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Birds, dotcom. You know what's weird about the presidency or, you know, one of the things that's weird. They all have to live in the same house, all the president's. Everything about that, OK, when you win the Super Bowl, like if the Patriots won the Super Bowl the previous year, you don't go and live in Bill Belichick house. You don't drink coffee every morning in his kitchen, watch TV in his rec room at night.

That would be strange. It's so personal going in somebody's space. I think a President Trump for so many years, he said Barack Obama should be president, said he was born in the United States, is still picking fights with Barack Obama today. There was that White House Correspondents Dinner the Trump attended back when Obama was president.

Donald Trump is here tonight. Obama mocked him. All kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience.

For example, no, seriously, just recently in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team, then Trump wins the White House and moves in and has to sleep in Barack Obama's old bedroom using the same bathroom in the morning.

And we see the beginning picture of the previous guy there right now.

And then at least once, it's weird that we make the most powerful man in the world do this, sleep in the bedroom of somebody he might hate, somebody he might really see as an enemy.

But, you know, that's a peaceful transfer of power. I hope it's not too partisan to say a few kind words today about the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, we all still believe in that, right?

Republicans and Democrats will stand by its basic principle of our Constitution, our democracy. 1992, Bill Clinton defeated the incumbent President, George H.W. Bush.

Bush had to move out of the White House for the young president who'd sent him packing. Bush left this letter for Clinton in the Oval Office. It's been circulating around on the Internet this week. The original was handwritten on White House stationery.

It reads, Dear Bill, when I walked into this office just now, I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that to. I wish you great happiness here. I've never felt belonging to some presidents have described. There will be very tough times made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I'm not a very good one to give advice, but just don't let the critics discourage you or put you off course.

You will be our president when you read this note, Yanagisawa, at our. I wish you well, I wish your family well. Your success now is our country's success. I'm rooting hard for you. Good luck, George. I know two people who cried when they read that this week, that's how far that letter seems from the America we live in right now. I like it that we make the new president go and sleep in the bedroom of his vanquished rival.

I go, how intimate that is. You know what's more intimate, that your own bedroom. And underlines how we're all stuck with each other in this country, divided as we are disagreeing so vehemently and underlines how we can't get away from each other than our program, same bed, different dreams, stories of enemies sleeping together or working together or just stuck together in some way with very different hopes and goals.

We have stories of deception and StarCrossed haters. WBC, Chicago. It's this American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Stay with us. Can dream Weaver, that title is going to make more sense as the story goes on, just trust me on that.

In 1986, a man and woman ran into a U.S. embassy in Vienna and said they needed asylum. They were from South Korea and they told embassy officials this incredible story of kidnapping and intrigue and being torn apart and thrown back together and years of dreaming about escape from their kidnapper while at the same time convincing their kidnapper that what they really wanted to do was stay with him. Nancy Updike has the story, the woman who was kidnapped was a famous South Korean actress named he I wrote a book about it by writer and film producer named Paul Fisher.

He spent years researching this story.

You should compare it at the time to Elizabeth Taylor.

Elizabeth Taylor, imagine if Elizabeth Taylor, past her prime, but still famous from all her iconic roles, had just disappeared one day she was that beautiful, that much of an icon in South Korea, and she was gone.

She found out pretty quickly who had arranged this when she was kidnapped in 1978. She was put on a boat and the boat went to Nampo Harbor in North Korea. And she actually has a photo, which is in the book of her very first meeting with Kim Jong Il. He was there waiting for her off the boat with a photographer and they had a photographer take a photo and then send it to her as you want to remember this.

Exactly.

Remember that time and he's that time I had you kidnapped and brought to me. And it's a terrible picture.

And he's beaming and smiling and she's got her face covered.

For years, her family and her country didn't know where she was. This happened in 1978. She was in her 50s. And her first sickening guess as to why she'd been taken was it Kim Jong Il had brought her to North Korea to be a mistress for his father, the great leader, Kim Il Sung, who is ruling the country at the time. But no, it seemed that Kim Jong Il himself was just a very big fan of Chinese movies.

He put her up in a fancy villa surrounded by walls and barbed wire and armed guards, she called it in her memoir, Las Vegas Meets Vladivostok. Kim Jong Il brought her out to display at parties. That was Czesław for five years until one particular night and one special party chair had been there for a while.

And she was standing, you know, somewhere in the center of the room.

And she was used to these parties by this point. Exactly.

They were routine. She'd started sort of feeling repulsed by them, but people got drunk and groped women and then they went on forever. And somebody had already told her that, you know, this is going to be such a great evening for you. And she nodded along because she was used to sort of hyperbole about everything.

She had no idea that Kim Jong Il that night was planning to show off for the first time.

Another person he had acquired, the man who had directed or produced almost all of his movies, her ex husband, Shin, saying, OK, Shin and Che each didn't know that the other was also in the country.

Shin had been brought there the same way Che was, but he tried to escape twice. So he was thrown in a prison camp for a couple of years.

The best way to describe Shin, you know, Steven Spielberg's sort of good comparison, a sense of why he made films that were very good, very commercial, very popular, and they also produced other people's films, had his own studio. And, you know, he was the most powerful popular filmmaker in South Korea, arguably in all of Southeast Asia for most of the 60s and the 70s.

And Shin, you know, ten days prior to this, he was still in a prison camp, got released and for ten days and Avella, they found them up, tried to restore them to health. You know, he arrives at the party when it's already, you know, in full flow and he walks inside.

And as soon as he enters, there's applause.

