Vault Release: CHRIS BATHUM Part 5 of 5: Criminal

0:00You may have heard of the sex cult NXIVM and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack. But she's never told her side of the story, until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed, and in my new podcast, I talk to Alison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member, and what she thinks of it all now. How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma to other people? I mean, I don't even know how to answer that question. Alison, after NXIVM from CBC's Uncover, is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

0:33This episode contains disturbing content, including mention of sexual assault, illicit drug use, and explicit language. Please take care while listening. In June of 2016, a white Tesla was parked along the side of Mulholland Highway, a two-lane road that winds through the hills of Calabasas. Inside the Tesla sat Chris Batham and Erica Littell. Erica was 27 years old, a former client of CRLA. Chris pulled out a meth pipe and put a flame underneath it until it started smoking. Suddenly, a sheriff's deputy pulled up behind the Tesla. Chris dropped the pipe to the floorboard. Danny, a former CRLA client who we spoke with earlier in the season, was friends with Erica.

1:22He told me about this incident. Erica called me and she told me when that happened and she goes, hey, he tried to tell me to take all the drugs and say they were mine. And I said, no. And then he tried to tell me that if I didn't take them, then this would be bad. Like, I had to take them. And if I didn't, this would be bad for me. And I still said no. And then when the cops walked up to the car and asked him what was going on, he said, oh, this is a girl that was in my treatment center. She just relapsed. I'm taking her back to detox. And these are her drugs, you know? And she was like, nope, they're not.

1:48Erica later testified that Chris claimed all the drugs in the car belonged to Erica. which wasn't true. He also said she was suicidal and he was just trying to help her. But Chris was clearly high. He'd been snorting meth off his finger while he was driving. The deputy then talked to Erica to get her side of the story. She said she was not suicidal, but that she and Chris had gone there with the intent to get high together. She said yes, Chris did own a treatment facility, but she was no longer a client there and he wasn't trying to help her. The deputy replied, wait, so he's the owner of a treatment center and he's getting high with you?

2:30And Erica said, yes. They were both arrested. And he got arrested that night. And she got arrested, processed and released. Maybe he did too, but that was the first night that like, wow, maybe it's true that he's actually getting high. Erica was released for cooperating with law enforcement. Early the next morning, Chris was released after posting the$30 ,000 bail. But the clock was ticking for Chris Batham. What he didn't know is that there was an investigation underway that touched multiple government agencies, including the FBI, the California Department of Insurance, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, and the L.A.

3:08District Attorney's Office. In five months, he would be arrested again, but this time, he wouldn't be released. His bail would be set at$9.6 million. Even as Chris Bathom's world was closing in, even after his arrest, there were those who remained devoted to Chris Bathom. There were people in the industry who are still in the industry who came to his side and said, no, he's a good guy. These women are just making it up. You know, stuff like that. It was only a matter of time before Chris Bathom and CRLA would come crashing down. From Cast Media, this is The Opportunist. This is the final episode in Season 4, Chris Batham, Criminal.

3:56I'm Hannah Smith.

4:08Erica Littell, the woman who was arrested in the car with Chris Batham, battled a drug addiction for years. By 2016, she was in this vicious cycle of using, followed by treatment, stints of sobriety and then using again. On a crisp winter day, I drove into the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I met Erica's father, Scott Littell, and his wife, Erica's stepmom, Sherry Akers. Hi, I'm Hannah. Nice to meet you. Erica is buried here. Her grave is surrounded by colorful pictures from her life. Scott told me that Erica was smart and kind, and despite everything that happened, they had a good relationship. Her and I always had a very strong bond.

4:55We connected very easily, and we shared a lot of the same interests. She was very bright, very inquisitive. She was somebody that people would confide in, somebody that really cared about people. Scott and Sherry never gave up hope that Erica would be able to get and then stay sober. She had a monkey on her back. And I now understand that I never really understood it. And it was just way, way stronger than she was. She had an addictive personality. She was drinking and, you know, it moved into pills and ultimately it moved into heroin. And but she fought against it and she had some long periods of sobriety.

