're listening to Scamander. In 2012, Amanda C. Reilly told the world she was diagnosed with cancer for the first time on her blog, Lymphoma Can Suck It. But it actually wasn't the first time she'd been diagnosed. She told her friends Lisa and Steve Berry way back in 2010, two years before the blog even started, that she had cancer.

So how long had you known her before you found out she'd got cancer? At least two months. How did she tell you? I still remember this conversation. She was picking Jessa up from our house, and I happened to mention about a fundraiser for a family at the school that had just taken place. It was one of their classmates, and the father had brain cancer, and he'd grown up in town. He was a very beloved member of the community. So it raised $100,000.

And I told her about that for the family. The very next morning, she called me to tell me that she had cancer too. That just blew me away. And I was surprised, why didn't she tell me before now? I mean, this is a big thing. She called me the next day, told me she had cancer. She'd been fighting it for a while. She's been on chemotherapy treatment. And she didn't think she was going to have children.

And literally within two days, I'm picking up Jessa for school because Amanda was too sick from chemotherapy. But I just thought, she's just told me this, I guess, right after. And I kind of thought, I wonder, you know, I wonder, yeah, I don't know. But it didn't make sense to me. There were always these little things that she'd do that didn't make sense. And that's like, okay, she's been at our house. We've talked so many times. I've been to court with them twice. How come she failed to tell me she has cancer?

Amanda's husband, Corey, eventually confided in Steve that... Amanda has stage four. She's progressed to stage four cancer. And we're like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And he was saying that they're telling her that she doesn't have much time. It just sort of blew us away. But when Amanda fell pregnant with her first child, she told Lisa... The pregnancy is reversing the disease. That's what she said.

The pregnancy is reversing the cancer. It was easy to just forget about these people and just forget about them and just go on with our lives. After we went through that awful feeling that we went through, they were gone. We moved on with our lives and we forgot that they even existed.

Fast forward to 2015, Amanda now has two kids, Carter and the youngest Connor, the miracle baby. Her bonus daughter, Jessa, was living with her and Corey, though the custody battle was still raging through the courts. Amanda's blog was her constant, and so were her followers. As well as her own journey, she posted resources, support services, and inspirational content.

The grace and love of everyone who has my back is unfathomable. I had so many people fighting for me when this started, but the small circle has dramatically grown beyond the city or even the state. We are an army, an army against cancer, and that is badass. I still believe in God and his miracles. My faith hasn't wavered, and that's not changing now.

Church and her Christian faith was such a big part of Amanda's life and support network. Here's Charisse Valdez. She would put that update out for us and it just devastating. It broke my heart that someone who was so strong and had battled for so long and got cleared was somehow back into that mess again.

It didn't seem fair. It didn't seem right. I was angry that that could happen to her again. It's just, it's not fair for a young mom to have to go back into that again. I definitely reached out, let her know that I loved her and I'm here for her and anything she needs to just let me know. I was a poor college student at the time, so I didn't have too much to give.

I tried to be there for her as best as I can and get the word out. And so that's kind of part of why I would speak more openly about Amanda and her journey to hope that other people who maybe could give would be able to because I wasn't financially able to.

Cherise may not have had the finances, but she tried to help Amanda in any way she could through Christmas caroling, community events, and just being there. This is a message that Amanda posted for her followers, thanking everyone for their support. And she gives Cherise a special mention. This is real audio of Amanda. There were so many blessings that we've received this year for Team Amanda.

They basically filled our entire tree full of presents for the kids and for us and gift cards and financial donations. And it was so beautiful and so selfless. And words can't describe how amazing that makes us feel. Cherise from church who doesn't want credit, but too bad you're getting credit. Thank you and Merry Christmas.

Tell me about the Christmas carols. That's producer Jackson you can hear there. It was a really fun, cute one, actually. It was probably a group of like 30 or 35 of us. We drove up to her house around Christmas time and people had donated some gifts. And so we were dropping those off and her and her kids came out and we just sang Christmas carols and tried to bring some joy to these little boys' lives.

as they were dealing with whatever it was inside their house. And kids were smiling. They were really excited. Amanda was giving us hugs, you know, thank you so much. I remember her crying a little bit while we were there. They were very excited. I mean, especially because most of us who had gone were people that did love them and had been close with her and her family. So immediately they saw us and they just saw, you know, extended family essentially.

