Eileen | Betrayal Weekly

0:02Speaker 1:When this did start unraveling, he actually used the words I've been unmasked. He loved that people thought of him as this boring economist, and at night, on weekends, he was living this wild life that nobody knew about. I thought you put my life in danger and never gave me the option to opt out.

0:40Speaker 2:I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. Sometimes on our show we tell stories of a life destroyed in an instant. The betrayal is like a rock thrown into a window. With one strike of the glass, everything shatters. But then there are other stories where the window doesn't break on that first throw. There are many secrets, many discoveries, sometimes uncovered weeks or even years apart. Each discovery sends a crack through the glass until finally it all falls apart. That was the case for Eileen. Eileen grew up in the sixties and seventies just outside of Boston. She was part of a big Irish Catholic family, the fourth of seven children.

1:39Speaker 1:It was a happy house full of very strong opinions, and our family was always trying to one up each other. With storytelling and jokes.

1:50Speaker 2:In a house of nine, she learned to speak up.

1:53Speaker 1:I can be a little bit feisty.

1:58Speaker 2:It's no wonder she gravitt towards politics in high school.

2:02Speaker 1:I was kind of driven to do things that I thought would be important for the country. I had been a page in Congress in Washington, d C. In my high school years and had interned down there, and I had a very defined vision of going into politics.

2:19Speaker 2:So right after she graduated college, she moved to d C.

2:24Speaker 1:I was working in Washington for a political consulting firm.

2:28Speaker 2:After a few months on the job, she began to doubt whether politics was really for her. This had been the career she'd always imagined, but she hadn't ever really considered other options.

2:42Speaker 1:I probably wasn't a bit of a crisis in my life at that moment, questioning, oh am I really doing the right thing. I was kind of bobbing around in the water, looking for my purpose and really missing Boston.

3:00Speaker 2:That summer of nineteen eighty six, she had to travel back home for a wedding. One of her cousins also happened to be in town.

3:08Speaker 1:A distant cousin of mine was over from Ireland and he was living in a household full of Irish people who were working there.

3:19Speaker 2:Eileen decided to spend a night out in Boston with her cousin and his friends.

3:24Speaker 1:We were all going out tonight and let's all go to this party.

3:27Speaker 2:They went out to an Irish pub and that's where she met a man we're going to call Paul. He was friends with her cousin.

3:35Speaker 1:He was a little shy, and that's sort of why I began talking to him. I wanted to draw him out very quickly. She could tell he was smart. He was the oldest of five children, the only one to go to college, and going to university in Ireland in those days wasn't common. I think only about ten percent of the population went to college at that point, he told Eileen.

4:00Speaker 2:And he was only in Boston for summer break. He was in the middle of a five year degree back in Ireland, and he was serious about his studies.

4:10Speaker 1:And I kind of perked up because I thought, oh, okay, here's another ambitious, driven person, and that was really what piqued my interest.

4:20Speaker 2:But Paul was more than just a brain.

4:22Speaker 1:He showed me kind of a little hidden side of him. He was sitting acrass for me, and I was sipping a drink through a straw, and he said, oh, to be a straw. I was flabbergasted because I thought I was totally not expecting that from you.

4:42Speaker 2:She liked a sense of humor. Even more so, she liked how Paul put her at ease with him. She just felt calm. This was a transition point in her life. She was looking to ground herself, and I.

4:57Speaker 1:Liked the idea of a comfortable stain a person by my side to help me do that. He was safe and soothing.

5:06Speaker 2:Soon after that night at the pub, Aileen left DC for good. She moved back to Boston and found a job working at an art gallery. That's when she and Paul went on their first real date.

5:19Speaker 1:It was about a twelve hour date. We started in the morning and we were walking around Boston, went to a movie Blue Velvet, I believe, we went out to dinner on Newbury Street. We just had this marathon date, and then he put me in a taxi to go home, and I remember glancing over my shoulder and he had been kind of like waving goodbye and sort of blowing kisses to me and That was my last image of our first day and I thought, wow, this guy.