5:47If she had not gotten involved with the person who's the subject of this podcast, who knows what would have happened? Because I will always feel like, you know, he set her on a path that wound up with her being dead. Erica Littell was hired as a CRLA site manager in 2012. At that point, it looked like she had turned a corner in her life. She was sober, had a stable place to live, was in a healthy relationship, and she had a dream of becoming a drug counselor. But in 2014, Erica relapsed, which kicked off a new battle with her disease. She lost her job and her housing. Her sober boyfriend broke up with her to protect his own sobriety.

6:33So what makes Erica's story different from another story of relapse? Well, the person who encouraged and enabled her escalating drug use was Chris Batham. He had become her drug dealer. And not just that. Chris was actively derailing any efforts Erica made to stay sober. Here's Sherry, Erica's stepmom. Every time she attempted to recover, he was the one pulling her back in. We had one situation where she was at UCLA Hospital. she had a UTI that was so severe that it was going into sepsis. And we used that opportunity to get her to agree to go into a great recovery program that would have gone from treatment into sober living, into a halfway house, and then a community.

7:22And, you know, she was released from the hospital into their care. This was in 2016. By this time, Erica had been in multiple treatment facilities over the years, but Scott and Sherry hadn't given up hope. Erica left the hospital and checked into this recovery program. But she wasn't there for very long because she was still in contact with Chris Bathom. Bathom sent an Uber and had her picked up and taken to an Airbnb and delivered drugs. So every attempt we were making to try to help her, every attempt she was making to try to get help, he was there to obstruct. This was so shocking to me when I heard it.

8:09Erica wasn't at CRLA. She was at a completely different treatment center trying to get sober. And Chris Batham ordered her an Uber, which picked her up from that treatment center and took her to an Airbnb. Then Chris delivered drugs to Erica. He had been providing her drugs for about a year at that point. Sometimes he would just drop them off and sometimes they would do them together. Scott and Sherry didn't know this. They have pieced together the truth over time. Like, when did you first hear that Batham had been giving her drugs? I don't recall specifically. I know that it's somewhere along the line she told me.

8:50And what did you, you know, think when she told you that? You know, some things are so horrible that they're hard to wrap your mind around. In 2019, Erica died from an overdose and the combined effects of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and morphine. She was getting ready to go into a treatment center the next day. You know, despite all the shit that we had been through for so many years, you never, ever expect this to happen. You just, and I've heard that from other parents too. It always comes as an unbelievable shock. Erica's dad, Scott, theorized that it was Chris who got Erica hooked on meth. And this is when things became especially regressive for her, worsening her addiction.

9:36Erica normally used opiates. I will always feel like a gigantic nail in Erica's coffin was the fact that Batham gave her a lot of crystal meth and got her into crystal meth, was my understanding. and that just wrecks havoc with your brain chemistry and you suffer from tremendous depression and your whole brain chemistry gets screwed up. It's like, why the hell would you give somebody drugs who's trying to get sober if you're in that rehab business? I mean, I think it's a gigantic middle finger to the world. You know, I think like some people maybe that don't have understanding of what addiction is or does to a person, looking at it, they might ask, you know, there's instances of her texting him and asking him for drugs.

10:31So she asked him for drugs and he gave them to her. You know something, when they're in their addiction, it takes them over. And the analogy that I always use is it's like, you're not going to talk a vampire out of wanting to drink blood. And they really have like a Jekyll and Hyde personality. And if she had really good self-control, she wouldn't have been an addict to begin with. So, yeah, I mean, if she was not sober anymore, she would text anybody in the world to get drugs. And it was his job not to give them to her. It was his job not to give Erica drugs or to give anyone drugs. It's hard to understand what Chris gained from enabling Erica, why he seemed so set on perpetuating her addiction.

