Official Book Club Selection (27 page)

The other big red flag, though, was that Matt gained about a hundred pounds in the first two years of our marriage. A hundred pounds. When I met Matt he’d been training for a marathon, so the change was striking. I don’t care about a guy having ripped abs or anything, but he was putting on the weight so rapidly that I went from thinking, Oh, he’s just getting comfortable, to me saying, “Matt, is this a sign that you’re unhappy? Is something going on?”

He always maintained, “I haven’t worked out in a while.”

“Well, I’m not always working out, either, but you seem to have quadrupled your intake of food. Is it the classic case of you stuffing down feelings? Do you need to express yourself more? What’s up? I love you, anyway. You know that. I’m attracted to you, any shape. But are you bothered by something? I would be asking you these questions if you’d had a dramatic weight loss as well. What’s upsetting you?”

His steadfast response was always, “I’ve just got to get back to running.”

I’d try to get him to go jogging with me, but he’d keep making excuses for why he couldn’t go. What could I do? I couldn’t force him to stop eating. Instead I just put faith in him coming to terms with whatever it was that was making him overeat.

When The D-List started filming in late 2004, we actually made his weight a story line, that Matt was going to have gastric bypass surgery. He never did, but I knew that filming in general would be another strain on a normal life for him—especially growing his business—so I made sure he was financially compensated by Bravo (Jessica, too), and I thought that would help him feel better about earning a living.

He seemed comfortable with the mic pack on, and I thought he was very natural on camera. Maybe this will be our life, I thought. He makes a living, whether nominal or good, and I subsidize the rest. That was fine with me. I never held it against him that he wasn’t going to become a millionaire. I never thought, I’m going to put my foot down until he makes this level of money.

Instead, I thought, You know what? We’re lucky. We’re in a position where I can carry the financial burden, and he can be the guy who’s there for me. This can work.

When D-List filmed, all those potential worries about Matt’s ways with money, his weight gain, and his struggles with business seemed to evaporate. Here we were, having fun together, but also working together, as a real team.

One afternoon, a phone call from my accountant changed everything.

Matt and I holding on, perhaps a little too long. (Photo: Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)

It was the end of a shooting day on season one of The D-List, and the crew had just left the house. We’d been in Las Vegas that morning filming as well, so it really had been a long day.

The phone rang, and it was my accountant. He said, “Hey, I just got a call from your bank, and somebody tried to use your ATM in two different states today.”

I appreciated the concern, but I felt I was able to nip that call in the bud. “Oh well, we were shooting in Vegas this morning, so that was me,” I said.

“Well, somebody tried to use that same card this afternoon at a Universal City ATM.”

That sounded odd. “I’ve never gone to a Universal City ATM.”

“Well, I’m looking back now on your withdrawals,” he said, “and I see several from a Universal City ATM. I just assumed it was the one you went to.”

“I rarely take cash out,” I explained to him. “I’m more likely to put stuff on cards and get the miles. But actual cash, I might withdraw $500 a month at the most.”

“Well, I’m seeing two different ATM cards, used back-to-back at this machine. One has a withdrawal of a thousand dollars and one is for five hundred. Someone is using those cards approximately once every three weeks, and they’re taking out fifteen hundred dollars. With the receipts I’m looking at, it looks like whoever this was withdrew about twenty thousand. And I’ve only gone back a few months.”

I immediately got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. This wasn’t a case of my cards being missing and I call it in to the bank. This was twenty grand stolen out of my account. Shit.

“Who has your PIN number?” my accountant asked.

“The only people who have my PIN number are me, Matt, and Jessica.”

Sometimes I sent Jessica out to get cash. Other times Matt and I would be running around doing errands and if I was driving, I would pull over and ask him to go to the ATM and get cash out for me. That’s why he had my PIN number. Oh, and he was also my husband.

My mind was racing at this point. I’d have to ask Jessica point-blank if she took the money, which didn’t sit well with me. Could there have been a worker in the house who might have gotten hold of the cards? While I was talking to the accountant, I went to my wallet.

