Beau Friedlander:
Adam.
Adam Levin:
Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
Travis.
Travis Taylor:
Yes.
Beau Friedlander:
Our episode today is decidedly not on the matrimony side of things, but it seems like there was some wedding-related news this week.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. We’re creeping up on wedding season. It’s late spring, early summer. Lots of folks are going to be tying the knot soon. There’s a app called Zola, which lets people set up online registries, and apparently hackers have just been draining cash from it all over the place.
Beau Friedlander:
Wow.
Adam Levin:
That entirely sucks.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
What do you mean draining cash from it? How?
Travis Taylor:
They’re logging into accounts and just transferring the money. People would be giving money for people’s registries. It’s sort of like GoFundMe for weddings, is my understanding of it.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh. It’s actual cash in there and they can pull it out. Oh, boy. What are we thinking about this, other than the fact that yeah, so what? Another bunch of callous jerks stole some money from a bunch of people who are going to be callous jerks to each other in 10 years. Oh my gosh. I’m so depressed. Save me.
Adam Levin:
You didn’t really say that, did you?
Beau Friedlander:
Save me.
Travis Taylor:
Beau’s getting in touch with his inner [inaudible 00:01:24] today for the-
Beau Friedlander:
I’m telling you, this thing… Listen, listen, we have to find something funny to say right now because we’re about to go into the heart of darkness. Cyber darkness.
Adam Levin:
Well, one thing is for sure. The story that you will be hearing gives new meaning to the concept only if there’s death do we part.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, man.
Travis Taylor:
Wow.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, no, it’s true. I don’t have anything to say about Zola. I could care less. I just want to get straight to this really-
Adam Levin:
Compelling.
Beau Friedlander:
… really… Yeah. That’s a great word. You know what? That’s the grown-up word.
Adam Levin:
Wait, wait.
Beau Friedlander:
Compelling.
Adam Levin:
Think about it. Beau has said I’ve used a grown-up word.
Beau Friedlander:
It’s right up there with going to the potty yourself, Adam. I’m very proud of you.
Adam Levin:
Thank you, boo-boo.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, no, but man, that’s true. This is the first time I think since we’ve been doing this show where I don’t want to do the pitter-pat of what’s going on in the world, the cyber. I just want to get right down to it. You guys feel the same way?
Adam Levin:
Totally. This is a story that you have to hear. You have to hear it to believe it and then understand there are other stories like this out there that we choose to not want to hear, but they’re there. It’s very important for people to listen to this because this could happen to anybody. Welcome to What the Hack, a show about hackers, scammers and the people they go after. I’m Adam, cyber scoundrel buster.
Beau Friedlander:
I’m Beau, cyber Billy Idol on a Jackson Browne album liker.
Travis Taylor:
I’m Travis, cyber scalawag slapper.
Adam Levin:
Today we hear a frightening story of snooping, stalking, surveillance and what happens when an abusive relationship enters the cyber realm.
Beau Friedlander:
It ain’t good, people.
Adam Levin:
Hope, I had the good fortune of crossing paths with you in the Southwest, but I don’t believe you’re from these parts. Can you tell us a little bit about where you are from and how you got here?
Hope:
Well, I’m from the opposite of the Southwest. We’ll call it the Northeast and like everybody else who grows up in the Northeast and all the people flocking to the Southwest, it’s cold and gray and dark and dreary. I was lured by sunshine and light and palm trees and warm weather and all the stuff that the Northeast does not have.
Beau Friedlander:
Now hold on just a cotton bit, no, Hope, you give me no hope. My place of residence is in the Northeast and it is the most beautiful, light-filled, green, happy bird-chirping, bug-buzzing, deer-romping and bear-stomping place in the whole world. How dare you malign my [inaudible 00:04:45].
Adam Levin:
Emphasis is on bear-stomping because one day-
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, I can’t tell you-
Adam Levin:
… Beau is definitely going to be stomped by the bear.
Beau Friedlander:
Hey.
Adam Levin:
Kenneth, the bear.
Beau Friedlander:
You didn’t like Northeast winters. Let’s be fair. Winters do suck.