5:49Speaker 2:Around that time, Paul decided that he wasn't ready to leave Boston just yet. He took a year off from school and got a construction job to make some money. So through that fall Paul and Eileen started officially dating. They got into a rhythm.

6:04Speaker 1:He would meet me in Cambridge and we'd go and have pizza, and we'd walk around, go to museums, go on walks, things like that. It was a very peaceful time in my life and very routine, and I think I needed that at that moment.

6:22Speaker 2:So Eileen Paul was an anchor. Being with him just felt right.

6:28Speaker 1:And then we had been dating about ten months eleven months when I became pregnant.

6:36Speaker 2:Eileen was only twenty three, Paul was twenty two.

6:40Speaker 1:I had mentioned that I'm from a Catholic family and so is he rural Ireland, and so we had decided we're having this baby and we'll get married at some point.

6:52Speaker 2:At some point didn't exactly go over well with their Catholic parents, so when Eileen was seven months pregnant, they had wedding.

7:01Speaker 1:We got married in December, two days after Christmas. Our son was born actually on Valentine's Day in nineteen eighty eight.

7:09Speaker 2:While Paul went back to school to finish his degree, Eileen stayed home with the baby. She loved those early years of motherhood.

7:17Speaker 1:I think I took like a duck to water being with my son and doing this with my husband.

7:24Speaker 2:We were a team in many ways. Their relationship was happening backwards. They got pregnant, got married, and only then did they have the opportunity to really get to know each other.

7:36Speaker 1:And I think as I got to know him more, our relationship deepened.

7:41Speaker 2:Even though Paul was busy with school, he made time for her and their son. She admired how thoughtful he was when it came to their little family.

7:51Speaker 1:He grew up in a very unhappy household, and so I think he was learning how to be a husband and a father, not in the mold of his parents. He was still trying to please his family. But I thought he was doing his best by us too. You know, he was going to school, working hard, coming home, helping with the baby. Our life was continuing as I thought it would with family as center.

8:23Speaker 2:Paul graduated A couple of years after the baby came and new opportunities quickly opened up for him. He got a PhD in a specialty of.

8:33Speaker 3:Economics, and during those four years we had two more children had just had my third when he got an offer to become a professor, and I could not have been prouder of him.

8:44Speaker 1:I thought, this is great.

8:46Speaker 2:They moved to a university town in the Midwest with their three kids in tow and then within two years of being there, we.

8:55Speaker 1:Had a fourth child, and that completed our family.

8:59Speaker 2:Their life was starting to look a lot like hers. Growing up. They had a full house, and as the kids got older, their home became a hub of activity. There was always a sports practice, to drive someone to, a science project to get done, a school play to see. Paul and Eileen held it down together.

9:19Speaker 1:We were literally dividing and conquering for attending events, and he was a very present father at their sports events, taking them to soccer tournaments, taking them to track meets.

9:31Speaker 2:Still they managed to find calm amidst the chaos.

9:36Speaker 1:We would have dinner every night as a family, whether it was at eight o'clock after sports ended, or whether it was at six o'clock when everybody was home for that night.

9:44Speaker 2:But they would also carve out time for just the two of them.

9:49Speaker 1:You know, going for hikes on the prairie, and he would plan little getaways.

9:56Speaker 2:Paul also made a point to show Eileen how much he loved her with small everyday gestures.

10:03Speaker 1:Bringing me coffee in bed, or you know, on Sundays he'd bring me the New York Times. I mean, when you see what we looked like as a family, we'd be the last people you would imagine. This would be what happened to them.

10:21Speaker 2:The years passed without incident, with Paul teaching at the local university. The kids all grew up and went off to college. After many years as a stay at home mom, Eileen got a master's and went back to work in the school system. But after twenty two years, and they're small Midwestern town, things got a little boring. Paul and Eileen were ready for a change.

10:44Speaker 1:So he decided to apply for a department head at another Land Grant university, and he ended up getting that job.