What an insane thing to go. You're in a prison camp, you walk in and you're the life of the party. Everyone's applauding. Exactly.

And in the pictures, you know, his face, the looks of me say that you can tell he's just gone through something terrible. The suit doesn't fit.

No, Che doesn't see Shin come in. She just hears people start applauding.

And Che is sort of even unfazed by this. You know, any time Kim does anything, people get up and applaud.

So she didn't know why people are applauding. She had no idea until somebody says, you know, why don't you look happy? Look who's here. And she turns around and, you know, it's been five years. Chen's got the marks of having been, you know, tortured in a prison camp. She doesn't recognize him right away. And from that point on, Kim Jong Il, you know, was pulling them together and they sort of shell shocked, hugged one another.

And then, you know what then moved around like like, you know, locking in a in a movie scene by Kim Jong Il. What, like stand here, sit here, stand here.

You stand next to me, smile to the cameras. You know, they were sort of to the guests of honor. Famous people don't get to pick their fans, Kim Jong Il was a super fan who was also, unfortunately, the son of the all powerful leader of a totalitarian state. Shin and Che had made their best movies together. Kim loved their movies and he wanted them to be a couple, just like they were in their heyday. So he arranged it Parent Trap style.

He told them at the party that, guess what?

He had a newly remodeled villa for them that they would be living in from now on together making a joke.

I think he said something like, you know, the newlyweds are going to want to be alone now. What a weirdo. And had them taken to a car. And, you know, by all accounts, seemed extremely pleased and expected them to be equally so. And, you know, it's the the moments right after that when I went back to the villa, close the bathroom door, turn the faucets on to the light privately, they turn the fastest on so they can whisper and actually have a private company.

Exactly.

And they just asked one another what had happened.

You know, the way she describes it is sort of a lovely moment where she asks him, you know, what happened to you? And he said a lot, I'll tell you some other time. And he asked her what happened to you? And she said a lot, I'll tell you some other time.

And then kind of gingerly again asked her, you know, you looked very smiley and happy. And I just, you know, have you been brainwashed? And she made a joke about how the director couldn't even recognize acting anymore. And it's sort of, you know, both of them were finally able to be genuine with someone. And, you know, they spent the next several hours going through everything.

Shin and Che made a long term plan and a short term plan, long term, they were going to escape. But they would wait till they could do it right, so they wouldn't be caught. Their short term plan involved a small tape recorder which they were able to get because one of the weird privileges of their captivity was that they were allowed to shop at a department store that sold things that were out of reach for most people in the country, like tape recorders.

Kim Jong Il had long and short term plans of his own for them. He told them that soon he would some of them, to talk about his vision for their future. Then seven months went by.

And during those months, she and Jay spent hours nearly every week in Kim's huge film archive. He wanted Shin and Che to see it and be impressed. And they were Kim didn't just love their movies.

He loved all movies. It was against the law for ordinary North Koreans to watch foreign films. But Kim had set up a massive bootlegging operation running in countries all over the world so he could build up his private collection with every movie ever made or as close as he could get.

The archive was three stories high and heavily guarded. At least two screening rooms, all for Kim only and now for Shin and Jae Shin was bowled over by every detail, you know, the way the building itself was set up to run and, you know, with admiration over how Kim had set up his own archive and how well everything was kept, you know, geeking out over the air conditioning settings and how he was preserving the celluloid and, you know, how everything was catalogued and the staff and and how large I was.

How is it categorized?

Was it by a year or by genre or by director and went by country first.

And then I think it went by year as they got them in. And then there's that lovely touch where, you know, the South Korean films and a kind of normal air conditioning room and then the North Korean films and the most lavish storage and screening room and the whole building. The films were dubbed into Korean after being painstakingly transcribed sometimes by Americans. There was an American defector. He was one of several actually who'd been there since 1965, and one of his jobs was transcribing American films.

But just by listening, because he wasn't allowed to watch them. Yeah.

And you wouldn't know that they were films because they gave him and the other American defectors the audio. For some reason, they chopped up the film soundtracks into different bits in the wrong order so they wouldn't know, I guess they were doing exactly enjoy them.

But he had this experience of, you know, transcribing them and suddenly realizing, wait, this is Mary Poppins. And Jay spent dozens and dozens of hours watching one movie after another in the screening rooms at the film archive and in their villa, which was also outfitted to show movies, they do that for months until finally they got word Kim is ready to meet with you.

They went and they brought the tape recorder.

And the second they walked in, she had the tape recorder and her purse and she flicked it on. And I think unexpectedly, Kim Jong Il just talked at them mostly for two hours.

I was, you know, Kim Jong Il spoke very, very fast and his mind sort of went all over the place. And he had a very intimidating waiter slash bodyguard who kept walking in to to refill drinks and empty ashtrays. Shin and she wanted to record Kim for two reasons.

First, they knew they might not be able to escape. Maybe they would be killed and their children and friends would just never know what had happened to them. Or chording, if they could smuggle it out, would at least be proof of where they'd been. The second reason to record him was that they knew that Kim would insist, they say publicly that they had come to North Korea on their own voluntarily. Shin and Che were hoping that in their private conversation, Kim might admit to having had them kidnapped and brought to him.

And he almost almost did by making a joke. In the first couple of minutes of their conversation, Kim talked about how he brought Che over first in order to entice Shin to North Korea.

I say joke because Kim laughs as he says it, and then all three of them laugh and everything about it's Tyrant Management 101.

If he laughs, you laugh the rest of what Kim said in that conversation.