Hope:
No. No. It’s more than that Beau. It’s really like you get three months and we get the rest, that’s why.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay. All right. I will retract my protest.
Adam Levin:
When I went to law school in Michigan, we used to kid about the fact that Michigan has two seasons, May and winter, but I’m from the East. I moved out West couple of years ago. I love the West.
Beau Friedlander:
You do, don’t you?
Adam Levin:
I do.
Beau Friedlander:
You thought you were going to like it because of the allergy-free zone and then people planted stuff.
Adam Levin:
Yes. The pitch for years was come to the desert. Your sinuses will thank you for it. Unfortunately, I came to the desert after everyone in the world preceded me and planted everything you could fantasize about. Now this is the pollen center of the Western world. My sinuses are all begging me to take them to the North Pole.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, well, I think-
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. I moved to the Northwest for the gloom.
Adam Levin:
Hope, we really appreciate you having a conversation with us today. We know that you’re in the middle of a pretty messy divorce that involves a number of the issues we’re going to be talking about today.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. If you have sensitivities around the topic of stalking or cyber spying, this episode might be upsetting. Now, you’re from the East Coast. You strike me as being pretty tech-savvy when we spoke earlier and I was actually super impressed. Do you come out of some sort of super nerdy computer background back East, or what was your childhood like? Were you building computers from a young age?
Hope:
Absolutely not. I was actually the inverse. I was computer… I won’t say a computer illiterate. I was just a geeky kid. But I didn’t really get introduced to computers until much later in life. In fact, this is a fun fact. I had to take a one-credit class in college and it was called computer literacy and I failed it.
Beau Friedlander:
Wow.
Adam Levin:
You’re not alone.
Hope:
Yes. This is many, many moons ago. Over time, we learn things and usually we learn things, not because we want to, we learn them kicking and screaming because we have no choice. My situation has been part of the reason I’ve had to embrace it because I would say not even very long ago, I really didn’t want to embrace it. Many days of the week, I still don’t want to embrace it but we have to do what we have to do.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay. It sounds like you were thrown into the deep end and had to learn how to swim pretty fast. How did it start though? I mean, what got you from failing a computer literacy test to, I mean, where you’re in a very impressive place now, as far as tech stuff goes? I mean, you know a ton, so how’d that come about?
Hope:
I think like many women do, we abdicate certain aspects of life to our partners and we self-divide the chores and the tasks around having a life with somebody else. I delegated like many do, not so much money because I understand money. I understand numbers well. I delegated the tech. That’s everything from our devices to our infrastructure in the home. I trusted the person I was with.
Hope:
He had demonstrated that he was extremely savvy through his work and throughout his career history. I didn’t think anything of it, but you really find out who you’re with when you leave them, because the way they respond to certain messages or perceived threats can bring out sides that you may not have seen when it was bright or sunnier days.
Hope:
In that instance, I had to learn really, really fast how to protect myself if I wanted to make that break and really extract this person from my life.
Adam Levin:
Your divorce sounds like a nightmare, but things weren’t always that way, right?
Hope:
That’s correct.
Adam Levin:
How did you meet your ex-husband?
Hope:
I met Bob decades ago. Bob and I met in a very unconventional way for today’s times. We met in a bar, like I think the majority of people used to do. But I was actually attracted to Bob initially because he was very unlike the majority of the other potential partners or suitors I saw around me and that was refreshing.
Hope:
I like to have in-depth and thoughtful discussions with people and challenge the status quo. I was looking for a mentally-stimulating partner that would keep me on my toes. Man, I met my match.
Adam Levin:
What you mean then too, is Bob was one of the few sober guys at the bar when you were there.
Hope:
No, I’m not saying that. I definitely am not saying that. In fact, at the time, within the tolerance of the stuff that you as a woman encounter in the context of dating, he was the antithesis of all those things. Like the shyster, the guy that just wants to get in your pants, the guy that… I don’t know. I mean, he just appeared and I say loosely appeared because it seems to have just been a mirage.
