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She Stole a Company - The Card That Unraveled Eleven Years · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the morning of November fourth, two thousand nineteen, a
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: utility lineman named Charles Harrison was dispatched to Delwood Business
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Parkway in Crestwood Falls, Ohio, at seven fifty two in
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: the morning. His job was routine access a utility panel
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: inside a commercial building, log a, reading and leave. He
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: opened the panel. Tucked behind it was a laminated business card.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: He almost set it aside, then he read what was
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: written on it in red marker, pressed so hard the
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: laminate had corrugated beneath the pen. She never thought of
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: any of this, not one word ask her. The card
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: listed two names. One of them was Monica Burns, the
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: other was Nicole Ford. That card had been there for
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: two years, and the story of how it got there
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: begins eleven years earlier, with a woman sitting alone in
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: a Columbus conference room writing in a sp iral notebook.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Monica Burns was born around nineteen seventy five, which made
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: her about forty four years old in the autumn of
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen. People who knew her in those years
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: described someone who thought in systems. She had spent years
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: in procurement before striking out on her own, and that
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: background showed in how she built things methodically from the
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: foundation up, accounting for every variable she could name. In
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: two thousand and three, she started walking a route through
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Ashland Park each morning. The route ended at a bench
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: near the corner of Revere and Millwood. She called it
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: the Dorothy Bench, a small private ritual that became as
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: fixed in her schedule as anything on a calendar. By
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: the time anyone else knew about that bench, she had
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: been touching it every morning for.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: More than a decade.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: That is the kind of person Monica was. Consistent, deliberate,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: quietly anchored to the things she had built. In two
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: thousand and eight, she tended a business incubator event in
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Columbus with a methodology she had been developing in a
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: spiral notebook, a procurement of the consulting framework she believed
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: was commercially ready. The notebook was hers alone, The ideas
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: were hers alone. She had been drafting the corps operating
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: agreement two months before she met anyone new at that event.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Nicole Ford was also in that room. Nicole was born
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: around nineteen sixty seven, which made her about forty one
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: in two thousand eight.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Her background was marketing.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: She was articulate and observant, and she knew how to
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: make a person feel understood. When she met Monica, she
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: called Monica's methodology twice, by multiple accounts, the most commercially
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: coherent thing she had seen in two years. Within approximately
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: three months of that Columbus meeting, Monica and Nicole had
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: formed a partnership. Monica held fifty one percent ownership, Nicole
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: held for forty nine. The split reflected who had originated
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: the work. Monica understood it as such. The firm was
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: called Stellar Path Consulting Group, and its address would eventually
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: be on Dellwood Business Parkway in Crestwood Falls, Ohio. By
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: twenty twelve, Stellar Path at eleven employees. Monica's sister, Brenda
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Hollis lived in Dayton. Monica had been divorced from Jeff
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Burns by the time Stellar Path reached that size. The
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: firm was, in the clearest sense, the thing Monica had
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: built from nothing, from years of procurement work, from months
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: of notebook drafts, from the kind of careful thinking that
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: produces results slowly and keeps producing them. She did not
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: know in those years that she was already being measured.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: In twenty fifteen Nicole Ford started joining Monica on her
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: Tuesday walks. That detail sounds small, It is not small.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Monica had walked the Ashland Park route for years. The
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Dorothy Bench at Revere and Millwood was a fixed point.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: She had touched it every morning since two thousand and three.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: It was private in the way that rituals are private,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: not because it was hidden, but because it was hers.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: When Nicole began appearing on Tuesdays, Monica found it touching.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: That was the word she would use later, touching. What
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: was actually happening was something else Entirely. The walks gave
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Nikole a recurring, unstructured window. No agenda, no colleagues, no
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: paper trail. They were, for Monica a place of trust.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: For Nikole, they appear to have been a place of study,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: and somewhere in those Tuesday mornings, the reframing began. By
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, Stellar Path had been operating for seven years.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Monica was the founding intelligence behind the firm. She had
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: the procure background, the methodology, the original note book, the
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: first operating agreement, but at some point that year the
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: exact date is not publicly confirmed, the firm's state registration
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: was quietly altered. Monica's title changed from co founder and
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: managing director to senior analyst. She did not authorize that change.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: She was not aware of it. The document carrying that
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: change bore something that resembled her signature. It had been notarized.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: The notarized was dated a Thursday in March. On that
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Thursday in March, Monica Burns was in Cincinnati. Hotel receipts
