Reality, Reinforcement, and Self Perception in the Prison Calls of Nicholas Godejohn

I didn't start out critical of Nicholas Godejohn. Quite the opposite.

When I first began looking seriously at his case, I sympathized with him. The documentary had already been released before he went to trial, the case had received enormous publicity, and there were other circumstances surrounding his prosecution that made me question whether he had received a fair trial. Those issues deserve their own discussion, and I'm not going to try to litigate all of them here.

At the end of the day, I believed Nicholas was another victim in this story.

I believed it strongly enough that I was prepared to do something about it.

When supporters were planning a rally at the Missouri State Capitol, I intended to go. I wanted to interview people, document what they were saying, and use my platform to bring attention to Nicholas and the concerns surrounding his case. I also joined the letter writing effort promoted by Toddy1Skip and encouraged people to write letters supporting Nicholas.

I wasn't neutral. I thought he had been treated unfairly, and I was willing to publicly help him.

That's important to establish because I didn't approach these prison calls and emails looking for reasons to dislike Nicholas. If anything, I had every reason to hope they would confirm what I already believed.

They didn't.

My opinion changed because we eventually gained access to something I wish we'd had years ago, Nicholas Godejohn speaking for himself through an enormous collection of prison calls and emails.

I'm thankful we got them.

Not because every private conversation perfectly represents someone's character. Give me thousands of hours of almost anybody's private telephone calls and I guarantee we'll find moments when they sound ridiculous, angry, arrogant, hypocritical, inappropriate, or just plain weird.

The value is in the volume.

One bizarre statement doesn't establish a pattern. Neither does one exaggerated story, one strange interpretation, one sexual boast, or one moment of arrogance.

But when similar ways of thinking appear repeatedly across different subjects, conversations, and relationships, eventually the individual examples begin to tell us something larger.

That's what happened for me with Nicholas.

I no longer see him simply as another victim in the Gypsy Rose Blanchard story. That doesn't mean I've swung to the opposite extreme and decided he's some brilliant criminal mastermind. It also doesn't mean that because my opinion of Nicholas changed, every concern I previously had about his prosecution suddenly disappeared.

A defendant doesn't have to be likable to deserve a fair trial.

But concerns about the fairness of a trial don't automatically make everything that defendant later believes about himself, his case, or the people around him true.

Both things can exist at once.

After listening to call after call and reading email after email, I began noticing a consistent pattern in the way Nicholas talks about his perceptions, abilities, and experiences.

Nicholas frequently expresses tremendous confidence in his own interpretations. Subjective impressions can become facts. Intuition can become knowledge. Ordinary experiences can acquire extraordinary meanings. His assessment of his own abilities can become inflated, and contradictory information doesn't always appear to reduce his confidence in those assessments.

Then somebody on the other end of the phone responds.

Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they agree. Sometimes they go further and actively reinforce what Nicholas is saying.

What I hear far less often is someone asking:

Nick, how do you know that?

That is ultimately what this post is about.

I'm not attempting to diagnose Nicholas Godejohn. I can't, and prison telephone calls aren't a psychiatric examination. Words such as delusion have clinical meanings that require considerably more than listening to recordings and forming an opinion.

Fortunately, I don't need a diagnosis to examine what is actually in front of me.

I can examine what Nicholas says, compare statements across conversations, look at how he arrives at conclusions, consider whether he entertains alternative explanations, and listen to how the people around him respond.

After enough calls, a pattern begins to emerge.

Autism Cannot Explain Everything

Nicholas is on the autism spectrum, and his intellectual and adaptive functioning have been discussed extensively throughout his case. Any serious examination of his behavior has to take those facts into account.

Autism can affect communication, social interaction, information processing, flexibility, and the way someone experiences the world. I'm not qualified to determine which individual behaviors in these recordings are related to Nicholas's autism.

But come on.

At some point we're talking about more than Nicholas being autistic.

I'm not concerned because Nicholas communicates differently or has unusual interests. I'm concerned about the reasoning I repeatedly hear and the degree of certainty attached to it.