Hope:
He seems to have been the appearance of what I was looking for. He grew up in a place similar to me and had values that were similar to me. I thought that that seemed to be an unusual thing. It appeared to be very, very similar to my background, but again, I say it all appeared this way. Then at some point I realized that it was very, very much the opposite of what I thought I had.
Travis Taylor:
In terms of after you both met, was that something where it was like an instant, deep relationship or did it take a little bit longer?
Hope:
No, it was instant. I mean, I can go back and be like, “Oh, yes. It was love at first sight.” I actually don’t know that I believe in that. However, at the time it just seemed like it was so wonderful. It was so happenstance. In reality, I’ve learned since that when you find someone and the relationship deepens that quickly, it’s often a huge red flag.
Hope:
At that point in time, I was so young. There’s no way anyone could have told me that and that I would’ve believed it.
Adam Levin:
You started by saying in this relationship, you sort of abdicated or compartmentalized different responsibilities. He had his things and you had yours.
Hope:
Let’s say we were both adept at different things and our roles were somewhat traditional, but not. He did what he did. He did it well. He had an unusual skill set, which actually played well into what I did for a living at the time and so I didn’t really question it. It was a weird thing and I think because I tend to like things that are unusual and things that are not conventional, it worked.
Hope:
I was a business-minded person, raised by a family of business-minded people. Really, I thought that I was going to be in a corporate job for my whole life and then realized I wasn’t necessarily suited for that. I still have this little dance inside of my own head, this waltz back and forth between, okay, I want to do something corporate, I want to do something entrepreneurial. I think I can probably do both.
Adam Levin:
Was Bob entrepreneurial? What was his skill set?
Hope:
Bob’s skill set was that he worked with very, very creative people who were very, very savvy. They were very, very innovative and they were powering the tools or creating the tools of tomorrow.
Beau Friedlander:
Are we talking about like tractor tools or chainsaws or-
Adam Levin:
Technology-related tools?
Beau Friedlander:
What kind of tools kind of tools?
Hope:
Technology, like within communications context services, et cetera. What you’ll find is that truly innovative people are not really situated in one place. They tend to have a global presence because they might be anywhere on the globe. Really I find that those groups of people tend to be obviously by the nature of what it is, they’re dotted all over the place, but they convene in virtual spaces to share and to innovate together.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, so they know how to manipulate those virtual spaces really well, because they built them.
Hope:
Yes and no. You went the dark hat route of what I was thinking. I was thinking on the white hat route, which would be, we’re all going to put our heads together. Kind of like in the context of the Ukraine war, there are a lot of people on the front lines that are dotted throughout the globe who are trying to assist the underdogs, the Ukrainians, to beat back the Russian.
Hope:
I would say really more in that context. You can be anywhere. If you’ve got someone that you want to collaborate with, you can find a safe space to do it, or if you can’t find it, you create it.
Adam Levin:
It sounds like you felt Bob and his colleagues were using their powers for good, at least at first?
Hope:
Initially, yes. I would say yes. To be honest with you, I think that that’s the case primarily. I’m not really sure at what point he crossed over to the dark side or whether he really on the surface is on the dark side. I know that he is with me and people can do that. People can have… I don’t want to say multiple personalities.
Hope:
But you can have one identity during the day, [inaudible 00:16:02] where you’re doing good things and you’re trying to help the world and then secretly be doing other stuff that people don’t know about that really would be frowned upon.
Beau Friedlander:
I mean, also if you’re getting a divorce, we’re just… I mean, I’ve been through one. We are very, very different people when we’re dealing with a spouse who is about to not be a spouse. It could be the only time in his life where the heart of darkness made an appearance.
Travis Taylor:
When the dark side started to manifest a little bit, how many years in was that?
Hope:
Year one, year two.
Beau Friedlander:
Wow.
Hope:
I just accepted it that I’m like, “Well, maybe I’m the problem.” I tried to change me when in reality someone who’s secure himself would say, “This is not good for me.” They would question it and they would be open with their partner and say, “I’m uncomfortable with X.” That was not something that occurred to me at that point in time.