11:21In her testimony, Erica said Chris never assaulted her. Their relationship was never sexual. Although there were instances in which he indicated to her that he would be interested in that. So perhaps he was grooming her and then ran out of time. Or perhaps it's something unexplainable. The lesson to learn from Christopher Bantham is that there is pure evil in the world. And if you're not a person who spent a lot of time around pure evil, you can be fooled. You have things that you wouldn't do. You have morals. You have ethics. It's really hard to imagine a person that would do anything, that has no morals, that has no ethics.

12:06You can't understand their frame of mind.

12:16I'm not sure what the best word is to describe Chris Batham in the months leading up to his final arrest. He was sloppy, deranged, careless, most likely high out of his mind on meth. LA Weekly ran an expose about Chris Batham in December of 2015, titled, A Drug Rehab Mogul Built an Empire That's Now Being Probed by the FBI, DA, and State of California. In response to this, Chris Batham made t-shirts and other merch with the words, Rehab Mogul, and sold them at the CRLA coffee shop Grounded. Then, six months later, on June 17, 2016, ABC's 2020 aired an episode on Chris Bathom. Danny remembers this.

13:03I remember when 2020 came and they interviewed him and people were like, dude, he's sitting there and he's like sanding a table, like getting ready for them to come, you know? When Danny says sanding, he literally means sanding a table, inferring that Chris had been up all night doing meth and completing random tasks like woodworking. So the guy who was in charge was actually supplying you drugs? Yes. He was getting even more, like, sexually aggressive with me. In the 2020 interview, Chris denied the allegations of sexual assault. He also denied smoking meth, saying that he just had naturally red eyes.

13:37The interviewer asked Chris about his overdose at the Malibu Riviera Motel back in December. Chris said he hadn't overdosed and that the story wasn't true. He claimed his identity had been stolen, but when pressed for more details about the supposed identity theft, he couldn't provide them. By 2016, Cliff Brodsky was reinvigorated in his battle against Chris Batham. After years of what seemed like no progress at all, now there was movement. The press was paying attention. Cliff posted something on Facebook offering to help victims of Chris Batham. The post has been deleted. But I've heard that the wording of the post implied Cliff might be willing to pay people money to come forward.

14:25He started to communicate with multiple women who had been abused by Chris Batham. Cliff spoke with one victim on the phone several times and told her that she needed to make a statement. I said, look, you need a statement because no one's listening to me. I'm telling this story to a lot of people, important people, famous people, which I can't name. They think I'm making it up because it's such a crazy story. I shared about this hundreds of times to professional people. They just didn't believe me. According to Rose and others I spoke with, Cliff was aggressive in his communication with some of the victims.

15:00He pressed people to come forward to make video statements against Chris Batham. He was not sensitive to how that could be traumatic for the victims. Here's Rose. I don't think that he meant it in, like, a malicious way. I don't. But his actions could be really hurtful sometimes. Cliff even admitted he was a bit out of his depth. I've never talked to a rape victim before. I didn't go to school for that. I'm like, well, I'll just Google it. From Cliff's point of view, he and Rose were the same. Both burned by Chris Bathom, both dedicated to justice, both highly organized and somewhat obsessive about the case.

15:41But a big difference between Rose and Cliff at the time was that Cliff had something to gain from all of this, or at least he thought he did. He was bringing a civil lawsuit against Chris Bathom, suing Chris for over$1 million. So Cliff's motivation has been questioned. Did he really want to help these victims, or did he just want to get his money back? Rose eventually wrote Cliff and his lawyer an email, telling him to stop communicating with her. So I'm still here, but I made a lot of enemies, sure did, fighting back. Now we know why there's not many heroes left and why people don't fight against bad people.