Nicholas describes himself as an empath and places tremendous importance on his intuition. He can speak as though these abilities allow him to recognize dishonesty, manipulation, motivations, or intentions that aren't necessarily observable.

That creates an interesting contradiction because Nicholas also describes himself as someone who has been profoundly manipulated.

Those things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Plenty of people believe they're excellent judges of character and subsequently discover they were wrong.

What interests me is how Nicholas resolves that contradiction.

The explanation can change without the underlying confidence changing with it.

From Experience to Certainty

The mouse story provides one of the clearest examples.

Nicholas describes accidentally killing a mouse in his cell. He felt terrible about it and prayed for the animal. Later, he dreamed about it.

There is an entirely ordinary possible explanation for what happened next. Nicholas experienced something upsetting, thought about it, prayed about it, and subsequently dreamed about it.

Nicholas developed a considerably more elaborate interpretation.

He described the mouse appearing in his dream as an orb and interpreted that orb as the mouse's spirit. He believed the experience indicated that the mouse had forgiven him. He then explained that immediately after the mouse died, he had acknowledged aloud that the animal was now in “spirit form.” Nicholas theorized that recognizing its spirit may have brought the mouse peace and contributed to it later reaching out to him through the dream.

The conversation eventually expanded into Nicholas explaining his belief that humans and animals are all connected almost “wirelessly.”

I'm a Christian. I believe in God and prayer, and I believe there are things about existence that I cannot explain. A spiritual interpretation by itself isn't what catches my attention.

It's the progression.

An event occurs. Nicholas experiences an emotional response. He develops an interpretation. The interpretation acquires meaning. Then the meaning begins to be discussed with considerable certainty.

There doesn't seem to be much room left for the ordinary explanation.

Once I noticed that process, I began hearing versions of it elsewhere.

Nicholas's Perception of Nicholas

Nicholas's self-perception is another recurring theme.

He doesn't merely have intuition; he can describe it as an unusually reliable way of knowing things. He doesn't simply believe he's perceptive, he identifies himself as an empath. Across different subjects, ordinary personal characteristics can become exceptional ones.

Even some of the sexually explicit conversations fit this pattern.

Initially, I considered leaving them out. There are a lot of them, and some contain details nobody needs me to repeat. But sexuality occupies enough space in these calls that ignoring it completely would remove part of what I'm examining.

During one conversation, Nicholas tells Sarah that he has a “miracle” to tell her. The miracle involves how extraordinarily well endowed he believes himself to be.

Without getting into how I know this, I have firsthand knowledge that Nicholas's description and reality are not exactly acquainted.

As ridiculous as that example sounds, analytically it's useful because most of Nicholas's claims about himself aren't independently measurable.

There is no ruler for empathy. I can't measure intuition or establish what a dream objectively meant.

This particular claim concerns something objectively observable.

His self assessment is considerably more generous than the observable evidence.

I'm not particularly interested in conducting a scholarly investigation into Nicholas Godejohn's anatomy. What interests me is that this gives us one unusual opportunity to compare Nicholas's perception of himself with something that can actually be observed.

It doesn't prove that his other self assessments are inaccurate.

It does give me reason to examine them rather than simply accept them.

When There Is a Real Foundation

This becomes considerably more complicated when Nicholas starts with something legitimate.

His statements concerning his trial are a good example.

Nicholas has described his trial as “staged.”

I don't believe that concern appeared from absolutely nowhere. His case received enormous publicity before his trial. Mommy Dead and Dearest had already been released, Gypsy Rose Blanchard had resolved her criminal case through a plea agreement, and media exposure surrounding the case was an issue by the time Nicholas faced a jury.

There are legitimate questions someone can ask about pretrial publicity, jury exposure, his representation, and the overall fairness of the proceedings.

But questioning whether a trial was fair and declaring that the trial was staged are not the same thing.

There are facts underneath his concern. The question is how far beyond those facts his conclusion travels.