10:54Speaker 2:They'd be moving eight hours away to a bigger city in the Midwest. At this point, Paul and Eileen were in their fifties. They were now empty nesters looking forward to retirement. This would be the final chapter of Paul's career, and he was finishing out in a prestigious position as the head of his academic department.

11:16Speaker 1:I was extremely excited, not just for him career wise, but for us as a couple, because we never had that time at the beginning of our marriage to embrace each other and get to know each other. And I thought, now we get it. Now's our time to connect on a deeper level and to have that. And so almost thirty years later, we get to be newlyweds again, and I was super excited about the future.

11:43Speaker 2:Paul moved to the new city first in January of twenty seventeen. He spent a few months getting oriented to his new job. I Leen stayed back packing up their family home. Finally, when summer arrived, Eileen joined.

11:58Speaker 1:Him, and that's where my life imploded.

12:03Speaker 2:That summer, they had to drive out of state for a wedding. But one day, as they were gearing up for the trip, Paul sat, I leaned down.

12:12Speaker 1:He had to tell me that he had lost his license and I was like what, And I said what happened? And he said, well, I got pulled over for a duy I was shocked.

12:25Speaker 2:Paul drank, to be sure, Still, she never expected Paul to drink and drive. But that revelation was only the beginning. Eileen soon learned that during their time apart, Paul had been building a new life.

12:41Speaker 1:And he said, well there's more, And I said, what more could they be? He got a duy and he said, well, it happened on my way back from a nudist resort in Indiana.

13:15Speaker 2:Eileen had been married to her husband for thirty years, and for thirty years she known him to be a shy, even kill guy. He was a mild mannered professor the study and hard working father to their four children. In July twenty seventeen, they had just moved to a new city in the Midwest so Paul could start as a university department head. But just as they were about to begin this new chapter, Paul made a shocking revelation. He'd gotten a DUI and lost his license while on the way home from a nudist resort.

13:54Speaker 1:My heart stopped. I was like, what in the world are you talking about.

14:01Speaker 2:Nudist resorts weren't part of their life together. He'd been hiding this from her, but Paul was acting like it was all no big deal.

14:10Speaker 1:And he said, I went to Indiana and I went to a nudist resort and they had an aft party and I got drunk and on the way home, I was stopped for drunk driving and they arrested me and they kept him in a drunk tank for the night.

14:25Speaker 2:This was the first Eileen was hearing of any of this. Remember, Eileen had just joined Paul. She'd been getting ready to move while Paul was settling in at his new job that first semester. While they were apart, Paul had tried to sweep all of this under the rug. He hired a lawyer and argued that since this was his first defense, he should be let off. But at the court hearing for his DUI, he was hit with some serious consequences.

14:54Speaker 1:The judge in his case said, I'm revoking your license for a year.

14:58Speaker 2:Eileen couldn't tell what's done her more, the DUI or the party at the nudist resort.

15:05Speaker 1:And he said, I was just curious. It was my first time. I've never done anything like this. You were gone. I just wanted to see what this was like. And then I remember, actually googling is it cheating to go to anudist resort.

15:22Speaker 2:She began to wonder what else had he been up to before she moved.

15:27Speaker 1:We used to leave our laptops out on tables, and I was like, you know, I sometimes see your email. I've never seen anything from a lawyer. And I said, show me the emails from your lawyer. And he's in front of me and he's tapping away, and he's like, I don't know where I put them on. They must be in some other folder. I don't know where they are, and so I left him. I said, well, show me when you get them, and I left the room and he came in ten minutes later, put the laptop on my lap and said, here they are. And there were the emails, but I could see that they had been imported from an email address I had never seen and didn't recognize, and I was like, there's something very off.

16:12Speaker 2:So the next day, while Paul was at work, she tried to log into that unfamiliar email address.

16:19Speaker 1:I started plugging in some of his known passwords, and I think about the tenth eleventh one that I was just sloofing. It popped open and I see hundreds of messages from Craigslist. I saw him responding to hundreds of Craigslist ads for anonymous meetings with men.

16:46Speaker 2:She scrolled and scrolled, trying to wrap her mind around what she was reading.

