Latest / Narcisist Psychology / The Watch on the Branch: How a Friend Stole a Life Slowly

Transcript

The Watch on the Branch: How a Friend Stole a Life Slowly · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The watch was hanging from a branch at eye level,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: face turned outward, as though someone had placed it there
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: to be admired. Connie Braddock almost walked past it. It
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: was Tuesday, May seventh, two thousand nineteen, and she was
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: moving along the Harvey Riley Trail in Culver County, Ohio,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: about forty minutes past the second creek crossing. The watch
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: was Asako automatic brushed steel, bone dry despite two days
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: of intermittent rain on the back and engraving oh oh,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: thirty years of service ridgeway freight. No body near by,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: no note, no explanation for how a man's most meaningful
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: object ended up displayed in a stand of young sycamores
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: miles from anywhere. That object would eventually lead investigators to
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: something far more disturbing than a discarded heirloom, not a theft,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: not exactly, something quieter and in many ways more thorough.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Alan O'Connor was fifty four years old and his life
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: ran on a rhythm so consistent that his neighbors could
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: set their week ends by it. He lived on Coppice
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Road in Alderton, Ohio, in the same house he had
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: shared with his wife before she died in twenty fourteen,
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: five years on, the grief had not disappeared. It had
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: simply reorganized itself around the routines he kept. Every spring,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Alan opened his twelve raised garden beds with a hand
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: written planting chart, a drip irrigation system he had built
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: himself over three seasons, and a precision that people in
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: the neighborhood found quietly remarkable. He grew tomatoes, peppers, beans,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: lettuces he would never eat fast enough, and zucchini that
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: got away from him every July without fail. The garden
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: was not a hobby. It was the visible structure of
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: a man who had chosen deliberately to state heathered to
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: living things. On Thursday nights, Alan drove out to cross
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Roads Lanes on Route nine for the Alderton Men's Recreational League.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: He had bowled with the same team for eleven years.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: His team mate, Chris Weller, had known him long enough
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: to notice when something changed. At Ridgeway Frate's Alderton terminal,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Allan had worked thirty years as a logistics coordinator. The
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: Watchcannie found on the trail had been given to him
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: by the company at a recognition ceremony. He wore it
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: every day his daughter, Claire twenty eight, who did not
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: live locally, later told investigators that when her father said
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: he had made a real friend, she paid attention. It
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: was not something he said easily. The friend's name was Kent.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Stuart Allan had encountered Kent in a Facebook group for
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: small scale growers. Kent's profile showed a pleasant faced man
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: in his late forties who posted with the casual authority
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: of someone who had been gardening for decades. He knew
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: his soil amendments, He asked follow up questions, He remembered
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: what other members had mentioned weeks earlier. In a group
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: full of strangers comparing compost methods, Kent felt like the
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: most present person in the room. He reached out to
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Allan directly sometime in the summer of twenty eighteen. The
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: messages were unhurried. They talked about raised beds, about the
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: difficulty of maintaining consistent moisture through in Ohio August, about
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: what it meant to tend something long term. Kent mentioned
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: in passing that he had lost someone close a few
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: years back. Allan understood that kind of loss. The two
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: men kept talking what Allan did not know and what
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: he would have no way of knowing was that Kent
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Stewart was running this exact approach in two other places simultaneously.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: In Huron County, a fifty seven year old woman named
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Norah Blaine was receiving the same careful attention inside an
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: online water color In Wayne County, a sixty one year
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: old man named Phil Varga was being cultivated inside a
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: classic car forum. All three were Ohio residents. All three
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: had experienced a significant loss. All three were financially stable.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: The gardening group, the watercolor community, the car forum. The
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: platform was irrelevant. What Kent was looking for was legible
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: pain and patient trust. Allan had both. By August of
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, something had already shifted. Chris Weller called Allan
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: about Thursday Bowling. Allan canceled, saying he was helping a
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: friend through a personal situation. Weller called back twice. Allan
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: didn't make it to Thursday League again for months. Laurie McCarthy,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: the licensed clinical social worker later assigned to Allan's case
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: by the Culver County Victim Services Unit, would review that
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: voicemail carefully. Her assessment was direct. By the time Allan
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: skipped that first Thursday night. The ou the architecture of
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: what Kent was building was already complete and functioning. Not
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: a single financial form had yet been signed. The first