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: confirmed it. Toll records confirmed it, her calendar confirmed it.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: She was not in Crestwood Falls. She was not near
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: a notary. She could not definitively say whether the signature
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: was hers, but she could prove with documentation that she
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: had not been present. That is the first image to
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: hold a notarized document changing everything, dated to a day.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Its subject was one hundred miles away. The second image
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: takes longer to see. Beginning around twenty fifteen and continuing
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: across the years that followed, Monica's effective ownership in Stellar.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Path was being compressed.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Stephen Quirk, a forensic accountant brought in after discovery, spent
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: three weeks reconstructing the firm's financial history. What he found
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: was not a single theft. It was a series of
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: reinvestment agreements, each one individually plausible, each one signed without
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: independent legal counsel. Each one presented to Monica during periods
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: of high activity, when attention was stretched thin. The cumulative result,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Monica's ownership had been reduced from fifty one percent to
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: approximately nineteen percent six years incremental steps, nothing dramatic enough
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: to trigger alarm at the signing. But here is the
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: thing about the re investment agreements. They did not arrive randomly.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: They arrived during the same period Nicole was deepening her
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: presence in Monica's daily life. The Tuesday walks, small suggestions
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: about which client meetings Monica might skip, quiet reinforcement that
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Monica's strength was the ideas, not the operations. Monica began
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: stepping back from client facing work. She would describe it
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: later as a natural evolution, the kind of role adjustment
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: that happens as a firm matures. Cork's reconstruction suggests it
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: was not natural at all. Monica's sister, Brenda, visited regularly
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: enough to notice things at the edges.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: One Thanksgiving of the year is not publicly confirmed.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Brenda asked Monica a simple question, did it still feel
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: like Monica's company? Monica's answer was immediate and honest. She
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: said she honestly wasn't sure she'd have known what to
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: do without Nicole. That answer is not the answer of
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: someone who has been kept from information. That is the
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: answer of some one who no longer remembers what knowing
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: without Nicole felt like. In two thousand seventeen, the building
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: at Delwood Business Parkway underwent a retrofit utility. Access panels
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: were opened and closed throughout the structure. No witnesses to
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: what went inside one of them. But whoever placed the
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: laminated business card in that panel knew the building well
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: enough to know where to place something that might not
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: be found for years. The card sat there for two years.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: On the fourth day of Brenda Hollis's stay in Crestwood Falls,
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: she made a phone call to Rachel Hayes. Hayes was
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: a licensed clinical social worker based in Columbus, specializing in
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: coercive control. She first met Monica Burns on November ninth,
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, five days after Charles Harrison found the card.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Monica had already located the spiral notebook. By then, she
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: had found it in a plastic bin in her garage
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: under a tarp she hadn't lifted in years. She thought
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: the notebook had been discarded long ago. Inside it was
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: her handwriting her procurement methodology, her core framework, developed and
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: dated two months before she met Nicole Ford at the
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Columbus Incubator. Tucked with it was the first draft of
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: the operating agreement, also in Monica's hand, also predating Nicole,
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: and there were incubator e mails Monica describing her methodology
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: to contacts, also pre dating Niicole. The notebook was not
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: theoretical back up. It was a time stamp. Nikoll had
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: quoted that methodology verbatim in a regional business profile. Years later,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: she had presented it as her own contribution to the firm.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: The phrase she used in that profile matched Monica's notebook
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: language precisely. Monica sat with all of this, the note book,
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: the emails, the agreement, the card from the panel, and
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: tried to construct a sequence she had spent over a
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: decade inside, something she now needed to look at from
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: the outside. That is what Hayes helped her do. Hayes
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: described the business card in clinical terms, not emotional ones.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: She called it, according to records, an externalized internal monologue.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Nichole had not left it as a threat. She had
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: left it as a record evidence of her own awareness
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: of what she had taken. The card said she never
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: thought of any of this, not one word asked her.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Hayes assessed that the person who wrote those words needed
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: some one to know.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: Not Monica, not a court, just some one.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: That assessment would later matter enormously, because in October twenty nineteen,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: before the card was even found, two separate signals had
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: already arrived. Ted Voss, Stellar Path's accountant flagged a discrepancy.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: He had reviewed a state filing and could not reconcile
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Monica's listed title with the role she actually held. He
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: brought it to Monica directly. That same month, a former
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: client named Dave Mercer sent Monica an email after encountering
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: a regional business directory that listed Nicole Ford as the
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: sole founder of Stellar Path, not co founder founder. Monica