16:52Speaker 1:It was a lot of sexual conversations like where do you go for a glory or what sex store is the best? He replied to somebody who wanted to give a Mother's Day gift to their wife by having two men at the same time, and my husband had answered it and said, that's my dream come true.

17:19Speaker 2:She never knew her husband was interested in men or group sex, even if he never acted on it. This was all shocking information to Eileen. And this wasn't a new habit. His email showed that he'd been sending messages like this for years.

17:36Speaker 1:It was like a kick in the gut, like I had just been stabbed, something at my core had been violated, and I just couldn't even absorb it. I don't know this person, I don't know how this happened. My mind could not grasp then normity of what he had been doing and what he had been hiding. And then I just absolutely got furious. I am not a yeller, even with four kids, very rarely lost it. But I remember going back into the backyard and calling him and screaming at him and saying, get home right now. I know everything.

18:29Speaker 2:In the moment, she thought that was true. Eileen waited for him on the front porch, and when he got home, he groveled. He told her he was so sorry and insisted that he never met up with anyone in person. These were all online fantasies.

18:46Speaker 1:That's what he fed off of, is sending out these messages getting them back. And I said, are you addicted to pornography? And I can still remember he had sort of a little relief in his eyes. He's like, yeah, that's it. I'm addicted to pornography.

19:00Speaker 2:This was the man she'd been with for thirty years, her entire adult life. If he was saying this was just an online habit, she felt like she had to take his word for it.

19:12Speaker 1:I gave him the assumption of trust because we were married and we had taken vows. I wanted so badly to believe that he was still the same person I knew, and that my marriage was not a sham. I was like, Okay, you know, it's pornography. We can handle that, we can deal with that.

19:31Speaker 2:And yet I.

19:32Speaker 1:Knew deep down that his story didn't ring true. That night, we were in bed and I'm lying next to him, and it's three am and he's sleeping.

19:45Speaker 2:She stared at the blank, white ceiling, unable to get the messages out of her head. Eventually, she couldn't lie there alone with her thoughts any longer, so she woke Paul up.

19:57Speaker 1:I just started poking him on the shoulder and saying, what did you do? I know you did something. What did you do? And he's like nothing, nothing. I swear, and he's groggy. I just kept poking him and saying, I know you did something. Tell me and he said nothing nothing. I said, okay, swear on your grandfather's head. He was close to his grandfather. I said, swear on your grandfather's head that you have never done anything during our marriage with another person physically. And he leapt out of bed and said, okay, okay, I did. You're right?

20:30Speaker 1:See what you made me do?

20:33Speaker 2:Paul finally admitted it. His infidelity wasn't just online. On many occasions, he'd snack away to meet people and engage in sexual activity. He'd lie to her about where he was going and cover his tracks afterwards, and he'd woven this all into their everyday lives. In the middle of days that might otherwise seem normal, Paul was having sexual encounters all while keeping up the image of being a family man and respected professor.

21:04Speaker 1:Anytime he went to a professional meeting or was asked to speak somewhere, he was seeking out sexual opportunities. On the trip to interview for the University of department head position, he had gone off and met somebody at a glory hole.

21:21Speaker 2:He'd also met up with people on trips years back, when he'd travel with his kids for sporting events.

21:28Speaker 1:How do you drop your kids off at a volleyball tournament and turn around and look for a sex store. How do you tell your kids you'll be back for their next soccer game and go out and meet somebody at a glory hole.

21:41Speaker 2:Eileen could hardly process what her husband was saying.

21:46Speaker 1:He had been masterful at keeping me in the dark for thirty years. He's putting himself up as a family man, committed to his faith, and he was doing everything in opposition to what he was putting out there. Talk about an inauthentic double life. Everything he did was designed to deceive those around him from knowing the truth.

22:14Speaker 2:Her mind snapped the immediate risks. Could he have given her an STD.

22:20Speaker 1:I insisted that we go to the health department, and I had said, we're getting some STD testing, and then those all came back negative. But I was like, you did all of these things without even a thought to what you were doing to me, And I was like, thank god, I didn't get any diseases.