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: transfer was four hundred twenty dollars. Kent had called Allan
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: in August of twenty eighteen, not to ask exactly, but
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: to explain truck trouble on I seventy one near Ashland,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: a towing situation. He would pay it back the moment
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: he got home, and he did. Within days, A check
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: arrived at Coppis Road with a handwritten note. Allan would
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: later tell investigators he remembered thinking this is a man
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: who follows through. That note is worth sitting with for
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: a moment, because in the contact log that would eventually
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: be recovered from a storage unit in Mansfield, Ohio. The
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: repayment is recorded in Kent's own shorthand, not as a
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: gesture of integrity, but as a data point it worked.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: The next request could be larger. Queen August of twenty
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: eighteen and February of twenty nineteen nine, separate transfers left
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Allan O'Connor's accounts. The total reached approximately thirty one thousand dollars.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: The pretexts shifted a delayed investment return a short term
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: cash flow problem at a business opportunity. Kent wanted to
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: bring Allan into a processing delay at a firm called
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Crestwood Venture Partners LLC. That last name deserves attention. Crestwood
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Venture Partners LLC was registered in Delaware in November of
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. Its registered agent was a mailbox service. The
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: listed manager was unverifiable. Allan did not know any of that.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: What Allan knew was that he had a friend who
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: was also building something, an investment opportunity that made sense
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: when Kent explained it, that had a name and a
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: structure and a timeline for returns. And Kent explained it well.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: He explained it patiently. He explained aimed it in the
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: same unhurried voice he used to talk about raised beds
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: and drip irrigation and the right time to transplant pepper
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: seedlings in an Ohio spring. The transfers grew, the gap
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: between repayments widened, then the repayments stopped. In January of
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Alan walked into Alderton Savings on Merchant Street.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: He was updating the beneficiary designation on an investment account,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: changing it to Crestwood Venture Partner's LLC. The branch manager,
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: Rosa Tindall, handled the transaction. She noted it afterward in
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: the customer log. What she recorded was not the paperwork itself,
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: but something she observed in all he appeared to be
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: receiving instructions by phone while standing at her window, relaying
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: someone else's impatience. He was not distressed, he was focused.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: He was trying to get this right for someone else.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Rosa flagged it as an irregularity. At the the time,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: no one connected it to anything larger. Here is the
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: thing that Lorie McCarthy would later identify as the operational
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: core of what Kent was doing. The financial transfers were
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: not the point. They were the measurement, each request, each hesitation,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Allen showed, each time Allen asked a question and then
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: accepted Kent's answer. All of it was being logged. The
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: contact spreadsheet recovered from the Mansfield storage unit tracked Allen,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Nora Blaine, and Phil Varga in parallel columns dates of contact,
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: a mounts requested, amounts received, and a third column notes
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: on emotional state and resistance level. Kent was not running
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: a con He was running three experiments simultaneously. Nora Blaine,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: fifty seven from Huron County, had been approached through an
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: online watercolour group. Phil Varga, sixty one, from Wayne County,
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: had been found inside a classic car forum. The pattern
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: across all three was identical. Find the community, find the
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: recently bereaved, find the financially stable, make contact about the
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: shared interest, Let time pass, let trust accumulate, then introduce
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: the financial layer so gradually that no single request ever
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: felt like a threshold. The Mansfield storage unit was rented
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: under a slight variation of Kent Stewart's own name inside
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: a laptop. On the laptop, the contact log organized by
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: initials tracking all three victims across the same operational timeline.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: The columns were methodical, so were the notes. Laurie McCarthy,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: reviewing the log, described one notation about Allen, entered some
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: time in late twenty eighteen that used the phrase assessed
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: remaining capacity. It was a phrase more appropriate to a
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: supply chain analysis than to a friendship. Ellen was a
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: logistics coordinator of thirty years. He would have understood the
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: terminology immediately had he ever seen it applied to himself.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: On the night of May sixth, twenty nineteen. Alan O'Connor
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: drove to the Harvey Riley trailhead alone. Kent had told
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: him to go. The explanation was procedural. A representative from
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: Crestwood Venture Partners needed to verify Allan's identity in person
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: before releasing the return on his investment. Standard practice, Kent said,
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: just a from Alan. But there was one additional requirement.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Allan needed to bring a good faith collateral deposit, a
