“Would you, would you, would you let me… Will you let me see your kids naked?” – Jared Fogle in a recorded phone call to journalist and informant Rochelle Herman-Walrond, whose children were 10 and 11 at the time.
Katie McLaughlin Fogle, Jared Fogle’s Ex-Wife #2
“You know, he was home with the kids and I in one life, and he was out on the road in a different life, and he was able to keep those two very separate in a way that I couldn’t even fathom.”
There have always been two Jared Fogles.
It’s impossible to determine when Subway’s slimmed-down spokesman first began using his money and fame to indulge his twisted desires. What is certain, however, is that by the time of his 2015 arrest, Jared Fogle had lived a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence for most of his life. The ability to present a facade wholly opposite his true self had been an integral part of his personality since childhood. When classmates bullied and ostracized him at school because of his weight, he pretended it didn’t bother him while anesthetizing his pain with food. Later, he carried that duality with him into adulthood. When in character as “Jared from Subway ” he was careful to appear humble, kind, non-threatening, and above all, concerned for children. Only after the crowds had gone and the cameras stopped rolling did the predator reveal himself.
In retrospect, there were clues to his depravity all along. They were small at first, easily overlooked details and patterns of behavior that would become clear only with the benefit of hindsight, then too big to ignore.
Jared married his first wife, Elizabeth Christie, in 2001. At that point, he had been thin for only a few years, and the Subway money was just starting to roll in. Consequently, his sexual history was almost certainly quite limited, and it would have been perfectly reasonable for his then-wife to assume any problems with intimacy were due to a combination of self-consciousness and inexperience. Regardless, their relationship was troubled, and Elizabeth fled their Indianapolis home after only five years. In her divorce petition, she stated the marriage was “irretrievably broken.” She also sought a restraining order against her estranged husband, which the court granted. Although Elizabeth has never publicly discussed her ex-husband, an unnamed source later told media outlets he “became controlling and had a mean streak in him.” The divorce was finalized in 2007.
Meanwhile, Jared kept himself busy promoting the Subway subsistence diet. Even after medical experts determined the plan resulted in 1,000 calories or less per day, meeting the clinical definition of starvation, the fast food giant continued pushing it – and him – to the public. What Subway executives didn’t know, or perhaps what they pretended not to know, was that by doing so, they were complicit in far worse things than attempting to convince millions of people to adopt an unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyle.
Studies have shown that pedophiles often seek out people and opportunities that allow them access to kids. In that respect, Jared Fogle was no different. Around the time Elizabeth, who happened to be a pediatric nurse, left him, Fogle began spending more time and energy on the Jared Foundation, a supposedly-charitable organization he created in 2004. Its stated goal was to fight childhood obesity, and in cooperation with Subway, it brought Fogle into hundreds of elementary schools a year. Under the guise of discussing physical fitness, he gained access to thousands of children, sometimes one-on-one.
And it was through these same appearances that Jared would meet the two people who would change his life in dramatically different ways. Forever.
(Please return in a few days for the next infamous installment
of the Jared Fogle story. Sadly, I cannot state precisely which day
because I suck at time management.
Thanks again for stopping by.)
By 2015, Jared Fogle was riding high. Not only was he worth a reported $15 million, but he’d also managed to accomplish quite a lot for a man without any obvious talent. After starving himself thin, he’d also appeared in hundreds of commercials, toured the country as a motivational speaker, helped carry the Olympic torch through his home state of Indiana, written both an autobiography and a children’s book, appeared in some truly terrible movies, and even created a non-profit to fight childhood obesity – all of which helped him achieve what he really wanted: access to minors. And he owed it all to Subway.
The fast food franchise was founded in 1965 by 17-year-old Fred DeLuca and his family friend Dr. Peter Buck, a nuclear engineer. Starting with an investment of $1000 from Buck and the modest goal of funding DeLuca’s college tuition, they opened their first store in Bridgeport, Connecticut, under the name Pete’s Super Submarines. Customers were not impressed.
The duo’s sales were as flat as their sandwiches when, according to DeLuca, they hit upon the idea of opening a second store in Wallingford to “create the illusion of success.” That store also underperformed, but surprisingly, the deception behind it worked. Within nine years, the partners were selling franchise licenses all over the state under a new name: Subway. Their startup costs were relatively low compared to competitors like McDonald’s or Burger King, which fueled the chain’s explosive growth. By 1987 over 1000 Subway shops were spread across the globe, making DeLuca and Buck multimillionaires. In 1997, they opened an additional 1100 outlets in the US alone. Still, it wasn’t enough.
Enter Jared Fogle.
Around this time, the morbidly obese IU student decided to lose weight. His apartment was literally ten steps from a Subway store, and one day it belatedly occurred to him that low-cal subs without cheese or mayo would be an easy way to change his 10,000-calorie-a-day diet. After somehow summoning the willpower to endure an entire year of shitty subs, food understandably lost its allure for Fogle, and he eventually lost an incredible 245 pounds.
A Chicago-area Subway owner read about Fogle’s success in a 1999 Men’s Health article called “Stupid Diets… That Work!” He brought the story to the attention of the company’s regional advertising agency, and they quickly decided to shoot a test commercial with the Hoosier hebephile.
Jared Fogle’s first Subway commercial aired on January 1, 2001. His life – and the fate of his future victims – was about to change forever.
(Please return Friday Monday for Part 3 in this sickening saga.
In the meantime, feel free to check out any of our other,
equally-disturbing articles.
Indiana Infamy 