22:39Speaker 2:As the shakrare off, Eileen felt her anger rise to the surface.

22:44Speaker 1:I trust you to do right by me. You trust me to do right by you, and I was robbed of that.

22:50Speaker 2:On the other hand, she was incredibly relieved, not just that she was healthy, but that she was finally getting the truth out of him.

22:59Speaker 1:At that moment, I felt like, Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Now I know that you have stepped outside the bounds of our marriage.

23:08Speaker 2:If they were going to have any chance at repair, the first step would be Paul's complete transparency.

23:15Speaker 1:You have to bring light into a dark situation. And that really was my attitude. Let's bleach all of this so you can be the person we always thought you were, and then you can overcome your dark behaviors. I said, I need to know everything so that we can begin to repair this. I don't want to find out in five months that you did something else.

23:40Speaker 2:Paul said he was ready to do whatever it took to save their marriage. He swore he was done cheating and that she now knew everything. He even went so far as to tell their friends and family and even their children what he'd done to Eileen. It meant a lot. At last, all the cards were on the table. They started couples therapy, and every week Eileen began driving Paul to a twelve step program for sex addiction.

24:08Speaker 1:We did that about an hour outside of our own town, and we would go up there together, and he was saying, I'm working on this. We can get through this. I'm like, okay, he's making an effort.

24:20Speaker 2:One day, Eileen was driving Paul home from a meeting. On the car ride, Paul suddenly looked over at her. He decided to share something.

24:30Speaker 1:This was probably one of the first information pieces that he volunteered, and he said, I did have a relationship with this woman in Dublin, and they had carried on an emotional affair.

24:47Speaker 2:This was someone he'd met years before at a wedding. He insisted that they had never had sex. Up until this point, Paul had only confessed to transactional encounters meetings that were pure sexual. Now he was admitting to much more.

25:05Speaker 1:That one really absolutely completely set me off, because I'm like, now there's not only anonymous sexual encounters, but there's a woman that you had this multi year relationship with.

25:19Speaker 2:She was tired of pulling tiny kernels of truth out of him, of having to ask specific questions or wait for Paul to volunteer information to get answers.

25:29Speaker 1:And I said, that's it. I need to know everything, write it down.

25:35Speaker 2:Right. When they pulled into their driveway, she got out of the car, walked in the front door, and sat Paul down at the kitchen table with a pen and paper.

25:44Speaker 1:I said, I'm leaving the house. I will be back, but you better write down every goddamn thing you did. So he's at the table. I went out, but I do remember coming back pulling up, and it was probably like an hour later. I walk in the house and he's still writing.

26:05Speaker 2:The confession was a full twenty two pages. And if you think that confession would be the end of it, you'd be wrong.

26:13Speaker 1:That's still just the tip of the iceberg.

26:15Speaker 2:More revelations and Paul's ultimate betrayal were still to come.

26:21Speaker 1:I called my husband, dropped to my knees and said, what have you done to me?

26:49Speaker 2:Eileen demanded the truth, the full truth, from her husband Paul. He responded with a twenty two page confession. I Leen sat down and read through page after page, taking in all the ways her husband had stepped outside of their marriage.

27:07Speaker 1:He had gone to illicit massage paulos all over the world, all over the place. It had been strip clubs and lap dances, hotel visits and glory holes.

27:18Speaker 2:At most of these places, Paul swore there'd been nothing physical. He said he got off on just being there and watching others. But there were also times when he did physically cheat, and it went all the way back.

27:32Speaker 1:That was one of my deep questions, When did this begin? When did you start this? He had started it right from the start. He had no intention of keeping his vows when we got married.

27:43Speaker 2:None. Even with all these pages of stories, hundreds of incidents of betrayal, Eileen had this sinking feeling that she was only getting a fraction of what Paul had done.

27:56Speaker 1:When I'd asked him, well, what about on this trip. He'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, no I did something there.

28:02Speaker 2:She continued to have to ask the right questions.

