A Friend of the Family is poised to be viewers' latest true-crime obsession, with its focus on what happened to Jan Broberg as a child at the hands of Robert 'B' Berchtold.
Berchtold was a friend of the Broberg family. Between 1972 and 1976 he groomed Broberg and abducted her twice: once at the age of 12 and the second time when she was 14.
The story is dramatized in Peacock's new show, with actor Jake Lacy taking on the role of the abuser. Here is everything you need to know about him.
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What Happened to Robert 'B' Berchtold?
Broberg and her mother Mary Ann Broberg first spoke publicly about Berchtold's abuse in their book Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story, which was published in 2003.
In it they explained how Berchtold became a close friend of the Broberg family, and he manipulated both Mary Ann and her husband, Bob Broberg, so that he could be close to their eldest daughter.
Berchtold's abuse is also explored in the Netflix documentary Abducted in Plain Sight, in which the family spoke of what happened to them.
They explained that Berchtold first kidnapped Jan Broberg in October 1974 under the pretense that he was taking her to go horseback riding. When they didn't come home Broberg's parents grew concerned but didn't call the police straight away.
Jan Broberg explained in the documentary that she had been drugged. Upon waking she was made to believe that she was given a mission by aliens, and that in order to protect her family she had to embark on a relationship with a "male companion," Berchtold, and have his children before she turned 16.
When Jan Broberg's family did call the police the FBI took control of the case, and they learned that Berchtold had taken Broberg to Mexico where he had married her, an underage child. They had been missing for five weeks.
After they returned home, Broberg's family did not pursue legal action because they were blackmailed by Berchtold's wife Gail who claimed the family would air the "dirty laundry" between her husband and Bob Broberg, they explained in the documentary.
Berchtold had entered into a sexual relationship with Bob Broberg, and later did the same with Mary Ann Broberg. The Brobergs issued a letter stating that they would not take legal action against Berchtold, and they said the kidnapping was a "misunderstanding."
Berchtold continued to see the family and he also kept grooming Jan Broberg, who explained in the documentary that she began to believe that she was in love with him and wanted to marry him for real. He kidnapped her a second time in 1976 and enrolled her in a school under a false name, claiming he was her biological father and a CIA agent.
When the FBI found Jan Broberg and brought her back home she continued to believe in her "mission" to be with Berchtold and have his children, but upon turning 16 she realized that her family was safe and that she had been lied to. It was then that she told her family of the abuse she had suffered at Berchtold's hands.
Berchtold was accused of kidnapping Jan Broberg twice and sexually abusing her, but he was never charged with these crimes. He did spend one year in prison for the rape of one child after his encounters with the Broberg family.
When Jan Broberg and her mother released their book she went to court to get a restraining order against Berchtold, who filed a lawsuit against them and publicly said the book was not true. Jan Broberg was granted the injunction for the remainder of Berchtold's life.
Berchtold would go to several of Jan Broberg's talks about her book, and at one he encountered a group of bikers, the Bikers Against Child Abuse, with whom he had a physical altercation.
On November 11, 2005, he was charged with aggravated assault and possession of a firearm. Found guilty, he took his own life before he was sentenced. In the documentary, his brother says he did not want to return to prison.
Jan Broberg Told Jake Lacy Not to Worry About Her When Playing Berchtold
Lacy spoke to Newsweek about taking on the role of Berchtold in A Friend of the Family, saying that Jan Broberg urged him not to be concerned by how she might react to seeing him portray her abuser onscreen.
"I think if she hadn't been a part of it as a producer, and her mother, Mary Ann, hadn't been a producer, I would not have really wanted to be a part of it," Lacy told Newsweek. "I know in our early conversations Nick [Antosca, the showrunner] had expressed the same when he first spoke to them, and saying, 'I'd love to tell your story, here's why. But, I only want to do it if you're a part of this, I don't want to buy your life rights and take it away.'
"So, it felt like there was already this foundation of a kind of greater reason to do this, Jan and Mary Ann being paramount to that.
"Then to have her involved creatively, she wrote a small note to me at the beginning of the process and left it in my trailer and it described a bit of B as being warm and charming, and effusive, and kind, and all these things, and that that was his superpower.
"And then the back half of the letter was her saying, 'I'm in a healthy place, go forth and tell this story as you need to, without concern for what this does for me. I'm past that and so you can just focus on what this work is and don't need to have dual priorities in terms of how do we tell this story and also is Jan okay?' [...] The most generous thing you could do for a person who's embarking on telling your own story is to say, 'go for it, you're going to be great' and I will forever be indebted to her."
Reflecting on playing Berchtold, he said: "Obviously the subject matter is difficult and grotesque, the way he treated this family and the things he did.
"Creatively it was very fulfilling to work on, because there are so many layers to what's happening and the quality of the writing from Nick and the writing staff was just top-notch [...] I felt like we really tied into that and had a lot of care for the story.
"So it was creatively very fulfilling, and then felt like the way to go about it was really just piece-meal, [it] was to just do the very next thing and then the very next thing, and just take it one tiny piece at a time, because to try to bite off more than that, I think, would have felt like I was stumbling in the dark a bit.
"But the quality of what we got to work on was so great, that was sort of safe harbor to just do what was in front of you and know, that was a great foundation, and that you'll kind of be guided toward the rest of it as the day went on."
A Friend of the Family premieres with its first four episodes on Thursday, October 6 on Peacock, and the episodes will air weekly thereafter.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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