Well, he said a lot of things, but the main thing was North Korean movies are bad and I'm sick of it.

Well, they were making the same film over and over again and that there were too long and too boring and like history lessons and and too melodramatic. And he says there's too much crying. I didn't tell anybody to put in so much crying.

My mother, Father Kim Jong Il, told Shin and Che that he knew he was the only person in the country who could get away with saying what he was saying. And he told them not to repeat any of it. He said when it comes to movies, we are in kindergarten and other countries like South Korea are in college, he said. If we don't catch up in the next ten years, our movies are going to be the worst of the worst movies in the world.

The problem, he said, just between us is that people in North Korea had it too easy. They had things handed to them. They didn't have to hustle like shit and shaded. There's a point in the tape where he tells them that, you know, and I think, you know, he says I'm paraphrasing, but he says, you know, there's no incentive and socialism to do any better. You know, he said my my screenwriters, you know, they'll write something, they'll get their rations.

You know, the other guys make a film, they'll get their rations, they get paid no matter what. They just turn out the the work. Exactly. And follow orders. And he seemed very conscious that, you know, I need someone who he pushes himself more than that, who's used to having to do more than that to earn his keep.

Kim Jong Il never mentioned another possible reason why North Korea's movies were wooden and unambitious, like fear.

He Kim Jong Il had written the book, the only book in North Korea, about the right way to make movies and think about movies. It's called On the Art of the Cinema. It's still in print. Everyone involved in North Korea's film industry in the 1980s had to have been aware of the potential consequences of doing something as unpatriotic or insulting, as trying to realize their own independent artistic vision. Without Kim's explicit blessing and his father's, it was better to be crappy than sorry.

The conversation continued. Shannon, she murmured that North Korea's citizens were fortunate to have a comrade leader who understood film so well, Kim Jong Il agreed with his permission. The three of them got into critiquing specific films, a North Korean one called the Star of Korea. And while they were at it, a Soviet film called Mother. It had a dying scene. They all agreed had been atrocious.

I they were three movie lovers talking about what they loved. And Kim Jong Il's big plan for Shin and Jay was that he wanted them to make North Korean movies good so that they could compete with films coming out of the West and win awards and be shown in theaters all over the world.

He wanted to act in the movies and Shin to direct them. Shin could have his own film company, just like he used to have.

Shin wanted to call the company Shin Film, a very bold request in the circumstances beyond nothing in North Korea had been called anything other than, you know, the worker's paradise.

This at a party, this sort of supreme leader this or, you know, Kim Il Sung University. So it was a big deal. But it's also very telling of Shin that even in this surreal situation, his first instinct is, OK, ok, ok, OK. But can we give the company my name?

In film noir, someone is always using someone and often people are using each other and we don't find out until the end who gets away with what she did.

And she knew that their only chance of escape would be to convince Kim Jong Il to let them film and work in the West.

Kim Jong Il knew that if he wanted good movies, he had to give Shen and Che enough freedom to create them. So all three of them wanted to make great movies, but same bed, different dreams.

Kim Jong Il wanted the films for his own purposes, and they needed the films to get away from him. And it's almost like his ambition of making films at the world respect completely overtook any sense of logic. So the first film, Shot and, um, Shot had sequences that they shot in Eastern Europe standing in for The Hague. And, you know, they showed Kim Jong Il the film. Um, he said, this is fantastic. It's like a European film.

It's the best thing we've ever made, allowed him to start showing it. And it never crossed his mind that they had done exactly what he'd forbidden his own filmmakers to do forever. For a reason.

They've been forbidden to show the world outside North Korea.

They showed people things that they hadn't been able to see, you know, almost in a lifetime for some people in North Korea by nineteen eighty three, nineteen eighty four and a second, that film started playing in cinemas in North Korea. You know, the North Korean audiences didn't take in necessarily the higher production values. And all they could talk about was that first 10, 15 minutes shot on the streets of Prague where, you know, the buildings look amazing.

People are walking into businesses. They're all dressed differently. There's cars. What you know, that's what really had an impact because up until then, they had been told, you are the luckiest people in the world. You know, the worker's paradise is the only place in the world where people have peace and freedom. And suddenly they saw that that wasn't true. How do you know that? That's what people thought. I was lucky enough to meet and speak to people who'd escaped from North Korea, who were of varying ages at the time that they were able to watch these films.

And there's another German researcher in Japan I called your highness here who's done quite a lot of talking to defectors about the same thing. And it's one of the things that's fascinating is that Shin and Chase films had a huge impact straight away. You know, there were been people in their late 30s who'd never seen anything of the outside world that hadn't been filtered. But it wasn't just that people suddenly were able to see footage of the outside world. But, you know, again and she made a film called Love, Love, My Love, which was literally the first love story and North Korean culture post nineteen forty five.

There wasn't about love of the leader. Our love of the party was literally the first time people were able to go to the cinema and see something. And it was about two people falling in love. And it was the first time, you know, teenagers had pictures on their wall of of a matinee idol of anybody other than the leaders. Shin directed seven films for Kim Jong Il, and then in March 1986, he and Che went to a hotel in Vienna for some film business, managed to grab a separate taxi from their North Korean minders, sped to the U.S. embassy and ran in.

They were debriefed by the CIA and later by South Korean intelligence, and they were interviewed by The Washington Post and other media outlets. And stories about North Korea are always hard to fact check for parts of Shin and Chase story, their recollections, their interpretations are all there is. But the movies exist, the recording of Kim exists, Kim Jong Il had told Shin and Che in the recording that when people asked them why they were in North Korea, they should say freedom for true artistic freedom for Shin.