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: personal item of significant value, something that demonstrated his seriousness
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: as a counter party, not money, something personal. Allan brought
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: the watch. It was a Saco automatic brushed steel engraved
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: on the back oh thirty years of service Ridgeway Freight.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: The company had given it to him at his thirtieth anniversary.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: He had worn it to his wife's memorial in two
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: thousand fourteen. It was the most meaningful object he owned.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: He handed it to a man at the trailhead, medium
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: height baseball cap. No paperwork, no introduction. The man took
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: the watch, walked toward the tree line, and hung it
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: on the branch of a young sycamore. Then he left.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: No representative arrived, No return was released, No Crestwood venture
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: partners existed in any form that could reach back across
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: a handshake. Allan drove home. When Connie Braddock found the
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: watch the following morning, hanging on that branch above the
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: second creek crossing on the Harvey Riley Loop. The face
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: was turned outward, the casing was dry, unfogged, she noted, specifically,
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: despite two days of intermittent rain since the night it
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: was left there. She called the County non emergency line.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Within days, it was logged as found property and the
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: engraving scent in investigators back through Ridgeway Freights records to Alan
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: O'Connor Logistics coordinator Alderton Terminal. Laurie McCarthy was assigned to
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Allan's case shortly after. Her assessment of the trailhead event,
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: delivered in the case notes filed with Culver County Victim
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: Services was precise. The collateral deposit request was not logistical,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: It was diagnostic. Requiring Allan to bring a personal item,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: not money, not a document, but the thing he valued most,
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: was a test of learned helplessness. If Allan complied, it
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: would confirm that the boundary between what Kent could ask
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: for and what Allan would surrender had effectively dissolved. McCarthy's
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: notes contained one sentence that has stayed in the record
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: of this case. He would have driven back with more.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: That sentence reframes everything that came before it. The thirty
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: one thousand dollars was not the ceiling. The watch was
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: not the end. The watch was Kenton determining whether there
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: was a ceiling at all. Picture the moment. Rosa Tyndall
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: stood at her window in Alderton's savings, watching Allan relay
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: someone else's instructions into a form he was filling out
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: with his own hand. She flagged it, she wrote it down,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: and then the paperwork was processed because Alan had come
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: in voluntarily, had signed everything correctly, and had committed no
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: crime of his own. That image, a man signing away
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: his own assets at someone else's spoken pace, sits at
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: the center of the question this case raises. Not who
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: broke the law, because that was eventually answered clearly, but
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: how a person arrives at that window without knowing they
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: have been steered there? Walk through what the evidence shows.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Kent Stuart never claimed to be any one other than himself.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: His Facebook profile was credible, warm and consistent. He used
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: his actual name, he posted genuine content about small scale growing.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: The approach was not disguise, prolonged calibration, finding the frequency
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: at which Allan operated, then matching it so precisely that
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: correction felt unnecessary. The first financial request was small enough
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: to test without triggering alarm. It was repaid, which is
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: not what a simple thief does. A simple thief takes
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: and disappears. What Kent did was invest in Allan's confidence
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: that he was dealing with someone honest. The repayment was
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: not generosity, it was infrastructure. But here is where the
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: evidence does something unusual. The Mansfield laptop did not show
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: a man improvising. It showed a man with a system.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Three victims, three timelines, three columns of notes tracking emotional
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: state and resistance. Kent was not swept up in something
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: that got out of hand. He was managing a portfolio.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Every kindness, every shared story about loss, every slow conversation
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: about gardening in Ohio, each of those X moments appears
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: in the log as a data point in a progression
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: toward a specific financial threshold. The defense argued its sentencing
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: that Kent had formed genuine relationships, that the bonds were real,
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: even if the financial requests were wrong, and that a
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: diagnosable psychological condition should be considered in mitigation. The court
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: rejected all of it. The laptop destroyed the argument about
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: genuine connection the moment it was opened. Genuine connection is
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: not tracked in parallel columns by initials. Genuine connection does
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: not include a notation on remaining capacity. Kent confessed when
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: the laptop evidence was presented. Until that point he had
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: maintained that the relationships were real and the financial matters