It was a very sweet time. I even still have a picture of all of us with our little Santa hats outside of her house, dropping it off. I am someone who has so much empathy in my heart for other people, especially if they're suffering and struggling. So to be able to be part of that, not only to just be there for Amanda and myself, but to be surrounded by other people who have that much love in their hearts is very different. I remember just feeling so joyful that we could make some type of a difference. The community kept rallying around Amanda.

Fundraising for their close friend became a good excuse to put on an event. Each one had a way to raise funds for #TeamAmanda. Next on the calendar, Amanda's 30th birthday at Tex-Mex chain of restaurants Chili's. You can probably find a Chili's down the street from you. Four of them near Amanda got together to support her.

Hashtag Team Amanda has been busy as ever. The incredible Heather Allison has organized a Support Amanda event at Chili's on my 30th birthday. If you eat at any of four Bay Area Chili's, 20% of your bill will be donated to our family to help pay bills, medical debt, complete bucket list items, and put money away for Corey and the kids when times get hard in the future. I was at Chili's.

Basically, you just show up and you have dinner on a specific night. I want to say it was probably like a Thursday or something. I just remember you're part of whatever you spent on your meal at that restaurant that night. If you mentioned that you're there for that, it went to Amanda. A huge thank you to all four Chili's locations that hosted a fundraiser for our family, as well as the hundreds of people and dozens of servers that participated. It was a wonderful way to spend my birthday.

Two locations have turned in their totals, raising over $650. I mean, throwing a birthday party at Chibis for her. That's where we went. Corey's boss was there, his wife was there, and we paid for their dinner because Corey and Amanda didn't have enough money. Mahasti the babysitter was one of the many on the invite list. I remember there was a little argument

That Amanda says, I don't have enough money. If you can't have it, I can't believe your boss again living without paying for his dinner with his wife. And he left before the dinner was even over. And they did. The boss and the wife left before the whole thing was even over. And Amanda says, I can't believe they didn't pay for it. And I don't have enough to pay for it.

And me and Kirsten, one of the moms, we said, "It's okay, we'll cover it." We walked to the back and got money to pay for it. I can't believe, Vita, we were invited to a party. Not only did we pay for our own, we paid for her boss and the boss's wife and her brother. Like, hello! Her brother was there too. It's crazy.

The idea was that she just needed to make it to 30. This was her big bash at the end of her life. She was supposed to die so many times, so many times. It was terminal. It was a miracle. Lindsay Wilder from Amanda's church. She put together a segment for a video that played at a women's conference at the church about her being terminal with cancer but still finding and leaning on Jesus.

huge deal with the number of people watching this. People were crying at their tables thinking about how this woman was going to disappear. There were people in the church that were very gifted with video production. They were usually the people putting together the announcements, which at this larger church were very high production.

So what she did was decide to collaborate with Amanda and make a video to the song, a fight song. I remember in that video, the fire department that are all holding signs. This is a couple dozen people holding signs for Amanda. I'm actually in it holding a sign that says Team Amanda.

Here is the new video. We did the #TeamAmanda signs. We were hoping and praying that we would get 10 people willing to go in front of a camera in support of me. We ended up with 92 photos. 92 photos! It was February 2015, and that song by Rachel Platten, "Fight Song," was really, really popular. It was on the radio a lot.

It was the song that Amanda made for her inspirational music video, her fight song, her cancer fight video. You know that fight song? It's that... Take back your... It was super moving. It was empowering.

It just lifted you and you're in her corner. And when it came out, I was just once again marveled, a little bit more starstruck because now this person was, you know, in a music video on the beach. What was the reaction to the video when it went out? More of affirmations for Amanda, you know? "You're so strong, you're so resilient. Look at what's happening in your life, yet you press on with a smile. Yet you spread sunshine.

because she did do little things for people. She did do nice things. I feel so honored, blessed, and supported because of you. Thank you. Hope this video represents a thank you to every person who donated to keep us in our house, help with preschool costs, get medical bills paid, help me achieve bucket list items, prayed for us, brought food, a lot, watched the kids, and just for giving your attention and presence.

Amanda premiered the video at her house, rolling out the red carpet for friends and family. Once I was over her house, she called everybody to show the video. This is my fight or something like that. So we were over there and she played the video. That's the time I sat there at the table crying, looking at the video and she was saying, it's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. She was patting me in the back. I thought it was a really good one.