There were some bitter truth to that, because South Korea at the time Shin and Che were kidnapped, had been a military dictatorship with very heavy handed censors. Shin Studio had been shut down by the South Korean government in 1975. His career was in ruins in North Korea. Shin got to make films again. He wrote unabashedly in his autobiography how much he had loved making movies there.

Shin always spoke of North Korea as the place where he kind of the place he associated film Freedom with and creative freedom with because he can ask for anything and get it, you know, he asked in one episode he asked for like a model train to blow up for a scene, and he was given a real train packed with explosives on rails to blow up if you wanted to. And if he asked for a wind machine, he sent helicopters. And if you wanted fake snow, everybody was flown to a mountain.

You know, there's no expense spared. You know, Kim Jong Il felt like the larger than life film producer there you hear about. And he didn't have the downside that a film producer usually has because the film producer has to say no every now and and we don't have enough money. We don't have enough time.

Chen and Jay had remarried in North Korea at Kim Jong Il suggestion, and it ended up being a real marriage. They were together until Shin died in 2006. They seem to have been each other's big love in life besides movies. Although Chynn loved movies more than she did. Maybe a lot more in their shared memoir of their time in North Korea. It goes from his voice to her voice back and forth, and kind of the second they start making films, her voice kind of disappears entirely.

And it's all his from then on. And, you know, it's about escaping, but in equal measure, it's about making the films almost as if he's writing a memoir of his time in Hollywood or something. Che's 88 years old, living in South Korea when Paul was researching his book, he interviewed her for it and he asked her about Shin and the movies they made in North Korea.

And, you know, when I met her and spoke to her, you could sense the impatience that, you know, if she had had been able to get out of there three years earlier and not made any of the films, she had been very happy to do so.

And him not so much and him not so much. Even great love can't protect you from the other person wanting what they want. Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our show, Patricia's book about all this is called A Kim Jong Il Production.

We first broadcast this story in 2015, and he has died since then.

Coming up, people sharing beds, actual beds with very different dreams. That's in a minute. Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

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To American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Today on a program, same bed, different dreams, we have stories of people who are bound closely together.

They are stuck with each other, but with very different hopes and goals.

We've arrived at Act two of our program to smell you later.

There are kinds of work situations where people very good or at least share an actual bed so they can do their jobs. These are people who share a bed that they are not ever in. At the same time, this happens in lots of places that has different names, shift beds, hot cheating, hot bedding.

Flight attendants do this their apartments with bunk beds that they use when they happen to be in that city.

Guys who work on oil rigs and oil fields do it, too.

We had we have to swap out sheets every time that we're going to pretend that we're going to go to our ship, swap out your shoes and put my sheets.

This guy works in Carlsbad, New Mexico, when he had a friend first moved there two years ago to do fracking to save money, they rented this small RV just like fifteen feet long.

One bet on it. He worked nights.

His friend Workday's, they had a room to always shower before getting in the bed.

The sheets, my friends always been real picky on that. He always had like a color blue. I always liked red, red sheets, something something bright. So he every time that I leave, he always had like my red sheets on certain that I'd leave. I'd always put his blue sheets on and we never got the same sheets because we never wanted to be mixed up and stuff.

I'd be pretty, pretty messed up smelling him and he'd be smelling me as the migrant workers also have these shift beds in some places, the farms around the country, in New York, the main agricultural product is milk. There are 4000 dairy farms in the state and lots of them operate 24/7. So shift beds are common. Stephanie Foo went to see the shift beds and one of those farms.

I didn't see any cows on the farm and more surprising, I didn't smell them. Instead, they were just sweet smelling bales of hay in a field with three mobile homes on it. Mexican music was blasting out of the closest one. My interpreter Antonia and I knock on the door and as soon as we step inside, the stench of manure is overpowering from a few mud caked boots in the corner. It's a two bedroom trailer with holes in the floor and black mold growing in the cabinets and clutter everywhere, roaches and jars of Nescafe and sugar and cans of beans, Coronas at seven p.m. and were there during the shift change there.

Four or five guys milling around are Mexican, all undocumented. Some are just getting home. And others like this one guy, Jose, are just waking up for work. Jose QAI. But he smiles a lot. He shows Antonio and me where he sleeps.

Well, there's a bed in the bathroom. Jose lifts up the beds, mattress and a wooden plank underneath, knocking over a jar of change and oh, are you in the bathtub?

Save. You joked that if you wanted to take a bath, he could just lift up his bed and get in his bed is a wooden plank placed over the tub. There are a couple of pillows shoved over the faucet so that the knobs don't turn and flood the tub while he's sleeping.

It's happened before, including the bathtub bed.

There are total of seven beds in the two bedroom mobile home.

Sometimes up to 13 people live here and share the seven beds sleeping in shifts. Jose explained how it works.

No, there are no alarm clocks, no need for them.

When you get off work, you find someone who has an opposite shift from you and you wake them up so you can take their bed.

I know you're living in a warzone, says, OK, I get here at four a.m. and my friend is sleeping and I tap him on his blanket and it goes like this. Guess who is it?

It was me, Hosain.

That's it's five. It's five. It's five. And they try to go back to sleep. Let me sleep. They come with me and I say I have it's five it's five minutes. OK, ok, it's five. It's ok. It's OK to then I get ready for bed. He wakes up and says OK, see you later, I'll wake you later.

And does it feel strange and intimate or did it first when when you had to share a bed with somebody.

You know, I say when I say this task force, Jose says, yes of course, yeah.