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: were a civil dispute. The laptop made that position untenable.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: What the record shows in the end is not a
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: man who fell into exploitation. It is a man who
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: constructed it, who chose each of three people for specific vulnerabilities,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: who maintained the architecture across many months, and who tested
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: the limits of each person's trust with increasing precision. The
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: watch at the trailhead was the highest point that architecture
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: reached with Alan. It was a compliance test, and Allan
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: passed it in the worst sense of that phrase. Laurie
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: McCarthy's final note in Allan's case file was four words.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Everything after that was just collection. Kent. Stuart was charged
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: in September of twenty nineteen, Culver County filed three counts
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: of wire fraud, two counts of identity deception, and one
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: count of theft by deception. The judge sentenced him to
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: seven years. He served four years and eight months. Restitution
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: was ordered to all three victims. The total extracted from Allan, Nora,
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: and Phil exceeded ninety thousand dollars. Nora Blaine, fifty seven
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: from Huron County, had never self reported. She had convinced herself,
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: according to investigators who interviewed her in June of two
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, that she had made foolish decisions and deserved
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: the consequences. The financial audit trail found her. Phil Varga,
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: sixty one from Wayne County, was identified two weeks after
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Nora by the same trail. He had not come forward either.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Neither of them had done anything wrong. The shame belonged
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: entirely to the man with the laptop. The defense argued
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: at sentencing that Kent had formed genuine connections with each
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: of his victims, that the relationships were real, even if
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: the financial requests had gone too far, that a diagnosable
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: psychological condition should be considered in mitigation. The judge rejected
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: every argument. The laptop had already answered the question of
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: genuine connection. Genuine connection does not come with columns. It
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: does not include notations on emotional state and remaining capacity.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: Kent confessed when the laptop evidence was presented. Until that moment,
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: he had held the position that the financial matters were
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: a civil dispute and the relationships were real. The laptop
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: made that position impossible to maintain. What the audit trail,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: the shell entity registered in Delaware, the nine transfers from
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Allen's accounts, and the contact log written in initials confirmed
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: together was not a man who lost control of something
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: that started honestly, It was a man who built a machine.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: He selected each victim for a specific profile recent loss,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: financial stability, social isolation, and unmet need for connection, and
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: he ran the machine until the evidence stopped him. Alan
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: O'Connor recovered his watch in the spring of twenty twenty.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: He collected it from the Culver County Sheriff's evidence room.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: The Saiko automatic brushed steel engraving, still intact ah thirty
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: years of service, Ridgeway fours. He put it back in
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: the garden by the last Saturday of March Thursday, Bowling
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: came back two cross Roads Lanes Route nine, the same
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: team he had played with for eleven years. Chris Weller
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: had called twice after that August voicemail. He called again
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: when things were clearer. In May of twenty twenty, Claire visited.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: She was twenty nine, and she had told investigators during
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the early interviews that her father saying he had made
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: a real friend was not something he said easily. She
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: drove to Coppice Road and helped him plant the peppers.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Laurie McCarthy, the licensed clinical social worker assigned to Allan's
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: case by Culver County Victim Services, made a note at
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: the close of his file. She had said in earlier
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: documentation that the watch at the trailhead was a test
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: of learned helplessness, that if Allan had driven back with
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: more Kent would have asked for it. Her final note
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: four words. Everything after that was just collection. There is
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: something in that phrase that stays with you. Not the
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: legal outcome, not the sentence, the restitution, the shell company dissolved.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: It is the idea that by the night Allan stood
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: at a trailhead in the dark and handed over the
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: most meaningful object he owned. The psychological work was already done.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: The money was a formality. The watch was the proof.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Alan did not know that. He thought he was helping
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: a friend. He thought Kent was real. That is not
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: a failure of intelligence. It is a precise description of
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: how this kind of dismantling works, slowly, through warmth, through patience,
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: through the specific and merciless exploitation of what it means
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: to trust someone After loss, the watch hangs back in
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: the garden. Now the engraving face is outward. The peppers
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: came up that May. This show is made by Obo Media.