Whatever happened to Rochelle Herman’s tapes?
By 2010, Herman says in the series, she and Fogle were no longer in contact. Unhappy with what she felt was the FBI’s inactivity and feeling like her own life was unraveling (in the series, her son Thomas attests to the strain that his mom’s one-woman sting operation put on their family, as well as the physical and mental toll on Herman), she went to the Sarasota Police Department to report Fogle.
Now-retired Sarasota PD detective Chris Catanzaro recalls interviewing Herman on May 13, 2012, and admittedly wondering, at first, “Is this a person that is enamored with a celebrity?” But then, she says, Hermann “showed us her evidence.”
The evidence included recordings, played in the series, of Fogle telling Herman to describe her kids for him and asking her if she’d let him see her kids naked.
“When I listened to Rochelle’s tapes, I was shocked,” Catanzaro says. “I genuinely was shocked. He comes across as a clean-cut guy. But predators come in many shapes, forms and oftentimes can be people we have a lot of respect for. I was very disturbed, I was concerned there was a possibility this man was going to do things.”
But, the detective explains, while she confirmed with the FBI that there was an active investigation, since Fogle lived out of state and there was no evidence he had committed a crime in Sarasota, the police couldn’t arrest him.
Herman recalls telling the detective she was going to play her tapes on her radio show. And Catanzaro says she told her, “Don’t do that, that would not be a good idea.”