"The only liberties we really took was to compress the timeline, to keep the story really active and escalating… I really feel like, anything we did, was only in aid of that, and to help people understand certain decisions were being made, from an emotional perspective. The women [who speak on] the podcast do explain why certain decisions were made, but don’t always go into the greatest detail. I think some people who listened to it were looking for bigger explanations. I was one of them, but not for the same reasons [as listeners]. I think the story is incredibly relatable and could happen to anyone under the right circumstances, but I wanted to make sure the audience couldn’t have distance from the story anymore — I wanted to draw them in [emotionally]. [What happened in Dirty John] could happen to you, and the people who this happened to are not stupid: They just wanted to believe the best in people, and it went horribly wrong."