“I’m holding those ATM cards,” I told my accountant. “They haven’t been stolen.”

“Well, if Matt and Jessica are the only ones who have access to your ATM cards, and they both have your PIN numbers, you’d better ask them. You’ve got twenty minutes, because I’ve called the bank, and they’re going to screen the tape of whoever the person was who went this afternoon and withdrew the fifteen hundred dollars.”

I hung up the phone, and steeled myself for an incredibly uncomfortable moment. I found Jessica walking up the stairs with a file in her hand, and I leaned over from the railing and said really off-handedly, “Jessica, I have to ask you a really weird question. I just found out somebody got my ATM cards and they’ve withdrawn twenty thousand dollars from my bank account. So I’ve just got to ask you, did you ever take my ATM cards?”

She said, “No! God no,” and I’ll never forget this, Jessica’s whole neck got this red rash instantly. She had a look on her face of utterly genuine confusion. To me it was completely the physical reaction of someone innocent. I knew it wasn’t from guilt. First of all, Jessica’s a terrible liar, thank God, and second of all, if someone wrongly accused me of something, I’d get sweaty and nervous and shake, too, probably, thinking, Oh my God, what do I have to say to defend myself? I know I would. This was a girl I’d been working with for three years, who was legitimately flipped out that this had happened. In any case, she took a beat and said, “Is there anything I can do to help you find out?” Also not something a guilty person says. I told her I’d get back to her when I found out more.

Well, being pragmatic, I couldn’t completely rule out my husband, so I decided to ask him directly, too. He could certainly ask the same of me if something like this came up. I called him into our bedroom, closed the doors, and he sat down. He was pretty large by this point, and he cut an immense figure in the chair. “Okay,” I said, “I have to ask you something, and it’s a really hard question, but just be completely honest with me, no matter what the answer is.”

I still really didn’t think it could be Matt. I was already thinking of who had been in the house over the last few months, and my mind was racing. “I just got a call from the accountant, and what they’re telling me is somebody has taken my ATM card, gone to a Universal City ATM and systematically taken out twenty thousand dollars from my accounts over the last few months. So I have to ask, have you been taking my ATM card and stealing money?”

“No.”

“Okay, because you and Jessica are the only ones with my PIN number, and I’ve already asked Jessica.”

“It wasn’t me,” he said.

For some reason, the phrase “due diligence” came into my head. I was trying to think rationally. Suspicion started creeping into my mind, so I just wanted to stay with the facts. I wanted Matt to know everything that I’d been told by the accountant. “All right. Well, you should know the accountant is on the phone with the bank, and they’re going to look at the tape, and he’s going to call me back in about five minutes. So, I know it sounds crazy, Matt, but if you’re on that tape, they’re going to know, and it’s going to be all over their office.”

That’s when he said, “It was me.”

I have to say, that moment was absolutely like being socked in my heart. Not like being punched in the gut or the face, but cold-cocked in my heart. My heart started beating really fast, the way it does when you’re faced with having to realize something you don’t want to accept as true, that a horrible inevitability is at hand. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear it. He came right out and said it. But only after …

That’s when I thought, My God, he only admitted it when he knew there was a tape and he would get caught. Ouch.

The accountant called back, and all I said was, “Matt admitted it. I’ll call you later.”

I was physically shaking. But I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t hysterical. Several things were flying around in my head. Number one, obviously, was why? Number two, what have I done to set the stage for this? In what way have I created an environment where this could happen? Number three, we’re in the middle of shooting a reality show. The crew is coming back tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. How does that work?

When shitty things happen to me, I go into processing mode. I wouldn’t say my approach dealing with the situation was matter-of-fact, but I started thinking about the actions I needed to take right then and there. I set aside feelings and emotion and instead began taking care of business. I wanted to tell Jessica immediately that she was off the hook, because I felt it was my responsibility to put her mind at ease after my uncomfortable inquiry. But that meant, by process of elimination, that Jessica was going to know it was Matt. I wanted him to know that I had to go do this.

