She recently graduated from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles with a BA in journalism and a minor in film studies. Either it happened to you, Julie, or it happened to somebody close to you. I wanted this for a long timeto tell the story in a way that would affect the most change and the most understanding so that people could avoid this happening in their own life or help any traumatized young person get to a healthy, happy place. Thats not in the documentary, Broberg said. The altered state of having been abused and how that affects your psyche and your life and your choices and your thinking and your self-worthIm worthless. For more information, please see our I didn't learn to swim because she was afraid I would drown. The 1967 film Guess Whos Coming to Dinner starred Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton as a ne, As the open-hearted matriarch Hattie Mae in Tyler Perrys 2022 film A Jazzmans Blues, Amirah Vann demonstrates a great tenderness and fierce love to b, This story includes spoilers for Saint Omer. Part of the problem is that Abducted in Plain Sight, a 90-minute movie in a field populated mostly with six- or eight-hour series, is focused entirely on telling a story rather than illuminating it. Bob and Mary Ann, Agent Welsh states, were told to cut off communication with the Berchtolds. The following article contains discussions of sexual violence and suicide. You can never blame them or their family members who didnt know. I remember the first time I really understood what love was or at least what a nine-year-old could understand as romantic love. It didn't take long before Bob had his own key and could come and go as he pleased. I can't imagine how many girls there were before Jan, between Jan and I, and how many came after me. Afterward, Berchtold maintained his grasp on their lives by ensnaring both of the Brobergs in a sexual relationship before kidnapping their daughter for a second time two years later. The series stars McKenna Grace as Jan, along with Jake Lacy as Robert "B" Berchtold, . Peacock. In 'A Friend of the Family,' the Berchtold's had three boys plus a girl Jasper, Joel, Jacob, and Jenny but in real life, they had four boys as well as a girl: Jerry, James, Joseph, Jeff, and Jill. Despite the outcome of her marriage to Robert, Gail found love again. "Berchtold took her away in a motor home on the afternoon of Oct. 17, 1974," ABC News reported . He kidnapped her. 24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. She endured some of the worst imaginable psychological manipulation during her childhood. She and her family went on to be manipulated by him for years, even after she was returned home from the kidnapping. In January 1974, Robert Berchtold was rebuked by the LDS . The recording was a message from two aliens named Zeta and Zethra, telling Jan that she was half alien and needed to complete a mission to have a baby with Berchtold before her 16th birthday. So we went out to eat, he took me to a movie,we got some ice cream, then we went back to his empty apartment. I was so involved and so consulted and so cared for. Shes your daughter. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. It was released on October 2022 on Peacock and had its finale on November 10, where Jan Broberg appeared as Dr. Carr, the real therapist the Berborg worked with. Her saga was admittedly complicated: When she was 12 and living in Idaho in the 1970s, a close family friend and neighbor who was decades older, Bob Berchtold, drove off with her one day, having told Brobergs parents he was taking the child horseback riding. He anesthetized her with sleeping pills and raped the girl up to maybe 200 times. The children in the clan considered Berchtold a second father, so much so that when he fled to Mexico with a 12-year-old Jan by his side in August 1974, the family was initially unwilling to. The reality, though, is that the extraordinary nature of the revelations in the film, and their insufficient excavation, end up overshadowing the much more urgent subject at hand. Jan Broberg is now the executive producer on the Peacock miniseries based on her life, A Friend Of The Family. Robert kidnapped Jan Broberg, who was only 12 years old girl. Its very close in every way to how it truthfully unfolded. I remember waking up in the morning and not feeling well at all. Jake Lacy as Bob Berchtold and Hendrix Yancey as a young Jan Broberg in Peacocks A Friend of the Family. If you can [watch] and go, That would never happen to me. Heidi Brewer on the documentary, A Friend of the Family: True Evil. He was born February 7, 1936, in Tremonton, Utah to Leonard N. and Lucille Grover Berchtold. She has been writing about entertainment news since she started writing journalistically in high school. My dad isnt dead. Im so glad youve found relief. And then this really deep sorrow and sadness for all the people, all the girls, his whole familyall the people who he had affected. "When people ask me about the brainwashing, I'm like, 'It took 10 seconds.' Some viewers hit the roof, wondering how any parent could let their kid be taken by the same person twice. People knew, or certainly had surmised, that he was a threat. If she did, he said, her dad would be killed, her sister Karen made blind, and Susan taken in her stead. Between 1972 and 1976, he eventually kidnapped and wed her. Listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Spotify, Stitcher or the ABC News app. Her sons were quite a bit older than methe youngest was seven or eight years older than meand I don't remember them being in the house much. As Jan Broberg later described in the documentary Abducted In Plaint Sight, Everyone had a best friend.. Today, Jan Broberg has a "wonderful relationship" with her parents. In hindsight, I don't think Bob would ever have done anything to Jill. Thats why I think the documentary was a first step in some ways because it really taught me what was still missing in the conversation. "I met my ex-husband and we had kids. Netflix first recounted