Dirty John
A true, unbelievable story perfectly told by Christopher Goffard from the L.A. Times.
From the excerpt: “Debra Newell is a successful interior designer. She meets John Meehan, a handsome man who seems to check all the boxes: attentive, available, just back from a year in Iraq with Doctors Without Borders. But her family doesn’t like John, and they get entangled in an increasingly complex web of love, deception, forgiveness, denial, and ultimately, survival”.
This is all you need to know about the story behind “Dirty John” and this is enough to attract you to listen to Christopher Goffard from the L.A. Times telling it in a masterful way.
When you have a great story — and here you sure have one — you’re less than halfway: you’re just at the beginning. From that point on, as a journalist, you have to dig in, interview, analyze and then put everything in its right place and see if it makes sense. And it’s only at that point that your ability to tell this story takes place. And it could happen or not: you can have a great story and ruin it telling it in a wrong or unappealing way. Or you can tell it just how it should be told. Like in this wonderful podcast. The good thing is that Goffard did respect the chronological order of events but still this story is so intricate right from the beginning that you need more clues to understand what motivated those people to act and react the way they did.
Perfectly crafted storytelling and perfect story to be told. Now just listen to it.
