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He Published Her Life Under a Stranger's Name - She Didn't Know · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: A hardcover book sat wedged against the cinderblock foundation of
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: a farmhouse crawl space on Colter Road in Fenwick Crossing, Indiana.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: The title read What I Carried A Memoir. The author
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: name read Cheryl Pruet. Cheryl Berry had never been married.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: She had never used that name in any legal document,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: any contract, or any signature in her life. She recognized
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: every word inside that book was her memoir, written across
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: two years of her life, about her mother's degenerating mind
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: and the slow labor of watching it happen from the
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: next room. Every sentence, every memory, every particular of her
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: own grief, published under a name she had never chosen,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: without her knowledge, by a man she had come to
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: trust completely. What happened between the moments she first handed
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: him her manuscript and the morning she found that book
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: in a used bookstore on Massachusetts Avenue is not a
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: simple story of theft. It is a methodical account of
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: how one person dismantled another's sense of reality so completely
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: that the evidence of what was being done to her
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: sat in print on a shelf, and she still did
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: not know it existed. In the spring of twenty sixteen,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Cheryl Berry was twenty four years old and living in
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: a rented farmhouse outside Fenwick Crossing, a small community in
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Garland County, Indiana. She had grown up in Munsey. She
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: was not famous. She had no publishing credits, no literary connections,
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: and no particular reason to believe the world would want
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: to read what she had written. What she had written
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: she had written out of necessity. Her mother had been
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: diagnosed with a degenerative neurological condition several years earlier. Cheryl
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: had become her primary caregiver while still in her early twenties,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: managing medications, appointments, appointments, the specific texture of daily loss
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: that doesn't announce itself all at once, but accumulates incrementally
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: like sediment. She wrote about it the way people write
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: when they have no other place to put the weight.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: Her days ran on a tight schedule. She kept a
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: hollandlop rabbit named Stoker, who required feeding at four fixed
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: points during the day, a routine that gave the farmhouse
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: a kind of domestic rhythm even on the hardest mornings.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: She was methodical. People who knew her described her as organized, steady,
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: someone who kept her word and expected others to do
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: the same. The manuscript she completed by mid twenty sixteen
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: was a memoir in the full sense, personal specific built
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: from memory and caregiving notes, and the particular vocabulary that
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: only forms when you live inside a long illness with
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: someone you love. She titled it What I Carried an Agent.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: In June of twenty sixteen, Cheryl attended a writing workshop.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: Raymond Prewitt was there. He was forty one years old,
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: significantly more experienced in the industry, and operated a boutique
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: literary agency called Glasswork Literary from an office on North
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Meridian Street in Indianapolis. He had legitimate prior clients. He
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: carried himself with the particular authority of someone who had
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: navigated a world Cheryl was only entering. Prewitt began what
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: would later be documented as a love bombing phase. Consistent attention,
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: enthusiastic response to her work, the kind of interest that
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: when it comes from someone with real credentials in a
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: field you are trying to enter, reads as validation rather
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: than strategy. By September of twenty sixteen, Cheryl had signed
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: a representation agreement with Glasswork Literary. Pruett was her agent,
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: He had access to her manuscript, her contact information and
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: her trust. What she did not know, and would not
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: know for nearly three years, was that he had already
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: begun to construct a version of her professional life that
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: she would never be allowed to see. The first anomaly
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: was a number three thousand dollars. In two thousand seventeen,
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: Pruet presented Cheryl with what he called a development fee,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: a standard investment, he said, in the professional preparation of
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: a manuscript before major submission. Cheryl paid it. She had
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: no reason not to. He was her agent, He had credentials,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: a real office, a history of legitimate clients. The fee
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: had no documented basis in any standard agency agreement, but
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: she didn't know that yet. Around the same time she
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: handed him her laptop, he said he needed it for
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: safe keeping, to manage the submission file centrally, to keep
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: everything organized from his She trusted the explanation. The laptop
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: contained every chapter she had written, the metadata of her
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: working life from August of twenty sixteen onward. She gave
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: it to him, and it did not come back. Those
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: two facts, the fee and the laptop, sitting side by side,
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: would not look like a pattern for nearly three years. Meanwhile,
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: something else was happening that Cheryl couldn't see at all.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: In early twenty seventeen, a small press in Ohio made
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: a written offer on her manuscript, not a soft inquiry,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: a formal written offer. Pruitt received it and declined it