28:06Speaker 1:So I do have his handwritten notes, but I'm sure it's nothing compared to the reality of what he was doing for thirty years. That night I lost it. I couldn't even incorporate any of this information into my head.

28:21Speaker 2:None of it squared with the man she'd been married to for three decades.

28:26Speaker 1:If you met him, you would be like, he comes across as kind of a boring dude. He looks normal, doesn't draw attention to himself, and a very steady, steadfast guy. And when this did start unraveling, he actually used the words I've been unmasked. He loved that people thought of him as this boring economist, and at night, on weekends, whenever he had the opportunity, he was living this wild life that nobody knew about.

28:58Speaker 2:As they sat there talking through all this infidelity, Eileen did feel like she was seeing more of the pall she knew.

29:06Speaker 1:He seemed remorseful, He seemed like he was sorry. He knows that I like harmony, and I think he wanted to make me feel like, Okay, we need to get back to an equilibrium.

29:20Speaker 2:After reading through Paul's confession, Eileen did take steps to separate. She even filed for divorce and moved in with her mom in Boston for a few months.

29:30Speaker 1:But at some point I did decide, like, Okay, he's working on things, and so we went back to try again.

29:39Speaker 2:From the outside, it could be hard to understand Eileen's decision. She judges herself for going back after everything she learned.

29:48Speaker 1:I think maybe my waffling going staying, coming here with my marriage probably shows the effects of the trauma on my decision making.

30:00Speaker 2:You have to remember she'd been with Paul for thirty years, practically since they were kids. This marriage was all she knew. Living at her mom's contemplating everything that would change with a divorce, she just kept thinking she didn't want to have to start over.

30:20Speaker 1:My whole life had been uprooted, and I thought, I just want to get back to what I know living in a midwestern university town.

30:31Speaker 2:So in the fall of twenty eighteen, she moved back in with Paul. She decided to go to work again. She found a job in the school system.

30:40Speaker 1:I was like, Okay, I'm going to go back. I'm going to get to work. I need a sense of purpose.

30:46Speaker 2:She went through all the steps required when you work in a school, background checks, reference checks, and last of all, a physical exam. She went to her doctor's office to get what she thought would be a quick and easy say signature.

31:01Speaker 1:I'm like, you can see that I'm healthy and I'm fit, just sign off this form. And she's like, no, I'm going to do a real exam.

31:08Speaker 2:The doctor checked off all the necessary boxes, took her vitals, ransom, blood work, and she.

31:15Speaker 1:Did a pap s mare and it came back positive for HPV sixteen. I didn't know what that was, and I looked it up and found out that it was the most oncogenic strain of a cancer causing sexually transmitted infection.

31:36Speaker 2:Human papaloma virus is a common STI Most of the time it doesn't cause symptoms, but certain strains of the virus, like HPV sixteen, can cause cancer. Eileen was shocked.

31:52Speaker 1:I've never had an abnormal paps maar never in my life.

31:56Speaker 2:She'd always been on top of her annual visits, and not only that, she had an STD panel the year before. When she first found out about her husband's infidelity, but at the time she wasn't tested for HPV.

32:12Speaker 1:I called my husband and he was at work, dropped to my knees and said, what have you done to me? You need to get home right now. I'm literally crying on the phone telling him that I have a sexually transmitted infection, and he still went through with a staff meeting before he came home. He does eventually come home, calms me down, says, we'll get it treated, we'll take care of it, We'll go to the best doctors.

32:45Speaker 2:But before long, Eileen received another diagnosis.

32:50Speaker 1:I went in to a gynecologist and had a little nodule removed that had been bothering me, and it turned out that was vulver cancer from the HPVA.

33:02Speaker 2:Unfortunately, that wasn't all.

33:05Speaker 1:In March, I'm going to Boston to get what they call is a cold knife conization of your cervix, which pulls out just a portion of it to see how invasive the HPV is.

33:18Speaker 2:The doctors didn't see much during the procedure itself, but when the tissue results came back from the lab.

33:25Speaker 1:I find out I have invasive cervical cancer. So I found out I had vulver cancer and cervical cancer within about a month six weeks of each other.