That's why I don't want to dismiss Nicholas every time he says something extraordinary. Sometimes there may be a legitimate concern underneath it. The existence of that concern, however, doesn't automatically validate everything built on top of it.

The Reinforcement Problem

This is where my frustration increasingly shifts away from Nicholas himself.

I keep listening to the people around him.

Friends aren't therapists. A prison phone call isn't a clinical intervention, and someone saying “yeah” doesn't necessarily mean they're endorsing everything Nicholas just said. Sometimes people are simply listening.

I understand that.

What concerns me is repetition.

When unusual conclusions are repeatedly accepted, expanded upon, or validated, the other person can become part of a feedback loop.

Nicholas presents an interpretation.

Someone reinforces it.

That response provides social confirmation.

The interpretation returns later with even greater certainty.

And around we go.

I find myself wanting somebody to interrupt that cycle with the most basic questions imaginable:

How do you know that?

Could there be another explanation?

What evidence would make you change your mind?

Those aren't attacks. They're grounding questions.

There is a difference between supporting somebody and validating every conclusion they reach.

If Nicholas does have vulnerabilities that make evaluating certain situations more difficult for him, constantly confirming questionable interpretations may be the opposite of helping him.

Support Does Not Require Agreement

Caring about Nicholas doesn't require participating in every version of reality he presents.

Someone can believe Nicholas was manipulated without accepting every subsequent allegation of manipulation. Someone can believe there were legitimate problems surrounding his trial without agreeing that it was staged. Someone can recognize his autism and limitations without stripping him of agency.

And someone can love the man and still tell him he's full of shit when he's full of shit.

Sometimes that may be exactly what a friend needs to do.

Nicholas Still Has Agency

One of the biggest changes in my own thinking concerns the way Nicholas is sometimes portrayed.

I once leaned heavily toward viewing him as another victim.

The calls complicated that picture considerably.

The Nicholas I hear has opinions. He argues. He disagrees. He attempts to persuade people. He can be stubborn, confident, and condescending. At times, he's arrogant as hell and absolutely insufferable.

None of that erases his vulnerabilities.

Someone can be susceptible to manipulation and still attempt to influence other people. Someone can have intellectual limitations and retain agency. Someone can misunderstand a situation and still make choices within it.

Human beings don't divide neatly into manipulators and manipulated, perpetrators and victims, intelligent and incapable.

Nicholas doesn't either.

I don't hear a brilliant criminal mastermind.

But I don't hear a helpless child trapped inside an adult man's body who simply does whatever other people tell him.

I hear something considerably more complicated.

Conclusion

The prison calls and emails changed my opinion of Nicholas Godejohn.

What changed it wasn't one bizarre mouse story, one sexual boast, one claim about intuition, or one statement about his trial. It was the accumulation.

Across these conversations, Nicholas repeatedly expresses tremendous confidence in subjective perceptions, assigns substantial authority to intuition, reaches conclusions that sometimes extend well beyond the available evidence, and presents an inflated assessment of some of his own abilities.

Then, far too often, somebody reinforces it.

I don't know what clinical explanation, if any, belongs behind that pattern. These calls cannot answer that question, and neither can I.

But I don't need to diagnose Nicholas to be frustrated by people feeding ideas that desperately need to be questioned.

Agreeing with Nicholas isn't necessarily helping Nicholas.

Sometimes helping somebody means asking uncomfortable questions, offering another explanation, or simply being willing to say, “Nick, I know you believe that. But that doesn't make it true.”

And we're nowhere near finished.

We still have years of prison calls to go through, covering different periods of his incarceration, relationships, and circumstances. I will continue listening to them as I always have and releasing those that contribute to the historical record of this case.

I also have to remain open to what we haven't heard yet. Future calls may support some of the conclusions I've reached here, or they may challenge them. If they do, I'll say so.

There have been countless people telling the world who Nicholas Godejohn is. I don't want to replace their version with mine.

I want to preserve the record and ultimately get as close as possible to the truth of who Nicholas really is, in his own words.

And we still have years of his words left to hear.