You're used to coming to work and suddenly someone else comes and sleeps in your bed in your blankets. You should see it's weird you flip your pillow over each time. That's well, that's yeah. It's not OK, but you get used to it.

Everyone smells. We become friends. You know that if he showers, it's fine.

But if not, I understand when you're in San Antonio. I mean because sometimes you don't get back until seven or six and there's no time to shower. I'm understanding that. And he should be to. It's fine. I mean, you get used to it, really. It's almost like think that's what everyone kept telling me. You get used to it to the hours, to the work, to everyone else rummaging around in your space. You get used to it.

Jose Antonio works seven days a week, 16 hours, three days a week, eight hours, the other for no overtime. I talked to a guy who has worked closely with many farms across the state and he described the pay and living conditions at the farm we were at as, quote, slightly below average.

Jose says it's not that bad. He says other farms he's lived at have been worse. At one, the roof leaked onto the beds and it was so crowded that he'd try to sleep standing up at another. He couldn't sleep because he was afraid that a drunk, violent roommate would beat him up in the middle of the night here. They get along. If someone wants to bring his girlfriend over, the rest of them all cram into the other bedroom, even sleep together in one bed so that guy can have a room to himself.

But mostly they're not too concerned about privacy as I squeezed past piles of other people's toiletries and clothes and sheets and condom wrappers all over the floor. I was reminded of what a luxury it is to ever feel like you have a space that's all yours here.

At any given moment, somebody might be in the next room bumping the Black Eyed Peas off YouTube and singing at the top of their lungs. Here we go. Here we go. We go the second you go. This is a guy named Antonio singing.

He got really excited at this part because he knew the days of the week in English on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Well, most of the days all this is bearable because it's temporary.

They do this a few years, then move home. And Antonio tells me he makes more than one day here than he would in a whole week in Mexico and sends it all back.

One man says he actually owns his own farm in Mexico with his own workers and that he's working here to be able to expand it. Many guys have built businesses, one is putting two kids through college. Jose says he bought a big house for his girlfriend in Mexico. Another man puts it best. He says every head is its own world. I come from my dreams and he comes for his.

One of the things Antonio, the guy who was singing dreams about is his bed, his future, but he can picture exactly what his bedroom in Mexico will look like once he's finished building it.

Piece of here, making peace or color with a sturdy red floor.

That's a color I like.

The bedrooms each have a bathroom, Principlist quarters, Colombani, Banyo with Internet, Internet. I got Netflix.

What size bed do you want? Is it firm or is it soft king size? No, they were king sized waterbed.

It's the best. No. This is important. That's why we're here. Antonio cracks another. It's getting late for him. He has to get up in six hours for his shift and shake his hand. But before I go, I notice that I don't smell the manure anymore. I haven't smelled in a while. Actually, the air seems cold and fresh. The right. You really can get used to the smell.

Stephanie Foo, she's currently working on a memoir about healing from complex PTSD.

Her story was first broadcast in 2015 when it aired somebody who knew the managers of the farm apparently heard Stephanie's story on the radio and then talked to the managers like, hey, that sounds like your place. And then the manager apparently talked to the workers. And at some point, the Mexican consulate sent a guy in a car to help straighten this out. And soon enough, chop chop, new trailer. Nobody share his bed. Nobody sleeps in the bathtub anymore.

Factory hunted becomes the hunter. This next story is about two women who are sleeping in the same bed, they're kind of inhabiting the same body in a way with very different dreams. Tell us what happened.

Jessamine Lovel didn't know she had a secret doppelganger until she got a phone call. Jessamine is a photographer and teaches photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. And one morning she was heading out the door for work. And I get this call.

And he identified himself as inspector crudo from the San Francisco Police Department Financial Crimes Unit. And he immediately asked me, do you know a woman named Aaron Carlingford? And I said, no. And he and why? And he said, Well, did you ever give her your ID, your New Mexico state driver's license or any other ID? And I said, no, no, I don't know her. And what is this about? And and I immediately thought of my wallet being stolen a year and a half prior at this gallery in San Francisco.

She never got it back and assumed it was gone for good. But now this police inspector was telling her that a woman named Aaron Hart had just been busted using Jasmine's driver's license, trying to check into a San Francisco hotel. And he said, look, I'll send you a police report. You know, she's in police custody right now and she was in police custody because she had been trying to use your I.D.. Yeah, exactly.

I don't know.

I just kind of thought, that sucks that that happened and that's that and, you know, whatever.

But then about a week after that, it became clear that Jasmine's license had been used at more places than just the hotel. A collections agency demanded payment from Jessamine for five hundred dollars worth of goods from a Whole Foods store. Unpaid parking tickets and televisions also started showing up in her mailbox. And then the rental car company Hertz began hounding her for thousands of dollars in charges they figured out and sort of added it up.

And it was all like three different cars that she had rented. So one, she just returned. Another one she had clearly damaged, another one she had had like the boot had been put on it and there were tickets and whatever. Like I knew I had not rented these cars. And yet they would not believe me. They would not believe me.

She was spending time on the phone and email trying to tell them in other places that she'd been a victim of identity theft. And then Justman got a summons to appear in court from Alameda County Court in Oakland. The charge against her was petty theft. So I was like really freaked out. Like this must be connected to her.

This woman, Aaron Hart. So she bought a plane ticket on a credit card and flew to Oakland. Once Jessamine got there, she sat around in a courtroom all morning waiting to be called up. I was getting more and more ramped up. I felt like a lot of people were getting taken away until she was finally the last person in the room. And then the judge asked me, are you the one that sent this big pile of papers into me?