Hope:
When I really realized it was not safe to stay in the relationship, I’d have those conversations and what I would hear back when I asked those questions was, “Well, the problem really is you.” I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no, that can’t be because I can’t do all the changing. If we’re going to be in a relationship with each other, it has to be a mutually beneficial thing. Right now I’m not being benefited.”
Hope:
When that narrative changed, I was like, “I got to go.” It took me a very long time to get there but by the very end, I was like, “Got to go. See ya, tried to make it work. No hard feelings.”
Adam Levin:
Well, it’s almost like in a lot of relationships it usually is, “Honey. It’s not you. It’s me.” In this case it’s, “It’s not me. It’s you, honey.”
Hope:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
I was once in a relationship with somebody who all of my friends lovingly referred to as the claw, because every time I tried to break up with her, she would just pull me back in. They called her the claw because-
Adam Levin:
This is an Al Pacino moment here.
Beau Friedlander:
I couldn’t do it. Every time I tried she’d be like, “You don’t understand. We’re not breaking up.” I’d be like, “Okay.” Actually, Joe, our friend Joe, gave me the line that actually worked, maybe Hope you can use someday. Doesn’t sound like you can use it with Bob. What he said was, “Darling, this can’t be what you want it to be.”
Beau Friedlander:
I was stunned, but it just stopped everything. This can’t be what you want it to be. Now, I don’t know if that works with a sociopath. Do you think that Bob is a normal person or was he doing things that veered off into what normal people don’t do?
Hope:
In hindsight, there were a lot of red flags that I should have seen sooner, but didn’t, and it’s taken me in the aftermath to start trying to do postmortems and go, “Okay. Where did I go wrong so I don’t ever do this again?”
Travis Taylor:
One thing I’m wondering about, just in terms of the relationship dynamic, before you realized about all these red flags was how much privacy you were allowed within the relationship.
Hope:
Privacy initially it was fine. I don’t think that… Here’s the paradox to this. Initially, I don’t think that privacy was an issue. Privacy became an issue at a certain point in our relationship. Part of that, I think that he had no reason to question me, question my motives, question any of my actions. In fact, it was almost the opposite.
Hope:
I actually wondered whether he actually cared at all. For me, I felt very neglected. At some point when it switched, I remember thinking, “God, this is weird. This is not what I anticipated and I don’t really like this.” I like being left to my own devices. I like my freedom. I like my independence. When it flipped from almost too independent to, I’m under a microscope and I can’t do anything. That was a real eye-opener.
Hope:
Initially, I accepted it and I was like, “Okay. Well, he just really cares.” Then I was like, “There’s something seriously, seriously wrong.” Because I would mention snippets of things to people around me and they would look at me like I had four heads.
Hope:
I started trying to like go, “Okay. What’s wrong with this? Does anybody else experience this? Does anybody else, does their partner ask these questions about them? Do they get questioned?” Largely the answer was no.
Adam Levin:
What was it? It sounds like there was a little bit of paranoia mixed in all of this, or maybe a lot of paranoia mixed into all of this. Was there something that happened that an independent person would say, “I don’t like it when someone’s paranoid, but I understand why they might have been triggered into paranoia.” Was there a trigger event of some kind on either side of the relationship?
Hope:
You’re asking was there something that would cause him to have a reasonable expectation of having paranoia? Did somebody do something to cause that? The answer would be yes, yes, yes. But it was not a one-sided thing. It was a two-sided thing and absolutely trust was destroyed.
Hope:
I think that the paranoia initially was very reasonable. However, at some point the paranoia was not reciprocated. At some point, because of the nature of what happened and because of the genuine desire to set things right… I mean, I’m an open book.
Hope:
I have nothing to hide. Ultimately, when the paranoia never subsided and in fact escalated and I didn’t reciprocate it and felt no need to, I started going, “There’s something very, very wrong, and this has nothing to do with me.”
Adam Levin:
No, the point of my question is sometimes a partner in a relationship does something and then projects what they did on the other partner. Therefore-
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, true. Totally true.
Hope:
It’s both. It’s both.
Adam Levin:
Okay.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, it sounds like if I could just do the subtitles for this, like speaking between the lines that we’re doing, it sounds like you guys cheated on each other.