the harrowing story in the 2019 documentary Abducted in . She divorced him and took her kids and moved., Gail was not featured in the documentary. The film implies that the Broberg parents were both brainwashed and manipulated by Berchtold, which accounts for some of their actions, but not nearly all. He brainwashed her with false narratives in order to sexually abuse her. He was sentenced to five years probation and five years in prison. I really did find a way to hang up that very heavy coat of abuse and have it be outside of me. They had no idea about the abuse. I was 10 and she was 12. But now this man she didn't really know could let himself in at any time. In 1976, he spent 10 days in jail after accepting a plea deal based on the first kidnapping, then was sentenced to a mental facility for 6 months. Grace M. Galarraga is a writer based out of Southern California. He turned sideways and you could almost see him reaching back to start a tape recorder. About a month later, Bob took me to Ogden for the weekend to meet his five kids. His mother was still alive during the whole ordeal, she would have been 60 years old or so when he abducted Jan, Must have been hard for her witnessing this of her son. The Berchtold family also had a baby girl when they met in the Peacock dramatization. Your family was so close to the Berchtolds for years. Filmmaker Skye Borgman left out a scene which featured a meet-up that Mary Ann had with Robert Berchtold in a car park, allegedly involving a firearm and her brother (via Vanity Fair). I could look at the coat. I said, Did you do some deep dive on my dad that I dont even know about? Hes like, No. But what kind of sexual abuse did he go through? Thats really my mantra: Have a happy childhood at any and every age. Lets figure it out. They didnt want to know. It was the thing that kept me obedient.. He gave her allergy medication that knocked her out and drove with her to Pasadena, California where he enrolled her in a Catholic school with the alias Janis Tobler, feeding the nuns a fake story about being a CIA agent who needed someone to care for his daughter. B took a particular interest in 12-year-old Jan as well, often showering her with gifts and inviting her on trips. With the emotional adventure of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever closing out the controversial fourth, Minor spoilers ahead. Jake Lacy Biography. Robert Ersol Berchtold, 69, of Logandale, died Nov. 11, 2005. Photo: Courtesy Jan Broberg. He abducts her again in 1976, after she has . He never brought her home. Jamie Lee Curtis Is Both Weepy and Giddy About Her First Oscar Nomination. Its too painful for them to realize that they allowed that to happen to her.. I kept it all to myself and kept going," she writes. It all started in 1972 when Berchtold met the Broberg family at a church service in Pocatello, Idaho, and quickly became an esteemed family friend. He said he wanted me to take a vitamin. When the BerchtoldsGail, Robert and their five childrenmoved next door, the husbands bonded over being business and family men (so Bob Broberg said), the wives naturally gravitated to each. He got very angry. "You have to think again how the grooming happens," Broberg explained. Cookie Notice The real Bob Berchtold and Jan Broberg as a child. After Jan threatened to find her own way there, Mary Ann bought her a plane ticket and sent her to Berchtold. But Berchtold did not just kidnap Broberg oncehe entrapped Brobergs religious parents in such an elaborate web of trust and shame that he managed to convince the family to drop the most serious charges against him, continue letting him spend time with their young daughter, andin the most shocking twist of allkidnap her a second time when she was 14. When I woke up and that voice was therepeople often say, How long did it take for you to be brainwashed to believe that [aliens had kidnapped you]. I said, 10 secondswhen I [first] heard the voice [in the RV]. The planting of the seeds is where all of that nefarious grooming and manipulation happened, before that moment. When the two saw each other again in court, she told him, My goal, Mr. Berchtold, is to educate the public about predators like you. [Id get] phone calls and other scares. He drove her to California, where he enrolled her in an all-girls Catholic school claiming that she was his daughter. When I would ask Bob about these differences, including why I couldn't have friends over or spend time away from home, he would get angry. Both parents claimed in the documentary that if they didnt do this, B would expose a sex act that Bob and B engaged in prior to the kidnapping. Cunning child predator Robert Berchtold would be accused of sexually abusing Jan Broberg over several years, but he would see little time behind bars for a multitude of reasons.. Peacock's original series, "A Friend of the Family," is based on the stranger-than-fiction story of the Broberg family, whose young daughter was twice kidnapped by trusted family friend Robert Berchtold. Berchtold vehemently tried to denounce the book, claiming that they were lying about him and about the truth for a profit. Susan called him and said, Your father said that youre his attorney. He said, I would never represent my father. And then he had her wait outside while he abused me. Thank you for taking the time to have this conversation. A few people in the movie vaguely assert that it was the 1970s, and no one really understood what pedophiles were, or that intimate friends and family members could also present a real danger to children. He said because we wanted to come home, they would not let me come back across the border if I did not have her married to me. All but 45 days of his prison sentence were suspended, and B ended up only serving 10 days in prison. Berchtold, a frequent visitor to the Broberg household, orchestrated these heinous acts. The Peacock drama miniseries A Friend of the Family shows how Jan Broberg was kidnapped twice when she was a child after her abductor ingratiated himself with her parents. I