Interview with relatives of Lori Hodgson

Jessica and Jeremy Leake describe how Lori Hodgson attacked their personal beliefs and even ambushed her son with a news crew brought to his place of employment.


VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Jessica: If someone had a daughter who believes in Christianity very strongly, and the mother did not, you know if you had that mother come around and say, “I don’t like you being a Christian,” all the time, it gets to you at some point. And you can’t have a relationship with that person because they can’t respect your beliefs. And that’s kind of what was happening with my mother and I.

This problem is deeper than my mom not respecting my beliefs. It also started with her wanting to take my dad to court and having major conflicts with him. And I could not agree with what she was doing. And that she put private information on me on the Internet, which I was not okay with, without talking to me, without getting my approval. And she did things sneakily, and never communicated with me what was going on. It seemed very sneaky.

I don’t believe that she really wants a relationship with me. I think it is more important for her to have this vendetta against my Church than to have a relationship with me. And she has said that before.

Jeremy: I was working at this motorcycle shop. She shows up, out of the blue. And I was working and she said she wanted to talk to me. And it was just kind of weird because I didn’t know she was going to be there. I was working, I had customers I was helping. And I told my boss and he was like, sure, go talk to her. We go outside and start talking, and I see there’s this news crew outside. And then I got—I felt really uncomfortable. She was with this news crew. She said she wanted to do an interview with me with this—I forget exactly what the show was called. But I was like, “No, I don’t want to be on camera. I don’t want to talk about this, you know, with a news crew. That’s just really weird. I thought you were coming here just to visit me and see how I was doing. And then all of a sudden you’re trying to interview me without my permission.

And we were talking and all of a sudden it dawned on me—I just thought for some reason maybe she was recording me. I don’t know why I thought that, or what came to my mind, but I asked her straight up. I said, “Mom, are you recording me?” And she said “Yeah.” And she pulled out a tape recorder. And then all my trust went out the roof. At that point I still trusted her. I wanted to hear what she said. I wanted to know how we could fix this. And I asked her if she was recording me and she said “Yes” and she shows me a tape recorder. And it was just very upsetting.

She’s saying that she’s trying to get us back and have a good relationship. Yet, she keeps doing these things and going to the media, putting our personal information and our life for the world to see, you know, false information which is just going to upset us. Nobody wants to have their personal information put on the Internet, and their own drama or family situation that’s going on put on the Internet or on a TV show or whatever, for the world to see. I mean nobody would like that. So everything that she’s doing to “try to get us back” is just pushing us further away.

She’s the one creating this whole situation. She decides to create this problem that’s not even there. And keeps pushing towards that—just pushing me further and further away, and tape records me behind my back. Which is the biggest break of trust, I think, to me. That you can’t just have a normal conversation with your son without trying to secretly record him, is honestly really kind of gross.