Hope:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you guys, you really hit on both sides of it because we both breached fidelity on both sides of the coin. But I do believe that the projection was absolutely true.
Beau Friedlander:
You got into your inner relationship, the relationship hits a bump in the road, a mutual bump in the road, and you’re still in a relationship. It sounds to me like Bob has begun to spy on Hope.
Hope:
Yes.
Beau Friedlander:
Is that fair?
Hope:
Yes.
Beau Friedlander:
Is that fair? I mean, is he starting to… Now, is that possible because he has set up your family’s digital life?
Hope:
Yeah. I mean, yep. Now, because Bob feels entitled to control the family’s digital life and the family’s digital profile and all the records, Bob is now using all of his skills to make sure he knows everything at all times. If he can’t find the answer to what he’s looking for frequently will fill in the blanks himself.
Beau Friedlander:
He’ll make it up. He’ll make it up.
Hope:
Correct.
Adam Levin:
Are there little people involved here too?
Hope:
There are. There are several little people and so I’m-
Adam Levin:
Okay. We won’t identify the number in order to protect the innocent, but we have more than one little people.
Travis Taylor:
I’m wondering how you became aware of some of the means that Bob was using to keep tabs on you.
Beau Friedlander:
How did you know he was spying on you? Was it just that he would say, “I saw you at the diner with Daryl Hall and how dare you date an aging rocker?”
Hope:
Well, let’s put it this way, when he uncovered the infidelity, the method in which he did it was very invasive. He sought to use old devices for communication and just in general and essentially use system logs to-
Adam Levin:
Spyware?
Hope:
No, not even like, and that’s just it. I think that people believe that with digital infringement, that you have to use some special tools and you really don’t have to. You have to have an understanding of how this stuff works.
Hope:
If you understand the basis of how it sets up and when you send messages, how the files are stored, where they’re kept, how to retrieve them, and you have a minimal understanding of how to extract them, export them, move them around, you can really do a lot.
Beau Friedlander:
What’s going on with the devices in your house? Do you get a new phone for yourself all the time or are phones getting recycled and shuffled around? Is your phone, his phone? Kids using phones that belong to other people? Just wondering like what that hygiene looks like in your household.
Hope:
It was all of the above.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay. You could be using a phone that used to belong to him?
Hope:
Not anymore. At the time when I chose to leave the relationship, that was exactly the case.
Beau Friedlander:
That was the case when he challenged you about Daryl Hall at the diner?
Hope:
In that case, I actually do not think it was the case, but post that, yes. A hundred percent.
Beau Friedlander:
What was it the case with Daryl Hall? Because I’m obsessed with Daryl Hall.
Hope:
Okay. Daryl Hall-
Adam Levin:
Are you sure it wasn’t John Oates?
Adam Levin:
(singing)
Hope:
There was only one John Hall. There were no other Oates or any other band members, it was a-
Adam Levin:
Oh, no Keith Richard. No.
Beau Friedlander:
Man.
Hope:
No. No, no, no, no. I’m really boring, but he felt threatened and at that point all the autonomy that I had was erased.
Travis Taylor:
What changed after the affairs? Was there any effort made to try to rebuild the relationship or was this the beginning of the end?
Hope:
I spent a significant chunk of time trying to reestablish how devoted and loving and committed I was to him, to the family, to the future, to the point where I quit work. I quit my career for a little while, totally focused on him and rebuilding and at some point realized, “Oh my God, this is not working. I feel like I’m almost backwards. I’ve set myself backwards about a decade.”
Hope:
It was very, very confusing and I’m going, “I understand, he said this but it seems like he means that.” It took me a while to realize, oh, he’s really messing with me. At some point, when you keep trying to do right by somebody and no matter what it is, it’s wrong.
Hope:
You start going… That’s where I’m telling you, I got to the point of, this really isn’t about me. This is really all about you. I can go to my grave trying to make you happy and you won’t be, and you’ll blame it on me, but I don’t really have anything to do with this. That’s really your deal. You have to figure that out.
Beau Friedlander:
Gotcha. Now, how many years after meeting Bob at the bar, are we at this point?