was such a happy girl. So if we can find that community of support and do that, then that will not only raise awareness, it will prevent future abuse. When Berchtold asked if he could share a bed with 12-year-old Jan as 'therapy' for overcoming his own childhood abuse, her parents were so brainwashed that they bizarrely let him. And so many adults knew, but nobody did anything. I was working on myself. Every episode of ABC's award-winning talk show "The View" is now available as a podcast! It's hard to say what impact the abuse had on my life. Robert Berchtold was ultimately given a prison sentence, but rather than face life behind bars, he downed a bottle of heart medication with Kahla and milk and ended his life. Its something that happened to them or someone close to themthey had been groomed or conned or manipulated, and could relate. A Friend of the Family, created by Nick Antosca, is based on the real-life case featured in the 2017 documentary Abducted in Plain Sight . They didnt have to do that, but they did. For viewers watching at home, though, judging the Brobergs is easier, even if its hard to ever feel fully informed, or to believe that the family knew what they were getting into by airing everything so publicly. I finally told my mother about the abuse. While on the road to Mexico he . Her dad owned Atkin Florist, while her mother was a homemaker. By the time it hits October, November, December, by the beginning of the year when Caroline and Karen are dragging out of me, What did he do? I knew that that [the alien] part wasnt real. When they showed up at the front door, my dad would stick his hand out and go, Hello, doctor. And then they would come in and he would give them the corsage that he had made for me, to give to them, so they could give it to me for free. That was terrifying and surreal because I was finishing a speech for a thousand women and their daughters. Monday on "The View," Broberg discussed her childhood and the steps taken by family friend Robert Berchtold, who went by the nickname "B," to manipulate the family and kidnap Broberg twice. He was sentenced to five years probation and five years in prison. The film tells the story of Jan Broberg, who, as a child in the 1970s, was kidnapped twice and sexually abused by Robert "B." Berchtold, a family friend who grew close with her parents. You can change your choices at any time by visiting your privacy controls. The hope for Abducted in Plain Sight, Borgman and Jan Broberg Felt have both said, is that it helps end the culture of silence around sexual abuse and assault. NetflixMary Ann Broberg described Berchtold as having a charisma that Bob didnt possess.. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. BRIGHAM CITY - Robert Ersol Berchtold, age 69, died Frida, November 11, 2005, in Bunkerville, Nevada. Jan Broberg went on to be the subject of her mothers retelling of her story, Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story and was part of the 2019 Netflix true-crime documentary Abducted in Plain Sight, detailing the twisted affair. I moved back to Texas to stay with one of my brothers, and my mother stayed in Utah. As Mary Ann described, they got a little too cozy and the first seeds of what would eventually grow into an affair were planted. It wasnt about Mary Ann. Berchtold continually raped Jan as he drove his motorhome to Mexico, where the minimum age requirement for marriage was only 12 years old. That brainwashing, for me, was something that [lasted] a short period of time. I was making great strides in my life and my career and my familyall the things that I am so grateful for. So Broberg was thrilled to help reframe her and her parents story in Peacocks new limited series A Friend of the Family, which was created by Nick Antosca (The Act and Candy) and invited Broberg and her mother, Mary Ann, to act as producers. The Disturbing Story Of Robert Berchtold, The Pedophile Who Kidnapped And Assaulted His Neighbors Daughter Twice. However, the family still wasn't rid of Robert Berchtold. I didnt know people wouldnt get it. Gail Berchtold Career . Rian Johnson, Halle Berry, and More Share Their Inspiration, From the Archive:Who Stole the Oscars? Netflix documentary tells the story of how Jan Broberg was kidnapped twice at the ages of 12 and 14 by Robert 'B' Berchtold, a trusted family friend . After being rebuked, he met with a counselor and a clinical psychologist to, he said, help overcome his obsession with Jan. Robert Berchtold. In one, her underwear is clearly visible. In actuality, though, Jan explained that Berchtold had just been careful. Robert 'B' Berchtold kidnapped 12-year-old Jan and took her in a camper to Mexico in 1974. He served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Now I do. He took her inside the motor home and abused her, while I waited outside. The new Netflix documentary Abducted in Plain Sight is a bewildering account of one girls kidnapping by a family friend. Im still human. The following two years, B kept in contact with Broberg, who said she felt she loved him. I was sick to my stomach and felt like throwing up. Nonetheless Berchtold, even after his conviction and his briefest of interludes in prison, was able not only to be around children, but also to purchase and run a family-fun center as a business. Up until her kidnapping at the age of 12, Broberg describes her childhood in Pocatello as wonderful and idyllic. Although Berchtold feigned ignorance regarding Jans whereabouts, Welsh and investigators knew he was responsible for her disappearance. Today there are specialists and programs designed specifically to deprogram people who have been brainwashed. And I could hang it up. I was on set. The 31-year-old Belgian filmmaker tackles the crisis of connection among teen boys in his second film, now an international feature Oscar nominee. A nine-year-old could understand as romantic love True Evil was rebuked by the LDS the is! My brothers, and could come and go as he pleased served in RV. 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