If anybody wants to donate seeing that video, you're going to donate. Thank you to everyone for supporting my #TeamAmanda video. We have over 1200 views and 260 shares. That's phenomenal. I have received six messages from people feeling inspired and encouraged to keep fighting and been contacted by one journalist and two radio stations.

She was borderline a celebrity. My hope is to get the word out to #NeverGiveUp. And with you guys, that's happening. Rachel Platten, the singer of "Fight Song," even gave some recognition. That just made my whole day. Yeah. Rachel Platten tweeted a response to the video. "Incredible. You guys inspire me so much." I was just inspired by it. I was like, "Wow, this is awesome." Like, I passed it along. It was posted on my social media. It was...

It was just really inspirational. Like, yeah, like she's really fighting for her life. Like, you know, I teared up watching it. This is Stephanie Finn, Amanda's hookup to the celebs. She made her own videos as part of a viral campaign, which was started by Amanda's mom, Peggy, to help Amanda. Suitably titled, The Share Some Sunshine Challenge. Even like the You Are My Sunshine videos and trying to challenge people. I was like, hey, come on, guys, we got to get together and do this. I was at my friend's house, so her kids did it with me.

It was just anything we could do to just help her, like anything we could do to help get the money so it was one less thing for her to have to worry about.

Here it is guys, the Share Some Sunshine Challenge. A big thank you to all my friends and family that have helped us with #TeamAmanda to support our brave cancer warrior, Amanda Riley. Please check out supportamanda.com and the Share Some Sunshine Challenge on Facebook for more details. This challenge is fun and it's similar to the ALS challenge. However, instead of getting cold water poured on your head, they're asking you to share some warm fuzzies to spread the word about Hodgkin's lymphoma. All right, you guys ready? - Yeah.

Amanda's cancer wasn't taking a break, and her supporters weren't either. Nor was Nancy. She was consumed by Amanda, carefully watching everything. But instead of posting up outside Amanda's house with, say, a pair of binoculars, Nancy's stakeout was digital. There were pages of Amanda's blog posts piled high on her desk and binders full of research. You'd think she was a detective. I knew what I was doing was...

the right thing to do first off. I knew that what I was doing, I was doing it properly. I was going about it in the right manner of fact checking everything and anything I could. I was reaching out to people to try and corroborate whatever she would talk about.

When she said, you know, this is where I'm going to get treated, I reached out to those places. I had conversations with those places on a daily basis. Anytime she posted about them, I would reach out and I would say, here's what she has to say on her blog today. It couldn't give me information about A, any type of patient, and B, anyone who's not a patient, right? If she's not getting treated there. So what I would do is I would pose all my fact-checking questions in a way to very specific to what she would say.

And those nurse oncologists that were at this facility, they knew something wasn't right. I had told them about the blog. They had looked at the blogs. And so when I had asked those questions, they would answer me. Yes, no, we don't do it that way. We don't have this. We don't do that. So they never talked about her specifically, but just about procedure, about their clinical trials and about the facts. After about going through the first three years of the blog and fact checking everything I could,

I put together a log of everything that I did. All the steps, anytime I talked to someone, I logged it and kept track of everything. And then I contacted San Jose Police Department, the Financial Fraud Division. Detective Jose Martinez is the only detective they have for financial fraud. I was put in touch with him. I talked to him briefly on the phone. He said, well, what can you put it all in an email and send me why you think this?

So I put together all my notes, my timeline, my log, my source information that I thought, if he looked at this, he could see, okay, it wasn't just a hunch. We met with Detective Jose Martinez only days after he'd retired. How long have you been retired for? Like literally days? Actually like one month this week. Wow. Yeah. Was that a hard decision for you?

In some ways, yes, because it's something I like doing. In our agency, we have Cycle Back to the streets. That wasn't something I was interested in doing at 51. Wow. You look really good for your age. Unless you put this, like, one of those filters over the top. No, no, no filters. No filters for me, yeah, but I appreciate that. What was the first bit of information when Nancy called you?

Well, the setting at the time, so our police department was experiencing a mass exodus from political decisions made from city council and the mayor at the time. By the end of that whole exodus, there was only like maybe just under 800 officers for a city of about 1.2 million. So to put it in perspective, that's what was happening.

