
She divorced him and took her kids and moved." Gail, Mary Ann said, told her and her husband that she'd reveal Bob's sexual relationship with Berchtold publicly, this prompted them to agree to the affidavit.īerchtold's wife did not appear in Abduction in Plain Sight, and in an interview with Entertainment Tonight in 2019, Broberg explained that Gail divorced her husband before she was abducted a second time in 1976.īroberg said: "By the second kidnapping she had filed for a divorce.

When Broberg was found and returned home, Mary Ann explained in the documentary that Gail blackmailed her and her husband into signing an affidavit stating that they would not press charges against her husband over the kidnapping. In the Netflix documentary Abduction in Plain Sight, Broberg's mother Mary Ann explained that when Berchtold first kidnapped her daughter, his wife Gail suggested that they may have been in a car accident and urged her and Bob not to call the police.īerchtold, in reality, had taken Broberg and manipulated her into believing aliens wanted her to have a child with him before she turned 16, and he took her to Mexico where he married her they were there for five weeks. Gail was married to Berchtold at the time that he met Broberg and her family, and the couple shared three sons together who were around the same age as Broberg and her sisters, Karen and Susan.

While many of the internal machinations of Twitter’s child safety team remain unclear, there has been data to suggest that Twitter’s responsiveness has lagged since Musk took over.Īccording to data from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported by The New York Times, Twitter’s average response time to takedown requests for child sexual abuse material more than doubled in December to 3.5 days.Lio Tipton as Gail Berchtold in "A Friend of the Family," who was married to Robert 'B' Berchtold when he first kidnapped Jan Broberg but later divorced him.
ABDUCTION IN PLAIN SIGHT CRACK
In January, an NBC News investigation found that despite Musk’s claims that he’d crack down on child exploitation on the platform, hundreds of recent tweets offering to trade and sell child sex abuse material were easy to find. In November, the company halved the number of engineers and a wave of resignations followed. In October, Musk fired some of the company’s top legal employees. Heather questioned whether or not Musk’s chaotic takeover of the platform and the sizable layoffs he enacted at the company might have potentially slowed down how quickly the company could respond to law enforcement requests. The company says it will soon roll out a feature that can blur nudity in videos. An Apple representative said the company is working to expand features that can prevent children from interacting with predators. In separate statements, Discord and Roblox representatives said the platforms are taking actions to detect and prevent activities that could be dangerous for children. “We are very open to collaborating further with law enforcement on how we can speed up and better assist them with these types of investigations involving missing children and the data requests they may have in these cases,” Irwin said in an email. As the boy was being groomed, and over a month before his abduction, Elon Musk said that addressing child exploitation on Twitter was “ Priority #1,” alleging he’d inherited a platform on which child exploitation was previously allowed to run rampant.Įlla Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, provided an accounting of the company’s interactions with law enforcement in the case, but declined to address specific questions about the days leading up to the abduction. It also highlights the sometimes bold and grandiose security statements made by tech platform executives and managers, despite the problems those companies face every day. NBC News is not naming the teen because he is a minor. This report is based on a review of archived online messages, state and federal court filings made in the two active criminal cases involving the suspect, interviews with the parents of the teen, interviews with law enforcement officials who worked on the investigation into the abduction, and an interview with the teen himself while his mother was present. “I need to move forward and figure out what the hell happened,” Heather said.
ABDUCTION IN PLAIN SIGHT SERIES
It came after a series of missed opportunities over the span of nearly a month, where, they said, Twitter and law enforcement failed to effectively intervene despite an abundance of information posted online. Heather and Ken McConney, the boy’s parents, told NBC News that they believe the kidnapping was preventable.

The boy was allegedly abducted by the man accused of grooming him, driven across state lines, and, prosecutors said, repeatedly sexually assaulted. The boy’s father went to check on him one night and found him missing, his window open, the bedroom freezing.