“I understand. You need to do whatever you need to do right now. I’ve done a horrible thing to you, so whoever you need to tell, whoever you need to process this with, I understand. You’ve earned the right to get through this however you see fit.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “Let’s take this one step at a time. Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

He was very still. He didn’t cry, he wasn’t cavalier, and he seemed to be grasping the gravity of the situation. I told him to walk me through it, and while his reaction wasn’t exactly shifty—meaning he wasn’t making up crazy lies about it—what he was saying just wasn’t adding up. “My business isn’t going well. I’m not really making money. I just didn’t have any money.”

“Okay, but what made you think that you were entitled to just take money from me?”

All he could say was, “I just felt I needed more money.”

My head was spinning with big questions. What did that mean, he needed “more money”? Did I now have to start questioning everything with this guy? Did I marry the wrong man? Did he really love me? Ever? Did I think I was overlooking a small thing when in fact I was overlooking a giant thing? Because I don’t know why just because there’s a piece of paper saying we’re married that I have to lose half of my income to someone, half of what I earned from my own hard work. In fact, if Matt had asked for a joint account—which he didn’t—I would have been instantly suspicious. If I’d married Steve Wozniak, I certainly wouldn’t have expected half his money, or half his earnings during the time we were together. I know California is a community property state, but these were ATM cards that had my name on them, that were accounts to which only I had contributed. Matt had his own ATM card, and his own income from his job, as far as I knew.

At this point, I asked Matt to walk me through the process of obtaining this money. I was obsessed with wanting to know the details of it all.

He said he would get up early in the morning and while I was asleep—because if I can sleep in, I will—he’d sneak into my wallet, take out both ATM cards, and race to that Universal City ATM, which was three minutes from the house. He’d then take out the maximum amounts you could—$1,000 from one card, $500 from the other—and return home with the cash, put it in his pocket, then put the ATM cards back in my wallet. Then this man—who knew more than anyone in my life how hard I’d worked to earn that money, who’d witnessed all the crappy gigs, the exhaustion, the long days that started early in the morning with filming and ended with getting on a plane at night to fly to the next show—would crawl back into bed with me.

Does that not sound like a betrayal of trust? You can argue the whole “his money is your money, your money is his money” thing all day long, but I’m not sneaking into anybody’s wallet and taking their personal ATM cards.

This was not a situation where he’d come to me and said “Can you loan me twenty thousand dollars?” It’s the secretiveness that got to me. Regardless of California state law, I’m sorry, in my book it’s stealing. I was beginning to feel like a wife from one of those Dateline episodes where the husband has another family in Wyoming.

After I confronted Matt, I did say, “Why didn’t you just ask me for money?”

“Because I knew I couldn’t justify why I didn’t have my own money.”

This seemed a bigger issue than I realized. “So not only do you need money, but you’re now telling me that you haven’t been working as much as you led me to believe? I thought you had several clients, and you were making three hundred dollars to five hundred dollars a day.”

Shaking his head, “No.”

Okay. I began steeling myself for the next revelation. “How many clients do you really have?”

“Sometimes I have weeks where I make two hundred dollars,” he said.

Okay. “Well, you’re getting up every single day at six or seven in the morning, and you come home at five or six at night. What are you doing? Where do you go?”

“I drive around.”

Okay. “Drive around where?”

He told me he’d go to the movies, go to the park, and go to the drive-thru. This is where he confessed to compulsively overeating. I remember him saying one thing that did make sense. He told me the real reason he had put on so much weight was because he felt so guilty about taking the money. Now I knew where the 100-extra-pounds issue came from. But then I remembered how he’d tell me in great detail about his clients and workday, the computers he was fixing, the people causing him trouble, how he was trying to get $110 an hour instead of $100, all of it.

I didn’t know what was true anymore. This bright, capable guy was apparently living and building a life that was this very intricate lie. It seemed so odd to me. Why couldn’t he put all that energy and time and thought into his work instead?