Unfortunately, the financial crimes unit is not, for lack of better terms, the sexy unit like homicide or robbery. The financial crimes is in the back burner and so they're the first unit to take a loss in minimizing the unit.

I had returned back to this unit and they dwindled it from three people to me. So I was the only person in the city of San Jose looking at financial crime cases for about two years. Nobody knew that because I couldn't say it because it would open the door to even more criminal activity because then everybody knows nobody's watching the barn. So that's when Nancy had sent me a message.

So what would happen was I was literally looking at like 700 cases in a month, just triaging them, looking at them, doing something with outsourcing them, using my resources to kind of bridge the gap on gathering evidence and so forth.

I was pretty creative at that point just to get resources and working with district attorneys and other investigators. So I became a one-man circus for a while and so when Nancy came across me she gave me this the info on this case. So what I would do in a lot of my cases it was literally think about that case for for weeks just kind of spin in my head

I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about a case. Like, oh, I know what I could do with this. This was kind of one of those cases where Nancy kept feeding information about this blog that was going on with Ms. Riley. And so I'm going to take a look at that blog. My painful neuropathy pains and headaches from post-chemo symptoms are making me pretty miserable. I get to use my story and my fight to help raise money for research to support others in the fight. Thank you to everyone who had donated anything.

I would have had to stop treatment a long time ago without your kindness. My first thought was, how am I going to prove a medical case with HIPAA laws in place, which is the confidentiality for the state of California? HIPAA laws are patient confidentiality laws that basically prohibit disclosure of medical records.

Without a court-ordered warrant, a subpoena or a patient's consent, even a San Jose detective can't request or access them. And I thought, somebody may or may not be untruthful with their medical situation, in this case cancer, but how am I going to prove it? So I started surfing through the blog. I realized Nancy had told me. She's throwing a lot of information out on this blog that was specific.

So the specificity of it allowed me to actually nail down something. Quick health updates. I've been diagnosed with atelectasis on my right lung, which is basically a fancy word for a partially collapsed lung.

They aren't entirely sure why. There are lots of predictions though, including the bleomycin and adromycin have caused massive scarring and shrinkage of my lungs. The tumors that were in my lung caused issues. All the toxicity in my body is caused by lung failure. I got to ask myself, well, is it truthful if I was doing it? What's the first thing I would go after? I would put things out on social media because people believe what they see first. And she's the one populating the social media.

So that was the thing like, okay, she's the one pushing all this. It's not anybody else. They're just responding to her. So she has the wheel. I just got to show whether or not she's driving something legitimate or not. The fact that you had so many cases and you were severely understaffed, what was it about this one that made you pursue it? I have a kind of a theory or a philosophy. Persistence pays. In my cases that have gone on for years,

persistence pays and you just keep coming at it. Nancy had kind of embodied that persistence. The persistence kind of kept me looking at this page and looking at the pictures and looking at the videos. I thought, well, I know a lot of people who had cancer. At the end, they look awful. And I thought Amanda saying she was terminal like a number of times.

But she looks great. That's great skin. That's the face to her. She's a cute girl. She shaved her head. But I'm asking myself, does she look sick? And if I'm telling myself, no, she doesn't look sick. So maybe there's something to this information. Cancer is ugly. I often hear how good I look for being so sick. But people don't see behind closed doors how horrible this disease is.

So here's a more truthful, honest look at what cancer looks like. Amanda posted pictures on this blog of exactly this.

There is a picture of her eyes red, puffy and swollen, her knees full of rashes, and a picture of an IV bag in hospital alongside a blood pressure monitor. I think I probably would have dropped off from it if Nancy would have called a few times and then just said, OK, well, you know, it's just you're busy. It takes persistence. You advocate. When you have something that you feel like you need to unveil, especially something that

as dark as this. And it's so strange and so weird. And when you feel like you need to unveil that thing and you need somebody just to believe you for a second, I felt like she was there. So I thought, you know, I'm going to entertain this. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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I was used to, like, people I worked with or people I would bring it up to say, you're crazy. Who would do that? There was never like, oh, you're right. That's it. She doesn't have cancer. Like, that never was the case. And so with Detective Martinez, at least I felt like, okay, he's listening. I think at one point, you know, I may have said, oh, you're going down the rabbit hole with me. This is great. Like, you know, he was willing to at least look. Once I was pursuing the case,

I would set aside like hours in a day to make phone calls to get organizational criteria as to how somebody who had an illness like cancer qualifies to receive monies or assistance or resources or whatever. And they would not answer the questions. And I said, it's a simple question. So then I was calling actual hospitals, the doctors,

And then that's when I realized the doctors she was naming weren't, some weren't actual doctors and some weren't oncologists. How come all these organizations are just giving and finding her housing or helping with things? There's no stepping stones that they have to take, you know? And I think that was something we talked about, like, wow, that is easy. Like we were shocked at how easy that could be that no one questions it too.