Hope:
I’m going to stay sadly, probably a good, like four-fifths of the way into the relationship.
Travis Taylor:
It really sounds like this relationship wasn’t healthy for a long time and we don’t know how long Bob might have been snooping or spying on you or if he did any of this before the affairs. But you did say he was able to use information and data off of all devices, not by using malware or even hacking your phone. What stuff was he going through? Data, locations, messages? How was he getting the information?
Hope:
Computers, phones, just restoring old devices that were no longer in use to try and extract message logs, email logs, things like that. Trying to then go through… And as the family administrator, just going through all of my accounts because he had them. He was fully able to dive in and go where he wasn’t.
Hope:
For the most part, I deleted things, but as we all know, just deleting something from a phone, doesn’t erase it. He was savvy enough to go through and find the logs, the system logs where they still lived to extract them because they’ve never been truly wiped from the drives.
Travis Taylor:
Right. If someone has access to the physical device itself, it’s really hard to just make sure that deleted data is actually deleted.
Hope:
Deleted. Right. That’s exactly what it was. That’s what I mean by you can use some pretty low-tech stuff to gain a lot of information about somebody. Because in the context of privacy, there are a lot of laws, they’re really robust and where I live to protect me, but the knowledge of them isn’t so good. It’s high-level stuff.
Hope:
Because people aren’t familiar with it, they go, “Well, what’s the harm in that?” In the context of day-to-day life if you’re in a relationship, you share passwords, you share all kinds of stuff. You might have a thumbprint or a face embedded in your phone to open it because you trust that person.
Hope:
You give up a fair amount of autonomy and in relationships where the trust is intact, that’s fine. When it’s not, it becomes very dangerous.
Travis Taylor:
It’s also very hard to prove I would imagine if he’s accessing these things without your consent.
Hope:
Yes and no. It was, but it wasn’t because over time, this is where I had to learn to protect myself. I learned to go back and start documenting things. This is just the type of person that I am. I mean, I have been in businesses where they’re very cutthroat and when stuff happens, you’ve got to cover your butt. I learned to document via email or whatever stuff, text messages.
Hope:
At some point, realized I need to start doing that here, but then have to do it on the DL because if I’m now saving things, whether it be screenshots, emails or whatever, and I’ve got this trove of stuff that he can actually access… I remember creating hidden folders on my desktop that were inaccessible under covert other names to try and keep my stuff secure because I had no other security.
Hope:
I had no other privacy, but in doing so, kept a pretty good record. The problem was even when I went to go show people stuff, only the really, really savvy people got it. Everybody else didn’t care. For the most part, when you’re dealing with breaches of digital privacy, unless you are like a Fortune 100 company, and even the Fortune 100 companies, they don’t really care. Like IEEE, they don’t give two shits about me or some other guy.
Hope:
I dated a guy after the demise of this relationship who was actually the CTO of a Fortune 100 company. He named an instance where his company was breached and I contacted these groups or these organizations and they didn’t care. In the context of being a single user that is being affected this way, the law enforcement, they don’t know what we’re talking about. They’re low, low, low, low, low in tech.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, the police don’t even often understand if you’ve had your identity stolen. They don’t know what you’re talking about.
Adam Levin:
Oftentimes they don’t care.
Hope:
Right. It’s not a big deal to them, unless you’re bleeding or dead.
Beau Friedlander:
They don’t care, Adam, because it is a real pain in the butt to fill out the reports on those things. Because they’re talking not only about a crime that they don’t really believe happened, but they don’t understand how it happened or what it is.
Adam Levin:
Correct. A lot of them just don’t have the resources to do it.
Beau Friedlander:
Then if you come in as a female as the aggrieved party, there’s also a decent chance that you’re going to run into the not-so-quiet chauvinism of a very testosterone-ridden world of law enforcement where they’re like, “Yeah, lady, whatever.”
Adam Levin:
This invasive relationship that you found yourself in-
Beau Friedlander:
The stalking.
Adam Levin:
The stalking, I mean, it’s what it sounds like, did it end?