16:21There's really no reason. No one really gets any credit for it other than just trouble, trouble, trouble. Unless you're a police or investigative journalist, which I'm not. I'm a musician, but I just got given the job of doing it. Cliff's obsession with harming Chris Bathum would come back to kick him. In fact, it would threaten to jeopardize Chris's entire trial.

16:49Subscribe to The Opportunist wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. You can also rate the show and write us a review at Apple Podcasts. It really does help the show, so thank you so much.

17:10Victims had been coming forward with accounts of being assaulted and raped by Chris Bathum. Amanda, who we heard from last episode, got a lawyer to file an official complaint on February 9th, 2016. Women would call me and the stories would sound similar and match up. and after a while, after you've listened to five of those types of stories, you're going, well, geez, I mean, this sounds real. This sounds like this is really going on. This is Alan Schimmel. He represented eight of Chris Bathom's victims, including Amanda. He told me that it took a while, too long, for law enforcement to begin an official investigation into the sexual assault complaints against Chris Bathom.

17:54Alan has a theory about this. Some of the women had tried to get law enforcement to do something, to investigate this scare and look at them. And this is, again, my own view on it. They were lukewarm, I think, until they found out that 2020 was doing a story. And I think they knew that they'd be embarrassed by it, and they wanted to get going on it before it hit the airwaves. And I think without knowing that 2020 was doing the story, I don't think the law enforcement would have really put much energy on it. They certainly weren't putting much energy on it before. He also said something that I think speaks to how we view people struggling with addiction versus how we view successful CEOs.

18:41Here you had Batham, who was, quote unquote, a legitimate businessman who owned about 30 rehabs, who made a ton of money, who drove nice cars and could afford nice things. And he paid a lot of these people money. And I think they kind of knew what was going on and looked the other way. And also there is this attitude about, you know, a lot of these folks deserve it. Or they'd be on the street and he gave them a place to hang their hat. And all of that discussion is pretty disgusting. Law enforcement agencies had been investigating Chris Batham for both insurance fraud and sexual assault. On November 10th, 2016, Chris Batham was arrested after police raided his home.

19:25Shortly after, Kirsten Wallace was arrested as well. Malibu rehab owner is now accused of sexually assaulting former patients. And even more, he has also been charged in one of California's largest insurance fraud cases. Batham used to own at least 13 rehab locations in L.A. and Orange Counties and six in Colorado. There are currently three lawsuits filed against him, and now he's also facing criminal charges. The charges against Chris Batham were extensive and damning. They included multiple felony counts of grand theft and identity theft for over$176 million. He also faced multiple charges of sexual assault, forcible rape, and sexual exploitation.

20:07Because the sex crimes charges are violent crimes, that case took precedent. The insurance fraud case was put on the back burner. Chris Batham pled not guilty to all of the sexual assault charges. I spoke with Carlos Spiga, Chris Batham's attorney, about his approach to defending Chris in trial. What was your strategy? What did you feel like you needed to convince the jury of in order to win the case? The forcible rape allegations in my mind were all BS. That's not Batham's style. He doesn't have to forcibly make any of these women do anything. They all did it voluntarily and they did it for drugs.

20:47Yes. Yes. You know, they, you know, Bathroom gave them drugs, but they took the drugs. Bathroom offered them sex. They accepted the sex. And I think that that sense of shame also on the part of the victims that they, you know, you know, not all the sex offenses that Bathroom was charged with were forcible. In fact, I've always held that he didn't force anybody to have sex, that they all did it willingly, albeit for drugs or for access to drugs. If Carlo could show that sex between Chris Bathom and his victims was consensual, he hoped that would be enough to convince the jury that there was reasonable doubt surrounding the rape charges.

21:29The prosecution, on the other hand, painted Chris Bathom as calculating in his abuse and identified a pattern of predatory behavior. Reinhold Mueller is a seasoned prosecutor who's been with the sex crimes unit for eight years. He was the lead prosecutor in the sexual assault case. Mr. Batham would essentially would target each of them, become familiar with their weaknesses during these therapy sessions that he would have with them. They would disclose certain addictions, childhood traumas, prior activities that some of them have had. He would learn all of that, and then they would also reveal the lack of family support.

