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“You have the right to remain silent,” said an agent, snapping sharp handcuffs on my wrists. “Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.”
“Why?” Jamie breathed. His eyes were distant in a way I recognized, the dissociation that came with shock.
The agents pulled me to my feet, but I kept locked on him until his eyes rose to meet mine.
“Why?” he shouted. “Why are yousmiling?”
Was I? I hadn’t even felt it start.
The agents shoved me forward, one in front, two flanking my sides. My face dripped with blood. I could almost see myself: a living, breathing painting. Abstract expressionism, like a Pollock, art I’d made of myself.
I tipped back my head and laughed. Turned to Jamie and gave him the only word I had, the only one that could explain. It lingered behind me, filling the room as I finally made it up that dark staircase. It lifted my shoulders, stiffened my spine, as I climbed out from the depths of Don’s basement, out of the doors of his house, into the wide, wide world.
Free.
Epilogue
Transgressions, Episode 705, official transcript: “The Pater Society, Part One,” aired January 3, 2023
JAMIE KNIGHT:Welcome back toTransgressions. I’m your host, Jamie Knight. On September 26, 2022, this show aired an emergency episode, sharing snippets of recordings taken over the course of weeks by Shay Evans, then Shay Deroy, who infiltrated the Pater Society, a violent, patriarchal cult operating in secret across New York. Members included prominent New Yorkers such as then-Governor Alec Barry; financier Kurt Johnson, who used the aliases Don Rockwell and Nico Stagiritis, among others; and Westchester Chief of Police Adam Dorsey. The group was responsible for the deaths of several women, the exact number unknown at the time of airing. The FBI has since recovered the remains of five bodies from a Pater-owned property known as the Hilltop, including the body of Laurel Hargrove, a woman believed to have committed suicide a month earlier. Listeners will remember I featured Laurel on an earlier episode, calling attention to the suspicious circumstances of her death. Obviously, I’d only scratched the surface.
We did something extraordinary the day we aired our emergency episode. We not only asked you to listen, but to weigh our evidence, trust us, and help us bring down the Paters. We asked you to be part of the story.
You responded in an incredible show of solidarity, flooding social media and law enforcement phone lines, calling for exposés, sharing your own stories of abuse and harassment. You may have technically been in your homes or your cars, but for all purposes, you stormed the castle. And now you know—the wholecountryknows—that you not only brought down the Paters, but you helped save Shay Evans’s life.
In the aftermath, we’ve witnessed a reckoning. There was the immediate resignation and charging of Governor Barry and key members of his staff, along with prominent figures on Wall Street, in the faith community, and in higher education. The DNC has assembled a task force to determine whether anyone in the organization turned a blind eye to Barry’s involvement with the Paters. Mountainsong Church, whose former pastor Michael Corbin was outed as a Pater, has all but crumbled after congregants fled in droves. The Westchester County Police Department has been placed under a consent decree by the DOJ, with disturbing allegations that many rank-and-file officers were aware of the existence of the Paters, if not actively involved.
And following the revelation that Whitney College president Reginald Carruthers was both a memberandparticipated in the cover-up of abuse allegations against Kurt Johnson eight years ago, the college’s Board of Trustees has voted to virtually gut the current administration. The school’s larger fate remains uncertain, however, as students have taken to campus-wide protests following a disturbing60 Minutesinterview with Katie Harris, a Whitney College student who was preyed upon and lured into the Pater Society by Carruthers himself.
An unexpected silver lining of exposing the Paters has been the number of missing women, suspected Pater victims, who have come out of hiding now that they’re no longer at risk. I’m sure many of you watched the movingTodayshow special in which several women and their families were interviewed. They explained how they feared for their lives when they decided to leave the Pater Society and thought disappearing was the only safe option. The FBI issued a statement saying they hope more women feel safe enough to come forward. They’re also continuing to excavate known Pater properties across the state in search of bodies.
So far, a total of twenty-eight current and former male members of the Pater Society have been identified and charged with everything from sex trafficking, kidnapping, and conspiracy to insider trading and destruction of evidence. The startling reach of the Paters has prompted a wave of investigative reporting that continues to uncover former members. In a bizarre twist, reporters fromProPublicadiscovered that a few early known associates of Kurt Johnson, the Pater Society leader known as the Philosopher, went on to become high-ranking members of Nxivm, another so-called “sex cult” operating in upstate New York. While conspiracies continue to run wild as to how the two groups were connected, the discovery has prompted renewed questions about the ubiquity of groups like this, particularly among communities of wealthy, privileged people. In my opinion, theNew York Timespiece “What We Refuse to See,” written by friend of the podcast Carmen Grant, is among the best of the recent reflections.
I’m recounting this history for two reasons. One, to tell you that no matter how much coverage the Pater Society has gotten in the four months since our podcast broke the news—no matter how much you may think you know—no one has the inside story we’re about to share. The second and most important reason is to tell you that everything we’ve done to bring down the Paters will be for nothing if, in the end, we don’t save Shay Evans.
Shay is facing a sentence of twenty years to life in prison for the murder of Kurt Johnson. You’ve heard from the news that she killed him while he was on his knees, in plain sight of FBI agents. You’ve flooded my inbox, wanting to know: What drove her to it? Isn’t what Shay did as bad as what the Paters did? How could I have asked you to support a murderer? And I understand where you’re coming from. Trust me, I do. It took me a long time to recover from what I witnessed that day. But reading your emails and DMs, I realized how badly you needed the whole story, because as Shay herself once told me, the story is everything. She knew from the beginning that it was her best defense, the thing that could stitch her together, show us her humanity. In the weeks I spent interviewing her, I’ll confess I never realized she was testifying. She was always a step ahead.
So Shay and I are going to lay it out for you, and after we do, I hope you’ll understand what she did was, in a larger sense, an act of self-defense. I hope you’ll join me in campaigning for her charges to be dropped. Because the worst possible way this story could end would be if Kurt Johnson or the State of New York took away Shay’s life after she finally freed herself.
This story is hers to tell, not mine, so in aTransgressionsfirst, she and I are going to host together. We’re editing and recording this three-part Pater series while Shay is on house arrest, bound by an ankle monitor, awaiting trial. Shay’s going to start by reading from the beginning of her book manuscript, a work in progress calledThe Last Housewife. We’ll continue to incorporate passages from her book throughout the series. To set the scene, she’s written her manuscript in this Day-Glo purple notebook, which she’s opening now. Every time I see it, it reminds me of a notebook she had when we were kids. And despite everything, it makes me feel hopeful. Okay. Shay?
(Silence.)
SHAY EVANS:Thank you, Jamie, for this opportunity. To everyone listening…thank you for what you did, and for being open to hearing what I have to say. I’m going to start, actually, with a transgression, because I’m a longtime listener, and I know that’s what you do here. My transgression is that I don’t regret killing him. Not for a second.
JAMIE:Shay—
SHAY:Let me show you why. I want to take you back to the beginning.
(Throat clearing.)
If I can get the words out.
(Deep breath.)
Part Four
Scheherazade, you sooty phoenix