Hope:
No. In fact, going back to the claw woman that you mentioned, I had a similar experience.
Beau Friedlander:
The claw.
Hope:
Yeah. The claw. I mean, I said, “I’m done.” And he didn’t accept it. I would find… And this is a pretty typical thing for someone who’s in a relationship, but I hate to use this word, but a narcissist in that they’re like, “I don’t accept that you’re leaving me. If anybody’s doing the leaving, I’m doing the leaving.” I would get that a lot.
Hope:
I just was like, “No, I’m done.” He didn’t accept it. He would hoover me back in and like the love and the kisses and the gifts and the whatever. I was like, “All right. We’ve got a family and we’ve got all these things together and it’s going to be really complicated.” As everyone says, it’s cheaper to keep her, right? I’m like, “I’ll just figure it out.”
Hope:
Then I did that until I couldn’t. I was just like, “I’m done, I’m not willing to accept this anymore. I’m not being a good role model for the little people. It’s just time. I don’t really care what you think.” That was when all hell broke loose. I was at home alone one day and Bob sent me a text message and indicated that it was my mistake to leave him and that he felt sorry for me.
Hope:
Basically like, “I don’t need you. This is your problem. Whatever.” I basically responded saying “Okay.” A little snippet of, “This is what occurred between us. This is just so wonderful. This is stupid me for wanting to leave this behind.” He unleashed on me and just started just texting obscenities to me.
Hope:
Being home alone we just had something like a security event at our house, and I was a little bit on edge to begin with. After basically cursing me out, shut down all of our lights, shut off the automation in our house. Including blocking my devices from our Wi-Fi network and was kind enough to leave me the corded phone which is still digital.
Hope:
It was a selection of what was going to be granted to me. I called the police because it was really jarring. I’m saying, “Don’t touch anything.” I’m home alone. I will be like, “I’m scared. This is really creepy.” But this cop shows up to understand what’s going on. I’m like, “Yeah. He shut the lights and I don’t really like it. I’m concerned.”
Hope:
They’re required to say, “Are there children?” He sees pictures of the little people on the walls and he’s going, “They shouldn’t see this.” It was in that instance… This was the third person telling me, “Maybe it’s time to get a protective order. Maybe it’s time to put some physical space between the two of you.” That I finally said, “You know what? It’s time.”
Hope:
Because in context of having children in the home, that they do not need to see this. They do not need to take part in this. They do not need to be affected directly by this. I just thought “It’s time. It’s really time.”
Hope:
For doing that, for making that choice, all hell broke loose. I go to download an app and it’s sending the approval to his phone, the emails were being sent to him, not me. The name on notifications I was receiving, changed from mine to his. There’s a camera in my home in a place that I would have a reasonable expectation of privacy and images of me that I’ve got-
Adam Levin:
We’ll continue the rest of Hope’s saga next week.
Beau Friedlander:
Adam?
Adam Levin:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
I was just reading… Guinevere and I are heading towards our, believe it or not, fourth anniversary of blissful life together. I being a person who needs a lot of support from the world at large, I googled, how do you know your relationship is good at the four-year mark? The internet told me a whole bunch of stuff.
Beau Friedlander:
You will be shocked when you hear the first item on this listicle about how do you know you’re in good relationship? I’m going to let both of you guess first. Go ahead.
Travis Taylor:
She doesn’t poison your food.
Beau Friedlander:
You guys are twisted. Adam?
Adam Levin:
She gives you the password to her account?
Beau Friedlander:
Bingo. You win, Adam. That’s right. I was stunned because I don’t do that. I feel like it goes against everything we talk about on this show.
Adam Levin:
It can be very dangerous, especially if the relationship that you thought was going well, suddenly stops going well. Now you have somebody who not only knows everything about you, but knows also how they can get into anything else they don’t know about you.
Beau Friedlander:
Right. Because people reuse passwords and stuff. Now, in my first marriage, my only marriage, I knew my wife’s passwords. She knew mine probably because I would call and be like, “Hey, can you check something out for me?” Travis knew my passwords for ages. Everyone knew my passwords because it was hahahaha.
