If you need to catch up, you can find all previous chapters HERE
THE MARCUS CONLON EXPERIENCE
Episode #847 - Jackson Reed
Published March 15, 2018
[CONTINUING FROM 3:14:55]
MARCUS: I’ll never forget the look on your face when you found that tooth.
JACKSON: [exhales sharply] Yeah it just brought everything into focus. It’s funny how stupid people are. I’ve seen a lot of comments where people are like “It’s just a tooth! You couldn’t have known he was dead!” What, he bumped his head and it came out root and all? No way. That's not how teeth work. Someone ripped that out of Charlie's mouth.
MARCUS: Yeah, if you see a root, one of two things happened: it got ripped out with pliers or you got your shit rocked so bad your jaw realigned itself.
JACKSON: Yeah. We know now it was the latter. I’m just glad he wasn’t awake for that. Las Vegas Metro took over after that. Real cops, real investigation. They asked us not to publicize anything, which was fine by me. I wasn’t ready to post anything about what we’d found. I was happy to be done with it.
MARCUS: Were you?
JACKSON: Finding that storage unit changed things. Charlie hadn't just wandered off; even then I knew he was probably fucking dead. But it also made me doubt it we were on the right track. Irina couldn't overpower a grown man, even a wiry guy like Charlie. She's what, five-foot-six? She doesn't travel with muscle. Maybe Victoria was right when she called me crazy. Or maybe there was something else going on.
[pause]
The cops were treating it as a crime. Great. My job was done. Amateur hour was over.
MARCUS: Except?
JACKSON: [metal door slamming] Except things got complicated.
MARCUS: Victoria's livestream.
JACKSON: [long silence]
MARCUS: Do you believe Victoria made the livestream public on purpose?
JACKSON: I'm gonna be honest, I don't want to talk about that. I don't want to speculate on where Victoria's head was at. She's my sister and I love her, but there will always be things we don't agree on.
[awkward silence]
MARCUS: But you're okay now?
JACKSON: Yeah, we're good now. She's been extremely supportive through all this.
MARCUS: Even after—
JACKSON: Even after everything.
END OF EXCERPT
Published in Human Parts
October 15, 2018
The Instagram Live That Almost Cost Me My Brother
A story about family trauma, public mistakes, and learning when to listen to warnings
By Victoria Reed
Content warning: This essay discusses family trauma, mental illness, and violence.
In May 2017, I went live on Instagram at 5 AM from a bathroom at a rooftop party in LA. I thought I was talking to my 200 closest friends. Instead, I trauma-dumped to 47,000 strangers about my brother, my mentally ill mother, and a woman who would later try to kill him.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The Perfect Life That Wasn't
If you looked at my Instagram in early 2017, you would have seen exactly what I wanted you to see: A 29-year-old woman living her best life in Oklahoma City. Partnerships with Anthropologie and Away luggage. Invitations to influencer events in New York and LA. Perfectly staged coffee shots and motivational quotes about female empowerment.
What you wouldn't have seen were the eight missed calls from my mother that morning, each accompanied by unhinged texts about her latest manufactured crisis. I also made a point to keep my bottles of Xanex out of frame. They helped me deal with everyone else's emotions while suppressing my own. But I didn’t anyone to know I was taking them.
My mother likely has borderline personality disorder. I say likely because she’s never been to a doctor. Why would she? Everyone else is the problem; not her.
Growing up in our house meant never knowing which version of her you'd encounter. The loving mother who'd braid your hair and tell you stories, or the one who'd threaten to kill herself if you didn't come home from a sleepover?
Jackson had the balls to set himself free from her when he was 31. He went all the way with it: blocked her number, changed his locks, and never looked back. I stayed, continuing to give my unrepentant monster of a mother access to me. Not because I was stronger or more loving, but because I was terrified of what she might do if we both left. So I became the sole recipient of her 3 AM crisis calls, her financial emergencies, her emotional blackmail.
I hated him for leaving me behind, and that resentment poisoned every interaction we had.
The Night Everything Changed
On May 21, 2017, at almost 4 in the morning, Jackson called me. I was at an influencer event—a rooftop party celebrating a successful woman's latest business venture. The music was loud, the champagne was flowing, and I was networking like my career depended on it. Because it did.
I sent his call to voicemail, so he texted: "V please pick up. We found Charlie. Not him. Blood. A lot of blood."
Charlie Stine was a YouTuber who'd gone missing. Jackson, missing his time in the Marines as a police officer, had been helping search for him. I can’t be mad at him for that. How often have we longed for a job that actually mattered, where we felt we were doing good? Jackson had that for a while and wanted to recapture it. And he did, though I’m not sure any of us could have predicted how.
They'd found evidence of violence in a storage unit. That was why he was calling me. But then he said something that triggered every defense mechanism I'd built over 29 years: He suspected that the woman hosting the very party I was attending might be involved in Charlie's disappearance.
You know who she is. This woman. But I don’t say her name. I’ll never say her name again.
The Trauma Response I Didn't Recognize
What I didn’t yet understand was that Jackson and I had developed opposite trauma responses to our mother. He became both distant and hypervigilant, always scanning for threats, holding people at arm’s length and quick to cut people off at the first red flag. I became the opposite—desperate to see good in everyone, especially women, because I needed to believe not everyone was like her.
So when Jackson warned me that this successful, beautiful woman–who was everything I wanted to be and more–might be dangerous, all I heard was our mother's voice. The one that couldn't stand to see me have friends, or heroes, or really any happiness or excitement at all. The one that tore down anyone who threatened her.
I accused him of being jealous. Misogynistic. Making up conspiracy theories because he'd slept with her once and she hadn't called him back.
Then I said the cruelest thing I could think of: "This is straight out of Mom's playbook. When she can't control someone, she destroys them. And you're exactly like her."
If you've never been raised by someone with BPD, you might not understand why this was so devastating. But Jackson did. And so did I. It was the nuclear option, and I deployed it at 4 AM from a bathroom stall while my brother was standing at a crime scene.
The Live That Lived Forever
After hanging up on Jackson, I was shaking with rage. The champagne didn't help. The cognitive dissonance of being at this glamorous party while my brother tried to pull me into his paranoid delusions felt unbearable.
So I did what felt most natural: I opened Instagram.
I thought I was selecting "Close Friends" for my live video. I thought I was venting to my inner circle—the 200 or so people who'd understand the context, who knew about my family dynamics, who wouldn't judge.
I was wrong.
For eleven minutes, I talked to what turned out to be 47,000 viewers about:
How I was considering going no-contact with my brother
How he "used women" through his ghostwriting business
How he was "making up lies" about a woman I admired
Our mother's mental illness and abuse
How he'd "abandoned" me to deal with her alone
The viewer count should have tipped me off, but I was too deep in my feelings to notice. Too desperate to be heard, to be validated, to have someone tell me I was right and he was wrong.
By the time I realized my mistake the next morning, it was too late. The live had been screen-recorded. Twitter threads dissected every word. Reddit had a field day psychoanalyzing our family trauma.
And Jackson…
I’ll never forgive myself for what followed. No matter how many times he tells me it’s okay, it’s not.
And that’s my burden to bear.
What's the old adage: Sin in haste, repent at leisure? She learned that one the hard way.