And I was like, yes, those are the documents.

She's like, OK, I'm going to look through them really, really quickly here, because what was in there, again, all of the hurt stuff.

And then the police report just to show, like the believe me, this isn't the only thing, all this other stuff going on.

The judge dismissed the case, but told Jessamine she should get the charge expunged so it wouldn't appear in background checks, which was going to be a whole other hassle. She walked out of the courtroom and she was still completely worked up. How much was this going to cost her? Who was this woman and what else had she done posing as Jessamine?

I thought immediately, like, I want to I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I'm going to figure this out. I want to know what it was she did.

I don't know how she got my I.D. I wanted to find her.

I want to find her. This is where Jessamine story changes from a garden variety identity theft case to something stranger, she had a photocopy of an enhanced driver's license and the file she took to court. So she pulled it out and looked at the home address listed on it.

I had enough, like, drive, just like adrenaline that I was like, I'm going there just like I'm doing this thing.

And what was the thing that you were thinking you were going to do?

I don't know. I mean, I. I seriously, I wish I could tell you I had a plan and I had something I was going to say and I just didn't and I remember thinking, like, well, I want to park close enough that I can't get into my car if I have to like you.

Not even kidding.

I really did think that it was this huge, huge, huge, huge, huge apartment building.

And I got in I had someone went in and I just snuck in after them, like, I'm going in. I've got no apartment. No, I'm going to go in. And so I'm walking to the halls and I found the apartment. I just went up to it and knocked on it and no one answered the door.

And then I'm relieved, like, OK, well, I have to leave. And then I photograph the door. Maybe one of the most boring pictures ever taken my life.

Why? Like, why take a picture?

I almost wanted just to have the evidence for myself that, like, you went there, you did this almost like I mean, I don't overstate it like a tourist documents.

Like, I kind of felt like I needed to have this pin dropped there. Like, I know it sounds crazy in hindsight. It kind of does sound a little weird in hindsight.

Justman also went to the Herts counter in San Francisco, where three cars were rented in her name and the Whole Foods in Berkeley, where she had a five hundred dollar debt, and Hotel Vitale. That's where Aaron Hart got arrested, trying to check in with her license, walking in and saw that it was the type of hotel she'd never be able to stay at and was not prepared for how, like, fancy this place was going to be right away.

Coming in the door. They had, like wine or they had tea. And the hotel staff immediately asked me if they could help me. And as soon as I said this woman had tried to check in here with my ID, the guy knew.

And actually he said that usually when this happens and I was like, oh, this happens a lot. He's like, yes. And when that happens, we asked him to leave and they leave. And he said, this woman didn't leave.

The manager knew Aaron was a fraud because she got Jasmine's name wrong. When she checked in, she had a beautifully groomed Persian cat with her and was standing in the lobby insisting that the license was hers.

That's when the manager decided to call the police. So they arrested her. They took her away and the cat was just left there with her stuff. And they were like, well, I guess we'll have to call animal humane. And then she came a couple days later, she was released and asked for a cat at the hotel. And they said, well, we I'm sorry, we sent it. And she was really upset that they that the cat wasn't there.

That definitely was the first moment where I had any kind of sympathy for her. And they gave her the number for Animal Humane.

And then she left. And when I went to Animal Humane, you were the animal humane to go.

Yeah. So I tracked down the cat. Well, she had been there to see if, you know and nobody knew anything about her.

The cat, I mean, and so I just OK. And I just like left and then I photographed the outside.

So Jessamine goes home to New Mexico, but she just can't let this go. She's still dealing with the fallout, fighting with Herts and a few other places over bills. And she decides to do a bunch of things that most of us would not do. First, Justman sends a letter to Aaron's address saying, basically, I know what you did and here's what it's done to me. She includes an invoice for twelve hundred dollars, the total cost of her round trip flight to California, combined with an hourly rate for her time.

And then months later, Justman finds herself back in San Francisco for work and she picks up Aaron's trail again. She has a list of all the addresses Aaron had lived at, maybe 20 of them she got from a private investigator. And she starts going from place to place, visiting Aaron's old apartments. At one point, Jasmine pulls up to this gorgeous building overlooking the Bay Bridge. At the time, Justman was seven months pregnant and she thinks, well, maybe I can use this to my advantage.

I went to the front desk, the security officer, and I was like, hey, as you can see, I'm pregnant.

I really have to go to the bathroom. I'm looking for my cousin, Aaron Hart, but I need to use the restroom first. Do you mind? And she was like Aaron Hart. Yeah, I know her. She used to live here. The woman actually knew her boyfriend at the time. I now I don't know for sure. And it's just, you know, gossip. But I had heard that she had had several thousand dollars of his possessions or whatever that she took off with and never came back.

And I was like, oh, wow, OK, he's you know, and she's like, well, you know, you know, Aaron or whatever.

And I was like, Oh, yeah, totally. Erin's old boyfriend didn't live there anymore. So Jessamine took a few pictures inside the building and then moved on to the other addresses. All of them were dead. Ms. I mean, is there any part of you that is kind of feeling like a creep?

I knew it was crazy, like I knew that it was not like healthy. I did know that. But I could not let it go as just something that someone did to me. That I had no control over, Justman hates feeling like she's lost control and whenever it happens, ever since she was a teenager, she's dealt with it the same sort of way.