Thank you to American Cancer Society for giving me a free place to stay in NYC and amazing events like Relay for Life, all the amazing opportunities cancer has given me through this organization from support walks and banquets, hockey fights cancer, and NFL's crucial catch.

It was concerning to understand that there was really no, you know, hard criteria. It was just that you're saying it and you probably wouldn't be saying if you didn't have it. That was concerning. There's a real, like, ick factor with pointing the finger at someone and saying, I think they're faking cancer.

After a lot of consultation with my doctors, it was nicely broken to me that if I'm still willing to fight, this is about to get exceedingly more difficult than it already is. As of right now, the only drug left I can try doesn't even have an active trial in the United States. My doctor in New York would have to agree to administer it to me. For that to happen, I have to pass 28 assessment tests to make sure I meet the qualifications.

In Amanda's blog,

She kept her followers up to speed on all her trips going back and forth to New York from San Jose, California. So she would fly back and forth. That's a 3,000-mile flight across country to receive what she said was a clinical trial for this drug, Keytruda. ♪

The cost of the new clinical trial in New York was not just spoken about in the blog. When I first started my clinical trial in New York, insurance said no more. Sorry. Amanda also talked about it at church. She gave a testimony with Pastor Chase Wiggins on stage to a massive crowd, detailing how hard it was going to be to come up with the money. This is real audio of Amanda. The startup costs.

just to do the testing to get the drug to try to keep me alive was $3,000 up in two weeks. I had two weeks to come up with $3,000. The average Sunday church service at FCC would see nearly 4,000 people attending. We prayed about it. I was crying. One thing I noticed right away is Amanda would talk about facilities or names of the places she was going, but there was never...

any mention of the actual doctors or nurses or the people, you know, that were basically saving her life on a daily basis. It was always very generic. And that stood out to me as strange. I started to research about medications and clinical trials. Didn't make sense to me because you can look on clinicaltrials.gov and search the medications and where they're doing these trials. And a couple of things didn't add up with that.

You know, locally, she lived near Stanford University, which has probably one of the best cancer programs in the country. But yet she wasn't being treated there. She had to fly to New York. I just kept thinking, well, that's weird. And they had the same clinical trials. They had the same things she was claiming to need in New York. It just left me with so many questions, like, why is she going to New York?

The big NYC strikes again. Traveled back east for my biopsy and entrance screening for a clinical trial. She was flying back and forth, and she posted about how it went there and, you know, how sick she was and all these things that happened while she was in New York. Friday morning was biopsy day. More prescreens and the operation.

The three tumors on my right lung are all on the exterior and all encapsulated like little grapes rather than sewn on patches, so they were able to remove one easily. They didn't have to break my ribs like they thought, thank God. After eight hours of tests, I got to see Wicked on Broadway. Finally, I got to see the Times Square, New Year's Ball, and Rockefeller Tree while watching the Ice Skaters. Two of my other lifelong bucket list items checked.

And I started looking at those blogs and her pictures and her videos. And the thing is, I try not to get emotional in the case. And it's hard, you know, when people who have been sick with cancer, etc. Because if you tie an emotion to it, it gives you a different direction. I'm not trying to reach an end. I just want to reach the truth. And those are sometimes two different things.

I want to see this person go down, right? You can tell yourself that. But what if they truly do have cancer? So what you tell yourself is, I just want to see what the real truth is here. Because they're the one putting it out. They're the one laying out in front of me. They're asking for my money, right? Not just all these people, but me too. I'm looking at it, right? My family could be on these sites. My family could be in these social media circles. And I want to know.

The treatment is immensely expensive. We could barely come up with the money to pay for these when they were every three weeks. I remember crying out to God.

