It was two years ago when a pregnant teenager first reached out to a Tennessee couple on Instagram who had desperately been trying to adopt a baby for nearly a decade. Their relationship would eventually devolve from designing a nursery over the phone to threats of murder and a horrifying revelation: The woman they were speaking to was never even pregnant.
A second couple too thought their prayers had been answered when a woman responded to their online pleas to adopt, saying that she was pregnant with twins. The three discussed names, the woman sent pictures of her “baby bump” and asked the couple’s two young sons whether they were excited to be big brothers.
But again, the promise of an adoption unraveled. The couple fielded so many phone calls from the woman — which often devolved into threats of drug use that could harm the baby or to kill their sons — that they had to buy a headset to free up their hands. Then, the couple’s friend discovered the pregnant woman’s social media, which made it clear she had no plans to give up the twins for adoption.
Over seven years, Gabryele Watson ran the same scam against thousands of couples looking to adopt, prosecutors alleged in court documents ahead of Watson’s guilty plea. She never asked for money, the documents said, but spent hours of every day stealing the identities of pregnant teens she found online and calling her victims pretending to be the teenager, their boyfriend or other family members in what prosecutors called a “sophisticated operation of heartbreak and terror.”