When she was around 11, her dad abandoned the family, her mom and her three younger siblings. Then they lost their house. And for a while they all lived in a van with their cat and dog. Her dad, he did some pretty extreme things. My dad tried to have me kidnapped like he tried to kidnap you or sent someone. So he tried to have someone coming and kidnapped me at my school and then again later in a park and my family, we ended up going for some time up to Canada so that he couldn't find us.

Later, Jasmine's mom got really sick and suddenly she found herself taking care of her entire family at some point as a way to deal with all the chaos. She started taking pictures, things like an ambulance driving her mom away, screaming matches between her sisters, trash strewn all over their trailer home. She methodically document what she was going through and it gave her a sense of control. She continued to use her camera that way as an adult. At one point eight years ago, she had a brief scare that reminded her of her dad, a random incident where she wondered if he was following her again from that night on, I had it in my head.

I wanted to find him, but I didn't want to find him. And talk to him, what's the thing that you want to just I wanted to see him, I wanted to first just find him. I just want to know if I could find him. So I did I did a bunch of searching and background checks and Google stuff, and he was about three and a half hours north of where I lived.

Justman was living in Oakland at the time and her dad was just north of her living in a condo on the Mendocino coast. She started making covert trips up there and she never knew how to explain this to her friends. So she kept it simple and told them, oh, I'm going to spend the weekend with my dad, which technically was true.

It's just that she did it wearing a blonde wig and from a distance. Why does telephoto lens is really far away? I was like out in the woods, like I could get a mile or so away if I needed to. So what did you see? He was on the deck. He was out for a walk. He would go to the gym, taking out the trash. And he never saw, you know, now when you're stalking your dad or you're following your dad was observing him from a distance serving him.

And so what did that feel like? Um, felt really good to see him and him not know I was there because. Why? Because I had some, like, knowledge about who he was and what he was doing. It was like a one way mirror, you know, like I could see. And and he couldn't see me, you know, and it felt like I had some kind of power.

I don't know much about the identity theft business, but I'm guessing that the ideal target does not own a camera that can photograph you from a mile away. Two years after Jessamine got that phone call from the police, she was still trying to track Aaron down. And in February 2013, her private investigator let her know that he found Erin. She was back in jail and about to be released. Jessamine went with him to a jail in downtown San Francisco.

She brought a telephoto lens and a video camera, and the two of them sat around in his SUV for hours waiting for had a contact.

Who told them Erin might come out the back, was going to come back here.

So hopefully one by one people were coming out. And the entire time I'm just like photographing had this lens pointed at the door and terrified that she's not going to come out. She's not going to come out. We're not going to find her. And we see her. She comes to her. Yeah. Yeah. OK, we got her Earnhart walked right past their car, she had a couple of bags hanging off her shoulder and she was dressed just them and thought like she was going to a nightclub type black shirt, shiny pants and wedge boots.

Immediately I thought, oh, my gosh, we we do kind of look similar. She was a similar bill to me, which is sort of, you know, tallish five seven five eight. But like, you know, Fuller figured wider hips. And I could see that she had a roundish face like I do. And she has this bright orange hair. And I just thought of my days and my teenage years dyeing my hair that exact orange, like the super bright orange.

And I just felt this uncanny, like connection to her, like I really did. And then from there on for the next several hours was just, you know, adrenaline.

But you don't do it. OK, let me go through and OK then to other things. Working with them in a separate car, they all trailed and whose first stop was a convenience store where she went in to buy cigarettes and a lighter. She hung outside for a few minutes, smoking, then got a public bus. Where she going to be? Aaron got off right in front of a goodwill store and walked in right away. He says, jump out and go in there, go after her.

And I was like, oh, I talked to her, you know, like I think I'm thinking, oh, OK. He's like, no, no, no, don't talk to her. Just just go in, get your photographs, get a good look at her. Just go, go, go, go, go. And so I'm jumping out, like, freaking out like, oh my God, he's just leaving me here with her.

Like, what do I. And then I see Knee and Jerral in there, the other guy's.

Yeah. I'm like, OK, so I'm looking at them for kind of cues and they're not remotely giving me any kind of like cues. And then I just go for it and I go up to her and I don't say anything to her. I just stand across right across the rack of clothes and the goodwill from her as she's going through pulling clothes, all looking, changing her mind, very expressive, like, oh, no, I would never wear that.

Like, I could kind of hear in my mind, like what she might be thinking from, like, her expression. And I'm at an angle where I feel like she can't really tell what I'm doing. Like maybe I'm just checking my email or something and I'm just like looking at my phone and I take some photos of her.

But how nervous are you? I mean, you're literally now you're face to face.

I'm shaking. I'm very nervous, definitely. And I think there's a part of me that is still thinking I could just talk to her right now, Aaron. Hey, Aaron.

Like, I could just say that, like, I could hear myself saying, Aaron Hart, I know you probably don't recognize me. I know you don't know me, but I'm Laurel Jessamine level, and you use my ID to do a number of things. But I just the power for me was in seeing her without her knowing that I was seeing her.

And then she disappears into the into the dressing room. And that's when the other guy comes over to me and says she's stealing clothes. And I was like, what? I just needed to get out of there. I was overwhelmed. I was feeling really I was feeling really sad for her. And I didn't want to feel sad for her. I wanted to feel angry at her.

It was hard to maintain the anger because she was looking at Aaron and remembering things she had done when she was young and her family was broke.

I had shoplifted like nice cheese or like I literally stole a Rogala like things that I thought and associated with class, middle and upper middle class. And I think that's what really was like giving me the sympathy for Aaron Hart was like I could identify in a way with the desire to be someone else. Like I could see how a path in my life could have led to my being in that moment.