You've had me this far. You've never left me. Right. But how are we going to do this? That's a lot of money. How are we going to do this? So, of course, I'm literally walking on the airplane, falling to tears. So now I'm the girl with cancer on the airplane wearing a mask crying. And I'm like, fantastic. But the person that sat next to me, I always try to make them feel more comfortable. I mean, I'm wearing a mask. And I said, don't worry, I'm not going to get you sick. I'm not contagious. I just have to work to protect myself. And she said, oh, are you neutropenic?

She said, I'm a family medical practitioner in West Virginia. Then I fell asleep because chemo makes me tired. And I woke up in San Jose and I walked off the plane and I reached in my jacket pocket to get my cell phone out to find this. A check for $1,300. I never told her how much my treatment was.

I just told her it was expensive. My treatment is $1,300. And once I tie into something where I want to know, then it's going to be a ballgame. I didn't want to reach out too quickly. So I kept on looking at the information she was offering. I called all these people. I spent hours on the phone, gone in circles with people who are running these organizations. The hospitals are kicking me back.

That's when I rolled the dice a little bit. And then I went to the actual church where she called her home church. And ironically, that same church, the police department uses it for their ceremonies for like promotion, for their big grand ceremonies, because they have a pretty big auditorium.

So that church was kind of married into our police department. And so I thought, oh my God, I'm about to step on some toes right now. So I went over there to have a conversation with the head pastor and they asked the same question. Why would she say she had cancer if she didn't? You're going down the wrong direction. You're going after somebody. And I said, well, I'm not actually after her. Again, back to the

the premise i'm after the truth so do you know the truth well the truth is that she said she had cancer and we believe her i understand that but do you know well look at her she had canada you see her you know her social media etc i said yeah i could shave my head and put an oxygen tube on do you think i have cancer if i just told you you're just going to believe me

So I said, "What's the criteria here at the church being that you're a non-profit organization? And I don't know how much money you've poured out to this person, but what's your qualification process and the criteria? Where does it begin where you start giving away the money to somebody who says, 'Hey, I have this.'" They wouldn't answer that question. So I called a few more times and then I got the pastor's daughter. She was a lawyer.

And so she kind of gave me the same position that I was barking up the wrong tree. This is, you know, I'm pursuing somebody who's sick and this is not something that I should be doing. I should be going after the big criminals. I said, okay, but I asked her the same question, but how do you know? Right. And I said, you can't answer the question. You just believe. So now she's got two things going for her. She's got HIPAA shielding her.

And she sold you on the idea that she sold on what you believe too. Faith. But do you have faith in her or do you have faith in the truth? My feeling was they weren't going to give me nothing. I was going to fight a losing battle and I had already kind of rolled the dice because I had tilted my cards at them and I knew they were going to call her. And then everybody who was a member of that church who might know her

who might be fans of her, they were going to call them. I hadn't spoke to the church at that point because I was still continually fact-checking. She was posting at this point was like when she was posting a lot. Blood tests came back and confirmed again that even though the cancerous cell and tumors are still in stable disease, the Reed-Sternberg cells are progressing and have nearly doubled. So I was continually fact-checking anything she put up.

And like, Tecktoff Martinez is like trying to send it his way and just say, "Hey, can you believe she's saying this or she's saying that?" Being very blunt, if the chemo doesn't work, I can't do the trial anymore. And if I can't do the trial, this becomes a quality of life game rather than a beat cancer game. For the record, this is the shittiest, worst game ever. I told all my friends

My family in Los Angeles and my sister told all her friends because she was going through her own cancer, breast cancer, told all her friends, which are a lot of anonymous donors. I told a lot of people I knew over in San Jose and one of them is very wealthy and she donated money. One day Amanda and Corey come to pick up the baby. Amanda turned around and tells me as she's leaving,

We were all in the front yard. The kids were on the street. She says, "Well, thank your rich friend for giving $100 to my foundation." I didn't even know how much my friend gave. My mouth just dropped. How ungrateful, the way you said it. Even a dollar, you should be grateful. That was the time my whole thing started with them like, "Is she for real? She talks like that about people?"

What was her reaction? What did she say to you? No, I didn't say that to her. I didn't. I kept it in my mind. I didn't open my mouth. No. Yeah, I kept it. No, I'm too smart for that because she probably would have... I don't know what she would have done. She would have probably called social services and complained about my daycare. You know what I mean? I had to watch what I'm saying a lot of times. We would talk via text. Amanda's friend, Rebecca Caffiro. Because at that time...