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: by e mail. He never told her. The offer simply
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: ceased to exist, absorbed into the professional silence that Pruitt
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: controlled completely. Cheryl had no submission portal of her own,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: no direct contact with publishers. Every communication flowed through glass
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Work literary, through him. By spring of twenty eighteen, Pruet
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: had become her romantic partner as well. The professional relationship
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: had folded into a personal one, which meant that questioning
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: his decisions felt increasingly like questioning the relationship itself. That spring,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: she reviewed and approved a cover concept he presented for
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: the memoir. She liked it. He told her it was
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: moving forward. What he did not tell her was the
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: name that would go on that cover. In October of
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, ardwell House published What I Carried, a memoir.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: The author listed was Cheryl Pruitt, a name Cheryl Berry
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: had never used, had never legally held, had never signed
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: to any document in her life. The book was real
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: in print available for purchase. Owen Sato at Ardwell House
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: had accepted the manuscript, believing the author was Pruitt's wife.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: That was what Pruitt had told him. Cheryl knew none
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: of this. The book she had written, the one one
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: that held her mother's illness and her own grief and
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: three years of her life, was on shelves under someone
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: else's name. And she was still living in the farmhouse
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: on Colter Road, feeding Stoker at his four fixed points
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: each day, waiting to hear news about her manuscript's progress.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: That is the particular texture of this kind of manipulation.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: It doesn't feel like anything from the inside. It feels
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: like waiting. Late February of twenty nineteen, Cheryl checked the
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Indiana Arts Council Prize database, a search she'd done before,
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: hoping to find her manuscript listed somewhere in the submission
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: history Prewett claimed to be managing. It wasn't there. She
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: raised it with Pruld. According to the documented sessions later
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: conducted by Jessica Christensen, a counseling psychologist who worked with
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Cheryl across six interviews in the spring of twenty nineteen,
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Prewitt's response followed a pattern Christensen identified as Darva dey attack, redirect,
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: victim offeend. He minimized her concern, He reframed her question
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: as distrust. He made the inquiry itself feel like the problem.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: She let it go for about a week. On March
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: fourth of twenty nineteen, Cheryl was on Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: She walked into a used bookstore, and there on a
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: shelf was a hardcover book with a familiar title, What
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: I Carried, a memoir. The author listed Cheryl Pruitt. She
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: bought it. She stood on the sidewalk and read the
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: first chapter. She recognized every sentence, every word was hers.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: The dedication, the specific phrasing of her mother's diagnosis, the
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: rhythm of a particular scene from a Sunday morning in Muncie,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: all of it exactly as she had written it, under
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: a name she had never used. She drove to Pruitt's
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: office on North Meridian Street. No answer. She returned to
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Colter Road. She placed the book against the cinderblock foundation
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: beneath a crawl space vent, deliberately in a place she
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: could retrieve it. Then she called her sister, Pamela. That
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: call was the first crack in the architecture Pruet had
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: built around her. Pamela Berry called Attorney Susan Olander. The
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: next morning, March fifth, Olander contacted the Garland County Sheriff's Office.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Detective Frank Kovacs was assigned the case. The investigation moved
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: on two tracks simultaneously. The first was legal, establishing what
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: had been taken and how. The second was something quieter.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Six sessions between Cheryl and Jessica Christensen documenting the structure
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: of the manipulation across almost three years. Christensen's notes, reviewed
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: later as part of the evidentiary record, described a progression
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: with identifiable phases. The love bombing at the workshop in
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: June of twenty sixteen, the gradual transfer of professional control,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: manuscript files, submission communications, the laptop, the fee, the romantic
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: relationship beginning in spring of twenty eighteen, which effectively merged
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: two spheres of dependency into one, and then the Darvaux
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: responses whenever Cheryl approached the edges of what she wasn't
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: supposed to see. Reading the documented sessions is one of
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: those moments that stops you cold. It wasn't that Cheryl
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: had been naive. It was that the system had been
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: built precisely to look legitimate at every stage, real credentials,
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: a real office, real prior clients. The manipulation was architectural,
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: not emotional. It used the structures of the literary industry
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: as its scaffolding. On March twenty eighth, a warrant was
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: executed at glass Work Literary's offices and at Pruitt's home.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Investigators recovered submission correspondence, the Ardwell House contract, and the
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: emails in which Pruet had represented Cheryl as his wife.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: Each document added a wall to a room that Pruitt
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: had been constructing quietly for years. But the laptop was
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: not there. That absence mattered. The laptop was the one
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: object that could directly answer the question Pruitt had pre
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: answered with a lie, did he write any of it?