I really could. But it was, I guess, a little disappointing. Like, I guess it was a little like, oh, I kind of wanted it to be like she was a criminal and did something bad to me. Yeah. And it just wasn't that none of that satisfaction of I got her.

It was just sort of this weird transition and anger was starting to be sort of like replaced with empathy. What Jessamine did next doesn't sound empathetic at all when you first hear about it, but for Jessamine, it was the logical end or search. She went through the hundreds of images she'd taken and she put together a gallery exhibit that had surveillance shots of Aaron. The court summons, police reports, bills and pictures of places where her ID had been used.

She'd done this once before with the surveillance photos she took of her dad. In fact, her wallet was stolen while she was setting up that exhibit, which is what sent her down the rabbit hole of trying to find Aaron in the first place. She called the new show Dear Aaron Hart, and one of the items on display was a sealed letter and a Plexiglas box. She asked the people at the gallery to give it to Aaron if she ever showed up there.

It wasn't a dramatic letter, just a way of telling Aaron that she'd been looking for someone to talk. Jessamine didn't see putting Erin's name and photos out in public as revenge, but not everyone saw it that way.

You are a victim of identity theft. Would you consider tracking down the thief and turning the tables? This is from The Today Show.

In an act some have described as revenge, Lovel followed and photographed the woman who stole her wallet and then her identity.

I reached out to Aaron Hart through her probation officer to talk about all this. I sent a couple of emails listing everything Justman says about her. The air never got back to me, so I couldn't verify whether she was responsible for Bill's.

Justman got from Hertz and Whole Foods or any of the unpaid parking tickets and tolls or whether she shoplifted from Goodwill or stole from her boyfriend.

So Aaron secretly posed as Jasmine and Jasmine secretly photographed Erin, Jasmine admits it's an uncomfortable thing that they have in common. Each of them is willing to invade someone else's privacy to get what they want.

Miki Meek is one of the producers of our show. Like I said earlier Today Show's first broadcast a couple of years ago. Since then, Jasmine has become a licensed private investigator. She's taking courses in self-defense, weapons training, research. She says her skills are in high demand. We thought we would end today's program on an airplane at some point in putting together this week's show.

It occurred to us that an overnight flight really is just like this huge bed with hundreds of people all together dreaming different dreams.

And we asked people in two different flights like this to tell us their dreams and their daydreams and their hopes and dreams. One of our staff was actually on a redeye flight herself and got on the plane's P.A. system to explain the premise.

I have your attention, please. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Stephanie Foo. Somehow being on the P.A. system, she started talking like a flight attendant. I am doing the story about this flight.

David Weinberg and Jessica Amant recorded people as well. Here are some of them.

I was dreaming about old fashioned TV antennas and then at one point I felt like I was shaking. And I'm sure it was because the plane was shaking. But I was trying to adjust the antenna I was dreaming about.

I was in a hot air balloon and I was yelling for my dog.

Hey, Gadir, you're sitting there like semi lucid. I was thinking of the horn puffing, swimming under water and how the little bubbles come out of their feathers when they're swimming. And then I thought of them as like going along in this space and creating stars and then diving into the center of the galaxy. Sure. That's really trippy. Yeah. Yeah. Were you medicated at the.

I had a total nightmare, I was backing down the hill out of a garage with a friend and a VW bus, and we lost control of it and went down the hill. And my friend turned to me and said, you know, I will never forgive you for this.

You know, everybody says, why would you want to go to New York? You know, there's you know, it's so big and why, you know? And I'm like, because you see all these things on television, you know, I have always wanted to experience a cab ride in New York City. We're going to do it and do it on. My daughter's about to have a baby. So I don't know dreams exactly the right word, but a lot of hopes sort of.

First, baby, my first grandbaby is just to put it simply, I definitely didn't live it up to my responsibilities as a father. And I had not been a regular part of her life up until she she was nine. You know, I blew it. So I'm definitely not going to make the same mistakes that I made with her. You know, it's I feel like I've been given a second chance. Dream, anyway, our program is produced today by Zoe Chace and me with Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Conor Duffy, Walt, Miki Meek, John Dementieva, Brian Reed, Joe Richman, Robert Samuelson Shipp and Nancy Updike.

Senior producer for today's program is Julie Snyder, editing help from Joel Lovell, research help from Michelle Harris and Christopher Satava music help from Damian Graff and Rob Geddis. Special thanks to Dave Clinton, Cargill, Sam Greenspan, Sarah Steger, Ian Shapira, Alaska Airlines, Gonzalo Martinez, Davidia and the Worker Justice Center of New York, Antonio Sarah Hedo of Latino USA. Just singer Chris Crawford and C.C. on our website. This American Life, Dawg, This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by parks.

The Public Radio Exchange. Support for this American life comes from Sitka salmon cherries, community supported fishery, delivering seasonal shares of traceable sushi grade wild Alaskan seafood or another small boat fleet. Find recipes and order at Sitka Salmon shares dot com teau.

Thanks as always. Your program's cofounder, Mr Animality, who of course stopped by the office during the same outfit today that he wears every single day type black shirt, shiny pants and wedge boots.

I'm IRA Glass Bag next week with more stories of this American life. Put your hand on my shoulder. Next week on the podcast of This American Life, a doctor sleeps with 11 of his patients, goes before a medical disciplinary board, he is still practicing medicine.

Today, a doctor gives his prescription pad to somebody who then prescribes controlled substances for cash. The doctor goes before a disciplinary board. They do not take his license. He is still practicing medicine today. Why? This happens next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.