Two weeks from Thursday, Jared Fogle is due to formally admit to being a child pornographer and serial child exploiter. If the judge accepts a plea deal Fogle reached with federal prosecutors in August, Fogle will face a sentence of between five and 12.5 years in federal prison. All of this happened because a whistleblower in Florida did the right thing and shone the hot lights on a monster.
Back in 2010, Rochelle Herman grew so disgusted with Fogle’s sexually-charged comments about minors that she alerted Subway. However, that complaint disappeared into the corporate ether, so Herman went to the FBI. For the next four-plus years, the whistleblower wore a wire to record her conversations with Fogle. In part due to those conversations, federal officials raided Fogle’s house in late July, and all but forced him to plead guilty a month later.
This past weekend, Herman dropped by “Dr. Phil” to give the world a chance to hear her whistleblower tapes for the first time. Herman first met Fogle in 2006, when he was a guest on her radio show. She was taken aback when Fogle mentioned that he was turned on by middle school girls. She did what any good journalist would do–she decided to dig deeper. However, when he started making comments about her teenaged kids, Herman took off her journalist’s hat and put her mother’s hat on. That’s when she went to Subway–and after that went nowhere, she went to the FBI.
Herman said that while she was wearing a wire, she had to become “two separate people” in order to keep talking with Fogle. If you listen to excerpts of her whistleblower tapes, you’ll see why. Take this one, in which Fogle reveals the age range of kids he preferred.
Or this one, in which Herman rooks Fogle into revealing how he targeted children over the years.
Or another clip in which Fogle reveals how he “groomed” kids for abuse.
Herman was visibly shaken while listening to her own recordings. Dr. Phil noticed that Fogle had left “some really bad marks” on Herman, and urged her to take care of herself so she wouldn’t get “dragged down by him.” Herman realized that she was also a victim of Fogle’s debauchery, and vowed to “stand tall” so she wouldn’t become a victim.
The sheer depravity revealed in these whistleblower tapes has led a number of people to wonder if the FBI had enough evidence to take Fogle down before this year. Indeed, shortly after Fogle’s guilty plea, Herman herself told WWSB in Sarasota that when she asked why it took so long to bust Fogle, she was told that cases like these take time.
I can think of only one defensible reason for why it took so long. It’s possible that the FBI and federal prosecutors were bending over backwards to keep his victims from having to testify. That would make sense. While only 14 victims were referenced in the plea deal, Herman believes that between his numerous tours in the United States and abroad, Fogle may have victimized many more. Some of them were as young as six years old at the time.
In most cases, prosecutors bend over backwards to keep children who have been sexually assaulted off the stand. One way to do that is to amass enough evidence that the predator would have to be out of his mind to go to trial. On the surface, that seems to be what happened in Fogle’s case. After all, he undoubtedly knew that he’d effectively talked himself into a conviction.
If, however, the FBI had enough evidence that it could have taken Fogle off the streets before this year without forcing the victims to testify, then Subway officials aren’t the only ones who have some explaining to do.