Beau Friedlander:
The fact is that there’s a certain point where history the tides have changed and you can’t do that stuff anymore. I think a lot of folks still do, whether it’s joint bank accounts, a lot of couples share a Facebook account. I don’t know. Do we just have to not do that anymore? Is that what you think?
Adam Levin:
Well, we’re living in a sharing economy, right? The gig economy.
Beau Friedlander:
We’re living in a surveillance economy. Yeah.
Adam Levin:
Therefore we’re also living, right, in a surveillance economy as well. Sometimes marriage can be a surveillance state depending upon the two parties involved.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. But we’re not talking about you and Heather in the way that you stalk her Instagram account-
Adam Levin:
No.
Beau Friedlander:
… to find out what she’s up to.
Adam Levin:
In the alternative, Heather pretty much manages anything to do with our lives, because she’s really good at that and I’m not. Half the time I have to ask her if she can give me a clue as to whatever username or password we’re using for certain accounts.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, really? Yeah.
Adam Levin:
This is part of when people get married, oftentimes they will delegate. They will share. They will compartmentalize like, you do this, I do this. It’s very important that both people know as much as they possibly can about what’s going on, but at the same point, have some level of privacy in their lives.
Beau Friedlander:
It’s healthy.
Adam Levin:
It’s very healthy.
Beau Friedlander:
Travis, what do you think about this? Do you and Clear have this kind of sharing?
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. We have one another’s passwords. I think one of the main things that we have the general agreement of, if you ever need to, you can get into this account and please don’t.
Beau Friedlander:
Got you. You have her email password and her social media passwords?
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. She doesn’t go a lot on social media, but yeah. I have her email password and she has mine. It’s something where a couple of times it’s come in handy that if she’s not in the house, I need to look up like the reservation number to something, it can be useful in that way.
Travis Taylor:
One of the things about it is if I ever have need to actually check anything in her email, I will say immediately afterwards, “By the way, I was in your email earlier today.” It’s one thing that I actually have to wonder about because my wife and I have been together for over 20 years at this point.
Travis Taylor:
That predated social media, that predated smartphones and all that other sort of stuff, where it used to really just be, yeah, you’d have one password for one email account. That was it. I don’t know if we were starting over today, if we’d have the same level of openness.
Beau Friedlander:
I just think it’s not about being open or willing to share everything or having nothing to hide because I’m not worried about anything in that regard with Guinevere. I have nothing to hide, but I do have a lot of things to protect and I see no reason to ever allow there to be any vulnerability, however, insignificant in that armor.
Adam Levin:
In Hope’s case, perhaps she’d have been a little safer if she had her own cell plan instead of a family plan.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. For starters.
Adam Levin:
Should we advocate that partners not share a phone plan?
Beau Friedlander:
That’s rough because you get a better deal if you do share it.
Adam Levin:
Well, that’s it. It’s a money saver.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah.
Travis Taylor:
Well, it’s something too. I mean, in the next episode, we’re going to get into a little bit more about Bob’s technical capabilities and the like, but I think, from what it sounds like, or at least from the impression I’ve gotten, even if Hope was not sharing passwords, even if they were on completely separate plans, I still think he seemed both determined and tech-savvy enough to get in.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. A hundred percent. If your relationship is going sideways, you also need to have separate devices and plans. Really, at the point where you know things are heading in the wrong direction is when you sever, and you have to, just for your own safety. Because while a life partner is the most trustworthy person in your life, a life partner spurned is the opposite.
Adam Levin:
Well, that’s what makes this whole issue so complicated, is when there’s trust, it’s appropriate and in fact, a really good thing to share. But when trust is lost, then it gets tricky, very, very tricky. You have a moral decision to make.
Beau Friedlander:
Yep.
Adam Levin:
Thanks so much for listening this week. We really appreciate it. Check back in next week for chapter two in the Hope-Bob saga.
Beau Friedlander:
What the Hack with Adam Levin is a production of Loud Tree Media.
Adam Levin:
It’s produced by Andrew Steven, the man with two first names.
Travis Taylor:
You can find us online at loudtreemedia.com and on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @Adam_K_Levin.