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: His defense would later imply shared authorship, an editorial contribution
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: substantial enough to justify the name on the cover. Without
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: the laptop, the metadata that would disprove that claim was inaccessible. Then,
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: on June third of twenty nineteen, investigators traced a storage
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: unit in Speedway, Indiana, registered to a shell name linked
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: to a debit card at an address connected to Pruitt's mother,
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: inside three bankers, boxes of glasswork, literary files, and the laptop.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: The forensic examination was brief. The user account was labeled
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Cheryl B. The chapter files had been created between August
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: of two thousand sixteen and November of two thousand eighteen.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: There were zero editing sessions attributable to Pruitt, not minimal
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: contribution zero. Four days later, Raymond Pruitt gave a recorded confession.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Here is where the evidence seems to settle cleanly into
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: a single story. A man stole a woman's memoir, published
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: it under a false name, and was caught when the
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: laptop proved he hadn't written a word of it. But
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: the case contains a fact that doesn't fit that frame,
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: and once you see it, it recontextualizes everything that came before.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Picture Pruet in two thousand seventeen. He has a signed client,
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: he has her manuscript. He has a real offer from
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: an Ohio press, a written offer, not a soft inquiry.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: The straightforward play, even for a dishonest agent, would be
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: to take the commission, accept the deal, collect the percentage,
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: move on. That is the easy path. He didn't take it.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: He declined the Ohio offer without telling Cheron. He charged
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: a development fee with no legitimate basis. He asked for
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: the laptop, and then he waited more than a year
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: until he was also her romantic partner, before submitting the
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: manuscript to Artwell House under her name and a surname
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: she had never held. The sequence doesn't describe opportunism, It
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: describes patience. Consider what the documented manipulation phases reveal when
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: placed against that time line. The love bombing in two
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: thousand sixteen wasn't incidental to the literary fraud. It was
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: the first operational move every stage after the fee the laptop.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: The romantic relationship reduced Cheryl's independent access to information while
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: increasing Pruitt's control over the one thing that had her
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: name attached to it. The Ardwell House deception required proof
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: to misrepresent Cheryl as his wife. To Owen Sadow. That
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: specific lie served a double function. It created a publishing
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: credit Pruitt could control, and it built a story he
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: could maintain. As long as Cheryl remained inside the relationship,
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: she would never see a royalty statement, She would never
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: receive correspondence from the publisher. Every institutional point of contact
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: ran through him. That version of events collapses into something
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: more precise than fraud. It describes a person who dismantled
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: another person's access to her own professional reality systematically over years,
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: using her trust as the primary tool. And then there
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: is Andrea Solis. In the spring of twenty twenty one,
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: forensic accounting of glass Work literaries files flagged a prior client,
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Andrea Solis, a writer from Fort Wayne who had been
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: represented by Glass Work between twenty twelve and two thousand thirteen.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Investigators found Pruitt's IP address connected to emails that had
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: win withdrawn Solis's manuscript from three separate publishers e mails
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: sent under her name without her knowledge while she was
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: still his client. Solis had spent eight years believing her
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: manuscript simply wasn't good enough. She had no other explanation.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: The rejections had come in her own name, from her
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: own account, in language she had no reason to doubt.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: She had moved on. Her manuscript was never recovered. Reasons
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: why Pruitt targeted her were never fully established. The finding
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: added fourteen months to his custodial sentence, but it answered
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: almost nothing about what he had actually done with her
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: work or why. What it confirmed was this The architecture
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: around Cheryl Berry had not been built for her alone.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: Pruitt had done this before. The question of whether the
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Ohio Press offer, the one he buried in two thousand seventeen,
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: would have led somewhere real for Cheryl is one the
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: record cannot answer. What it can answer is that he
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: knew exactly how to make a writer wait and wonder
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: and eventually stop wondering. Cheryl Berry did not stop wondering.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: That is the only reason the book was ever found.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: The hard cover she placed against that cinderblock foundation became
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: states Exhibit three. It documented her independent discovery, before any
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: investigator was involved, before any warrant, before any official account
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: of what had happened. She had walked into a bookstore,
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: recognized her own words under a name she had never used,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: and preserved the evidence herself. In January of twenty twenty,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: ardwell House reissued What I Carried a Memoir under the
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: name Cheryl Berry, the name that had always belonged on
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: the cover. There is something that resists easy framing about
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: this case, not because the facts are ambiguous, but because