Well, one, I was like donating really actively. So I felt like they were keeping me up in the loop. I was also reading the blog and, you know, she would let me know when she needed to fly back to New York for a treatment because I would purchase the plane tickets for her. Hashtag Team Amanda helped raise nearly 25% of my medical expenses and medication for this trip so far, which let me tell you are not cheap. And my flight, first class. Woohoo!

If anyone has extra points they don't need or connections and wants to help me get back there for my second dose, we would really appreciate it. I'm working part-time to help cover bills, but the co-pays, medicines, and tests still add up so fast. Either I would just buy them or we had a ton of Southwest points. We had a Southwest credit card and had more points than I could use, so we would always use our points to look her trips back. And we introduced her to a friend of ours in New York that she stayed with while she

was undergoing treatment. I had an account that was all health products related, cleansing products, like, you know, vegan products, like all these nutritional supplements and stuff. And, and I was using it. It's just something I was using that I loved. And Amanda, I remember like after she was coming off chemo or something, she was like complaining about all the weight she gained from steroids and just feeling like she needed to like do something. And so I was like, well, you know what? You could try the stuff I'm using. So I just shipped her stuff.

Like I just, you know, put in an order and sent it to her house and she loved it. And she was like, oh my gosh, it's making me feel better, the energy, et cetera. So I just set up an account for her with my credit card. And I never even looked at how much was spent, but it was hundreds of dollars a month for years.

Amanda loved the shakes so much, she ended up becoming an ambassador for them and posted about it on her blog with a picture and a t-shirt that had the words "Straight Outta Chemo" on the front. The flights to New York that Rebecca paid for, Amanda also raised money for from the church.

My mom always told me to see the positive in things. So on a positive note, I got a job. Actually, I got two jobs. I get to share the nutritional shakes I've literally been living on the past year. And I get to work for a major cancer organization to manage their corporate accounts for fundraising. Both work towards helping people. Yes! For the nonprofit, I get to help raise money to ensure other people might not have to go through this.

I am so excited. But the two part-time jobs were nowhere near enough to support the family. Amanda still needed support from the people around her, including her closest friends like Rebecca. I told her, "Whatever you need." And occasionally I would send her, like, DoorDash or like, "Can I buy you guys dinner tonight?"

But I wasn't tabulating it because it wasn't alone. It wasn't, you know, it was a gift. It was me wanting to make her life a little bit easier because I just had an inkling of how difficult what she was going through was. I'd always been interested in photography. Like I just always loved it. So I had photographed her wedding. I'd photographed her maternity shoot. I photographed their family photos every year for five or six years.

When you were photographing them, what was their relationship like? And what was Corey like? Corey always seemed uncomfortable. He always seemed like he didn't want to be there. When they showed up, it seemed like they had just had a fight and Amanda was a lot better about putting on a happy face than he was. I remember asking Amanda at one of the family photo shoots. I just had seen her mom. They were buying a place in Lake Arrowhead or somewhere. They were buying a vacation home and...

you know, talking about it on social media. And I just remember thinking, wait a second, Amanda is raising money for treatment to save her life. And her mom is buying a vacation property. Like this just doesn't make sense. And I asked Amanda and she's like, you know what Rebecca, we have a really complicated relationship. I love my mom. I know like this is really bizarre. And I didn't press her further. So I thought it was odd. That started to like put some questions in my head. Amanda knew that I was looking at her.

But she didn't do any of that.

She walked straight into the San Jose Police Department and dropped off a stack of papers addressed to Detective Jose Martinez. She brought this printout of all these medications that were cancer-based medications, recovery, chemo or whatever. I was looking, you know, like Keytruda was one of them. It was a fairly new medication.

I'll never forget the sheer looks of horror on your faces as you all cringed to what my insides looked like. Hundreds and hundreds of little dark grapevines everywhere. After eight doses of Keytruda, my insides were looking better, but still so much darkness. So she shows me this list printed from a website. She left it at the police department to be given to me. She knows I'm going to qualify this.

sending me this website. So I looked up the website, I researched it, and the website was basically a website that any of us could add our medication to. We're self-populating the website. I could have put anything on there. And so I realized she could put anything on there. So she thinks I'm just going to stop at her list of medications. And that just opened the door even more because now I knew she was trying to deceive me.