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: had not authorized that listing. When she looked for documentation
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: that might explain it, she found the altered state registration.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: Instead.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Everything hit at once, the Voss flag, the Mercer email,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: the card, the notebook. Eleven years of Tuesday mornings. This
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: was the week Monica Burns realized that what she had
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: understood as a partnership had been something else. From the
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: beginning picture the building at Dellwood Business Parkway in twenty seventeen.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Workers are moving through it during the retrofit, accessing utility.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: Panels throughout the structure. Nicole Ford knows this building.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: She has been inside it for nine years. She takes
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: a laminated card, the firm's own business card, both names,
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: co founders, a phone number that has been inactive since
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: twenty twelve, and she presses a red marker into it
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: hard enough to corrugate the laminate. She writes eleven words.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: She places the card inside a panel that will be
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: sealed and forgotten. She does this alone, no witness. One
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: possible reading of that act is practical. She was hiding
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: something she no longer needed, something that proved an earlier
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: version of the story. The card predated the title change.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: It showed both names. If found later by the wrong person,
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: it might complicate a narrative she was building. But that
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: version collapses the moment you look at what she wrote.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: A person hiding evidence does not annotate A person hiding
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: evidence does not press a marker hard enough to leave
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: physical impression in laminate, a person hiding evidence does not
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: write ask her. That word ask is directed at someone.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: It is not destruction, It is placement. Hayes's clinical assessment
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: offers the second scenario, and it is the one that
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: recontextualizes everything that.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Came before it.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: Nicole Ford, by twenty seventeen, had spent years watching Monica
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Burns not see what was happening. Nicole had been inside
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Monica's methodology, Monica's mornings, Monica's firm, Monica's ownership documents. She
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: knew the gap between what Monica believed and what was
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: actually true, and according to Hayes's reading, she left a
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: record of that knowledge, not for Monica but for herself,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: an externalized internal monologue. That is a different kind of
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: mind than a paniced fraudster. That is, someone who understood
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: precisely what they had done and needed the understanding to
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: exist somewhere outside their own head. The prosecution used the
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: card in opening It was efficient. Eleven words on laminate,
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: pressed by someone who was already gone from the room
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: before anyone arrived, directed at no one in particular about
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: a woman who had not yet discovered any of it.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: The prior pattern is where the full picture assembles. In
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: two thousand seven, a woman named Beth Corley was defrauded
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: in Zanesville by a strikingly similar method incremental repositioning, document manipulation,
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: a gradual appropriation of something she had originated. Corley was
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: held at Crestwood Falls Detention Center on an unrelated matter.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: In late twenty nineteen, she overheard Nicole Ford in holding
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: rehearsing a narrative. Corley recognized what she was hearing, she
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: reported it. Corley was not a material witness to the
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: Stellar Path case.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: Her role was specific.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: She testified to the Zanesville scheme, establishing that what Monica
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: experienced was not a first act. Nicolford rejected too plea
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: offers before trial. That decision to reject twice an offer
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: that would have reduced exposure is the final image. It
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: is consistent with someone who had spent years building a
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: version of events she believed was defensible, some one who
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: had practiced the narrative in a holding cell, someone who
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: perhaps still believed the version she had constructed was the
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: real one.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: It was not.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Spring twenty twenty seven of nine counts, four years minimum security,
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars in restitution. Monica Burns was formally
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: restored as sole founder of Stellar Path.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: Consulting in February twenty twenty.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: The Spiral notebook was admitted into evidence and returned to
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: her after trial. The forensic reconstruction took three weeks. Stephencourk
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: worked backward through six years of Stellar Path's financial records,
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: and what he found was not a single theft. It
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: was a gradient. Monica Burns had entered two thousand eight
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: olding fifty one percent ownership. By two thousand nineteen, that
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: figure had eroded to approximately nineteen percent, not through any
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: single transaction, but through a sequence of reinvestment agreements, each
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: presented during high activity periods, each requiring a signature Monica
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: had given without independent council present No single document looked
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: catastrophic on its own. Together, they had nearly erased her.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: That is the architecture of what Rachel Hayes would later
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: describe as incremental displacement. The goal is never one large move.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: The goal is to make the target's reality shift slowly
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: enough that she provides the labor of normalizing each step herself.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Monica had done that. She had done it faithfully for
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: years without knowing it was being done to her. The