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: the damage, which extends past what any sentence can address.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Andrea Solis's manuscript is gone. The eight years she spent
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: believing she had simply failed as a writer cannot be returned.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: The Ohio press that made an offer in twenty seventeen
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: will never know what they almost published. Cheryl Berry got
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: her name back. That is not a small thing. It
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: is also not the whole accounting. Four days after Detective
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Kovacs's team opened that storage unit in Speedway, Raymond Pruitt
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: gave a recorded confession. The laptop had been sitting in
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: a banker's box under his mother's registered shell name. The
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: metadata was unambiguous. There was nothing left to contest. In
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: November of twenty nineteen, a court in Garland County sentenced
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Pruitt to four years. Two were suspended. Full restitution was ordered.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Every royalty from what Eye carried returned to its author fraud, identity,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: fraud under Indiana's standeat, breach of fiduciary duty. The charges
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: named exactly what the evidence had documented, piece by piece,
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: session by session, across three years of methodical dismantling. Owensto,
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: the owner of Ardwell House, cooperated immediately he had believed
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Cheryl was Pruitt's wife. He had never met her. The
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: man who called himself her agent had used her manuscript,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: her name, and a fabricated marital identity to extract a
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: publishing contract she never knew existed. Sato moved quickly. In
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: January of twenty twenty, Artwell House reissued the book. The
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: cover read What I Carried, a memoir by Cheryl Berry,
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: the name that had always belonged there. That should have
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: been the end of the accountant. It was not. In
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: the spring of twenty twenty one, forensic accountants auditing Glass
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Work Literary's financial records flagged a pattern from nearly a
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: decade earlier. A client named Andrea Solis, based in Fort Wayne,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: had been represented by Pruitt between two thousand twelve and
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen. Investigators traced Pruitt's IP address to a
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: series of emails sent to three separate publishers, emails withdrawing
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Solas's manuscript. Every e mail carried her name. None of
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: them came from her. Solus had spent eight years believing
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: she simply wasn't good enough. Eight years of silence she
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: had interpreted as failure. The manuscript was never recovered. The
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: reasons Pruitt targeted her were never fully established by investigators.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: That gap in the record remains open. The additional charges
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: from the SOLAS finding extended Pruitt's custodial sentence by fourteen months,
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: fourteen months for eight years. The math does not balance.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: It never does in cases like this. What Raymond Pruitt understood,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: and what makes this case so difficult to set down,
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: is that the most durable damage is not legal. It
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: lives in the gap between what a person believed about
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: themselves and what was actually true. Cheryl Berry believed for
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: a period that she was asking too much, that her
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: questions were disruptive, that the agent who had found her work,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: encouraged her and eventually shared her life, was acting in
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: her interest. That architecture, the doubt, the gratitude, the learned
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: patience was constructed deliberately over years, using her own trust
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: as the material. Jessica Christiansen, the forensic interviewer who documented
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: the manipulation across six sessions, identified the progression as systematic,
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: not opportunistic, not a single decision made in a weak moment,
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: a sequence sustained over nearly three years that moved Cheryl
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: progressively further from her own judgment. The laptop that held
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: the evidence user account Cheryl B. Files created between August
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: of twenty sixteen and November of twenty eighteen. Zero editing
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: sessions attributed to Pruitt had been in a storage unit
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: registered to a shell name he had kept it. That
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: detail does not have an innocent explanation. Cheryl Berry was
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: twenty four years old when she met Raymond Prewitt at
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: a writing workshop in June of twenty sixteen. She had
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: written a memoir about caring for her mother through a
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: degenerative neurological illness. The book was an act of witness
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: of love. Honestly, she had carried something enormous and found
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: a way to set it down on the page. She
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: was the only one who wrote it. The metadata confirmed it,
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: The confession confirmed it. The cover as of January twenty
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: twenty confirms it. Andrea Soley still does not have that confirmation.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Her manuscript is gone. What she carried nobody got to read.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: There is a question this case leaves standing not as
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: an open investigation, but as a fact about how manipulation
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: works at its most sustained. The target is never just
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: the work, It is the person's belief in their own perception.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Pruet did not only take a manuscript, He spent years
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: making Cheryl uncertain enough that she might never have looked
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: at that book store shelf with full confidence in what
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: she was seeing. She looked, she recognized herself. She bought
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: the book and preserved the evidence before anyone told her
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: what to do with it. That instinct, that refusal to
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: stop wondering, is the thing no system of control fully
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: accounts for. This show is made by Obamedia