33:35Speaker 2:Cancer and she wasn't just fighting one form of it. She was fighting too from an STD her husband likely gave her the painful irony was it now felt like she couldn't leave Paul.

33:51Speaker 1:I was getting insurance through him. I needed to stay married because I needed treatment.

33:57Speaker 2:Leaving him could disrupt the care she desperately needed. Eileen immediately began treatment. Her life became consumed by doctor's visits, blood workups, and painful surgeries. Meanwhile, she stayed married to Paul. He was in the Midwest continuing his work at the university. She was in Boston, receiving treatment and living with her mother.

34:20Speaker 1:I have to have a radical open hysterectomy, so I have that in May, and he comes back to help me recover. And my father had died a number of years before this, and my parents' anniversaries in June, and he was there for it, and I said, oh, let's go get a cake from my mother. She loves thinking about my father and this is their anniversary. And while he went out to get a cake from my mother, he had left his backpack there and I went through his backpack and I found a sheet of paper that he had written on a list of people he needed to inform that I had cancer because he had had sexual relationships with them, And on this he had kind of like a script for a phone call. My wife has HPV sixteen. You might want to get yourself checked.

35:13Speaker 2:All these years he never told Eileen to get herself checked.

35:17Speaker 1:I thought you put my life in danger and never gave me the option to opt out.

35:24Speaker 2:Paul now claimed he had reformed his behavior, that he wasn't hiding anything anymore, but she soon found out his escapades had never stopped.

35:35Speaker 1:I needed to have my labia removed. And on the day he finds out that I need my labya removed, my husband invited a man into the hot tub at our house.

35:47Speaker 2:The two of them were naked together. Eleen only found out because the man was someone they knew, and he told her Paul was doing what he'd always done, prioritizing his pleasure and ignoring her. Her life was now in jeopardy. She was undergoing major surgeries and suffering the consequences of his actions. But even after couple's therapy and a twelve step program. Paul was unwilling to change Rileen. This was the breaking point.

36:18Speaker 1:That was really the first time that I was absolutely sure that I could never have anything to do with this human being again in my life. And I was like, there's no redemption, there's nothing here that can be salvaged. And since that time I have not heard his voice or seen his face.

36:39Speaker 2:They began the divorce process, and Eileen drew firm boundaries about communicating with him outside of the proceedings.

36:47Speaker 1:We've had a grandchild. I'm at the baptism. He's not. My daughter graduated from Chicago. I'm there, he's not. I will not ever breathe the same era that he will breathe. Not because I'm vindictive, but because, after so many years of turmoil and lies and deception, I need to remove myself from his presence. He is the epitome of evil. Every time he had the choice to do right, he did wrong. And if that's not the definition of evil, I don't know what is. The years since she and Paul separated have been difficult. Her cancer has spread.

37:29Speaker 2:On top of the vulgar and cervical cancers, Eileen was diagnosed with anal cancer in twenty twenty three.

37:36Speaker 1:I undergo surgery for that every six months, and I'm put under It's horrific, it's painful, it has lifelong consequences. But I'm actually one of the lucky ones because mime were found early.

37:49Speaker 2:These cancers made her reevaluate everything in her life, including her decision not to vaccinate her kids for HPV. She remembers having the choice to get her daughter vaccinated back in the early two thousands when the Gardisil shot was first rolled out.

38:05Speaker 1:My daughter, my youngest, was nine, and they weren't offering to boys at that point, and I talked to my pediatrician at that time and he said, you know, you should get your daughter vaccinated. And I didn't because it was very new, and I thought, I'm going to hold off on that because I'm not really sure about the efficacy or the safety of this vaccine. I am not anti vaccine. My kids have been vaccinated for everything else, but that one I thought needed to have a little test of time.

38:34Speaker 2:She hadn't gotten the vaccine herself either.

38:37Speaker 1:At that point. I was over the age of twenty six, which was the upper limit, and I didn't think I was vulnerable to STIs, how would I, a faithful woman in a faithful marriage, be vulnerable to an STI.