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: notarized state filing was the single hardest piece of evidence.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: Monica's title had been changed from co founder and managing
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: director to senior analyst on a document bearing a signature
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: close enough to her own that she could not definitively
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: confirm or deny it. The notarization was dated a Thursday
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: in March. Monica's calendar, her hotel receipts, and her toll
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: records placed her in Cincinnati for the entirety of that day.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: She had not signed it. She could not have.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: That gap between the signature on the document and the
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: day Monica spent two hours away is what collapsed the defense.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Nicole Ford rejected two plea offers before trial. The first
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: offer would have substantially reduced her exposure. The second was
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: more generous. Still, she turned down both. Her attorneys offered
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: no public explanation. What the record shows is a defendant
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: who had spent years constructing and rehearsing of events, who
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: had practiced that version aloud in a holding cell while
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: Beth Corley listened from the adjacent block, and who apparently
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: still believed facing trial that the version would hold. It
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: did not Spring twenty twenty, a jury returned guilty verdicts
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: on seven of nine counts, fraud, forgery of a notarized document,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: financial exploitation, four years minimum security, facility three hundred thousand
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: dollars in restitution ed. Monica Burns was formally restored as
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: sole founder of Stellar Path Consulting.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Group in February twenty.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: Twenty, one month before the verdict. The two thousand eight
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: Spiral notebook admitted into evidence was returned to her after trial.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: She has it now. It predates Nicole Ford's involvement by
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: two months. It contains, in Monica's handwriting the methodology that
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: Nicole would later claim as her own in regional profiles
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: and client presentations, every word of it written before Nicole
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Ford ever walked into them. At Columbus Incubator event, attorney
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Claudia Ewen reviewed and restructured the firms operating agreement. After restoration,
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Monica rebuilt the ownership structure, with independent council present at
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: every step. She still walks the Ashland Park route daily,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: still stops at the Dorothy bench at the corner of
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Vere and Millwood, the one she has touched every morning
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: since two thousand three. The ritual predates stellar path, it
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: predates Nicole. It is hers alone. There is something specific
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: about this case that resists easy framing. It was not violent.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: There was no single dramatic moment of rupture. No day
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Monica Burns woke up and realized everything had changed. That
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: is precisely what makes it so difficult to process. The
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: mechanism nicoll Ford used was patience. She did not take
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: anything quickly. She moved in increments small enough that Monica's
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: own judgment absorbed each one without alarm. The Tuesday walks,
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: the language that shifted, the duties that quietly transferred, the
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: documents signed during busy weeks. A woman's ownership of her
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: own creation reduced from fifty one percent to nineteen percent
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: across six years, and the target never recognized it as
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: a coordinated campaign, because no single day looked like the
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: day it happened. Rachel Hayes, the licensed clinical social worker
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: who first met Monica on November ninth, two thousand nineteen,
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: has a clinical term for what Nicole constructed, coercive control
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: applied to a professional context. The tools are the same
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: ones documented in domestic abuse literature. Isolation from external validation,
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: gradual reframing of the target's competence, incremental transfer of decision
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: making authority. The setting was a business the dynamic was
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: not different. The business card is the detail that stays laminated,
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: pressed into a utility panel during a two thoy seventeen
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: building retrofit, found two years later by alignment dispatched at
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: seven fifty two in the morning, eleven words in red marker,
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: hard enough to ridge the laminade. She never thought of
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: any of this, not one word ask her. Hayes described
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: it as an externalized, internalized internal monologue, a thought Nicole
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: had been carried, possibly for years, that she needed to
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: exist somewhere outside her own head. The card was not
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: a threat. It was a record, a record of what
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Nicole believed, or needed to believe about the woman she
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: had been systematically dismantling. Monica Burns thought of all of it.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: The note book proves it. The incubator emails prove it.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: The first draft operating agreement, dated two months before Nicole
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: entered the picture, proves it. She thought of it first,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: she built it. She kept the document in a plastic
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: bin under a top in her garage, and it survived.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: That is the detail worth sitting with not the conviction,
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: not the restitution figure, not the four year sentence, though
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: all of those matter. The detail worth sitting with is
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: that Monica Burns in two thousand and eight, wrote down
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: what she was building, put it in a note book,
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: and kept it. She did not know she would need it,
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: she kept it anyway. The Dorothy Bench is still there
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: at the corner of Revere and Millwood. Monica still walks
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: to it every morning. The route is hers, it always was.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obomedia