22:11So as he gains this information from all of them, then all of a sudden kind of the grooming kicks in, and he would essentially kind of become their father figure, kind of replace, you know, the support that they had from their family. They would trust him, and then he would breach their trust. I think that was very helpful in the trial, very powerful, because you could see that same pattern with all of these victims. On January 9, 2018, the trial began. It lasted five weeks and involved 14 different victim testimonies. Reinhold knew that it was possible that members of the jury would have preconceived notions about people who suffer from substance use disorder.

22:52He decided not to sugarcoat it. And so I started off just letting them know that, you know, these are young women who are suffering from drug addictions. I let them know some of their background, you know, that they've come from a history of sex for drugs. All of the issues that I thought would come out from the defense to try to discredit them, I just brought it all out. Can you speak to what, you mentioned some things happened during the trial that you didn't anticipate happening. Can you speak to what that was? Well, first of all, we lost one of our victims. She died right after preliminary hearing.

23:33And I think that was attributed to her drug use. So we didn't have her for trial. This person's name was Jenny Eyrich. She testified at the preliminary hearing and the transcript of Jenny's testimony was used in the trial. Jenny's story is awful and heartbreaking. She had health problems due to years of drug use, and she was told by her doctors that she had to get sober, or she would die. She checked into CRLA, and she did get sober. Then, after 60 days in treatment, Chris Batham asked Jenny to become his personal assistant. She was allowed to come and go from CRLA as she pleased. She started drinking.

24:16This escalated into using. Then, Chris Batham started giving her drugs. He took Jenny to a hotel multiple times, gave her drugs, and repeatedly violated her. Jenny was never able to get clean after that. She passed away before Chris Batham's trial began. Jenny's half-sister, Nicole, did testify at the trial. She and Jenny's experiences were similar. They were both clients at Sierra LA, and they relapsed together. In Nicole's testimony, she described an incident at the W Hotel in which Chris provided Jenny and Nicole with drugs and then had sex with both of them. Nicole had to recount this incident and others in graphic detail for the court and then have both the prosecutor and the defense question her about it.

25:07After she detailed what happened at the W Hotel, Reinhold asked her if Chris said anything to her about this incident. Nicole replied, quote, just that the recovery of all of the clients was on my shoulders. You know, if I were to say anything, then the place would be shut down and all of these people would be homeless and it would be my fault. For many of the victims, the result of their experiences with Chris Bathum was that they had relapsed and they were in varying stages of addiction still. This impacted the trial. For instance, there was one witness who got up to the stand and it became very clear that she was high.

25:46She had just shot up with heroin moments before. So she was testifying high and it was really obvious that she was testifying high. We tried to get through as much as we could testimony on direct exam. We ended the day and then she didn't show up the next day for cross-exam. Reinhold is referring to Erika Littell. Chris was charged with furnishing clients' drugs, and Erika was in court to testify about how Chris provided her drugs and also about the incident in the Tesla in which they were both arrested. Erika was supposed to return to court the next day, but she didn't show up. So we had to get a bench warrant for her arrest to get her back to court.

26:30We couldn't find her for a while, several days, but we ultimately did. And then she resumed her testimony. But, you know, we had to let the jury know. And it was pretty apparent that she was high on heroin at the time. Erica did eventually make it back to court. In her cross-examination, Chris Batham's attorney, Carlos Spiga, questioned Erica about the fact that she needed money and Chris was giving her money and drugs. Erica responded by saying, quote, I can see clearly that you have zero understanding of what it means to be an addict. She went on to say, It is a disease that kills people, and part of that disease, and part of the reason that people like you don't have any compassion for it, is because while you are using, you end up doing anything to get that drug, because it is a mental illness, an obsession that you can't understand clearly.