38:50Speaker 2:Once she got these cancers, she did more research into the HPV vaccine.

38:55Speaker 1:It's now been proven extremely safe and my kids have all been vaccinated now, and actually I was just vaccinated last summer.

39:03Speaker 2:Adults of any gender up to the age of forty five can easily get the shot. Above forty five, you can also get the vaccine in some cases. Once Eileen realized the importance of this vaccine, she wanted to educate others.

39:19Speaker 1:I felt that I needed to put purpose to my pain. And I was like, I can use my narrative to help other people. And so I just started doing little TikTok videos about HPV and its importance on my own. Here's my big shout out, my push on National Cancer Survivor's Day. Go get your pat tests, get screened. I hope you never get a cancer that is almost one hundred percent preventable.

39:55Speaker 2:In telling her story, she's met so many women like her.

40:00Speaker 1:I have been contacted by I kid you not, thousands of people who have shared that they also were married to men who lived completely deceptive lives and that they hadn't thought about the health consequences that might come with that.

40:18Speaker 2:Her experience and the experiences of the people who've written to her, have also changed her views on infidelity. She's always thought stepping out of a marriage is wrong, but now it goes beyond that.

40:31Speaker 1:I do believe that infidelity is domestic violence. My body would have recovered faster if he had shot me. My body would have recovered faster if he had stabbed me. I'm living with life long mutilation of my body because of his behaviors and his cowardice.

40:54Speaker 2:To this day, Eileen continues to discover new details about Paul's secret life.

41:00Speaker 1:I just found out about in the last year from his former boss's wife that on the day my daughter was born, she saw him pick somebody up at a bar. There are still things that can absolutely cut me to the quick. As far as I know, he has not faced nearly the consequences I faced.

41:24Speaker 2:Paul is now living down South working a new job in academia.

41:28Speaker 1:He will, I am sure upon his retirement return to Ireland. I don't care. I've detached myself. I feel nothing but relief at not having any contact with him.

41:42Speaker 2:She continues to get treatment for her cancers, but she also lives a full, beautiful life despite her diseases.

41:51Speaker 1:I played tennis, I work on my advocacy, and I have a beautiful granddaughter and another one on the way. I think I might soon join the workforce again. I think that I have more to contribute to the mental health field. I think I have more to contribute with advocacy, and so that feels very affirming and very hopeful.

42:16Speaker 2:We end all of our episodes with the same question, why do you want to share your story?

42:22Speaker 1:My first purpose is showing that you can live through this and you can craft a life that is authentic to you. And the second purpose is you might not think that you're vulnerable to an STI, but you might be. And I just want people to be aware so that their life story does not include what my life story now includes. We have one vaccine to protect against cancer, so let's use it. And this is why, even though I'm a fairly private person, telling my story with all of its horrendous, egregious, soul shattering details, so that other people don't go through this.

43:14Speaker 2:On the next episode of Betrayal Weekly.

43:18Speaker 4:Just panicking Amber, I'm being arrested. I need you to come get my car and my gun. I'm like, what the hell is going on?

43:37Speaker 2:If you'd like to share your story on Betrayal, please email Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That is Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com. Please note that we are not a mental health organization. If you are in crisis or currently experiencing domestic violence, we encourage you to seek local help or dial nine to one one. Please contact organizations that offer immediate support. And our show notes, we've included a list of US based resources. You can follow us on Instagram at betrayal Pod or find me at It's Andrea Gunning. To access our newsletter and additional content, and to connect with the Betrayal community, join our substack at Betrayal dot substack dot com. We're grateful for your support.

44:26Speaker 2:One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way. Big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason. Hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning. This episode was written and produced by Caitlin Golden and Olivia Hewitt. Our story editor is Monique Lebord, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Our associate producer is Leah Jablow.

45:05Speaker 2:Production management by Kristin Mercurie, Booking support by Curry Richmond. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Tresica Crimecheck. Audio editing and mixing by Matt Albcchio with additional editing by Dean Welsh. Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by my Music And For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,