She was sending me down another road and then that really sparked me. I called her to just to make sure that she was the one who dropped off the paperwork. So it tied herself to it. And she's all, "See, I gave you what you need. I'm sick and here's all the medications I take." She told me she had an attorney and I said, "That's great. That's wonderful. So are you going to be communicating through your attorney?" So she was like, "Yep." I said, "Okay."

I got it. I'm looking at it. So I'll be in touch. It was really hard to see everyone donating and helping and doing so much. And really, the few times I did reach out or try to, I don't want to say warn people, but I wanted people to be aware that there was something going on. And I had ways of doing that. It led to, you know, I was vilified. I was this, who is this person coming in and how dare they? I let the family know.

the brothers in that, "Hey, you know, there's, what do you guys think? You're running this thing and I'm a reporter. This is where I'm working. And I want to know where this money's going." Up until that point, I had been doing everything behind the scenes, talking to wherever I could without tipping my hand.

Alita and I would touch base several times a week just because there was new information coming out all the time. Amanda would post something and I would check with Alita. Alita would hear something and she would let me know. It was really important for us to compare stuff back and forth because, you know, I may say something like, oh,

I saw this in the blog and this is how that happened. And she would say, "Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. I know about that and that is not what I remember or this is how it happened." So just comparing things, keeping track of the information was really important. Nobody believed me. Everybody thought I was, you know, just being vindictive, scorned ex-wife, whatever you want, however you want to put it. But I was crying out to get my daughter help. Nobody would listen.

Sometimes I would call Nancy crying. Sometimes I'd call her mad. Sometimes we'd just be comparing notes and, you know, I would let her know what's going on with Jessa. It felt good to have somebody listen. Yeah, nobody would listen. And she listened to me and we kind of put our heads together. Next thing you know, we've got this big investigation going on. I spoke to Detective Martinez and he had told me he reached out to Amanda and they had this back and forth conversation.

At that point, I don't think Amanda knew about me yet. Amanda, I think, found out about me during a custody hearing. Alida had called and asked if it was okay if she brought up the fact that I was investigating Amanda. And at that point, it was an official investigation with San Jose Police Department for Detective Martinez. So they were able to bring it up in one of their court proceedings for the custody case.

Amanda was telling everybody that I was just a friend of Alita's, that Alita had basically come up with this story and that was using me to play this part. Like it was just all made up. I actually thought it best that I wrote a letter that Alita and her attorney could give to the court to say, I am not a friend of Alita's. I am a producer and this is what I'm working on and that I was

Working on this without Alida, this didn't come from Alida. It made absolutely no difference to Amanda that the truth was being told and submitted to the court. As far as she was concerned, it was a better story that this came from Alida and it was just all a lie. And in case Nancy had any doubt about whether Amanda knew she existed... The first time I noticed something in the blog, she called me the enemy. She just said,

There's an enemy out there. You know who you are. She referred to me a couple of times as just the enemy. Don't ruin this for me, enemy. Why are you ruining this for me? She would be posting about a job, that she was up for a job. She would say, don't ruin this for me, enemy. I've got this interview tomorrow. I think she thought I was going to call places and try and ruin things for her.

She was putting it out there, like someone's trying to ruin me. There's a reporter, there's a person, it's like the ex-wife. I came home from work, it was a Friday night. It was a holiday weekend, so I remember it so clearly. And I was getting the mail out of my mailbox and I opened it up and it's just stuffed with paper. And I was like, it was strange, right? So I'm looking through it and I'm like, what is this? And I see the name Amanda Riley. I see Nancy Moscatello. I'm like, man, what is this?

I see restraining order, civil harassment, and my mind is catching up to what I'm reading and putting it together like, oh my God, she was taking me to court for a restraining order. Amanda Riley wanted to stop me investigating her by hitting me with a restraining order. Scamander is hosted and produced by me, Charlie Webster, and produced by Jackson McLennan. Amanda's blog posts are read by actor Kendall Horne.

Edit and theme music by Nico Pallella. Assistant producer, Casey Hertz. Assistant editor, Seema Grewal. Additional production support from Stephen Sletten, Will Hagel and Nicole Urban. Executive produced by me, Charlie Webster and Nancy Moscatello. Scamander is a Lionsgate Sound production engineered by Pilgrim Media Group.