How A Friend of the Family Turns a Horrific Abduction Saga Into Something Beyond True Crime
Vanity Fair, August 9, 2022: How A Friend of the Family Turns a Horrific Abduction Saga Into Something Beyond True Crime
“On his first day of filming A Friend of the Family, Peacock’s upcoming true-crime limited series, Jake Lacy found a letter in his trailer. It was written by Jan Broberg, one of the series’s producers and also one of its real-life subjects. The note described in generous detail the character he was set to play, as she remembered him from childhood: charming, warm, funny, a wonderful storyteller, able to cry at the drop of a hat. This was his superpower, she wrote, that disguised his monstrous nature. The letter then concluded by giving Lacy a kind of blessing: ‘She was like, “Go for it,”’ Lacy recalls. ‘“Don’t second-guess this.”’
“Lacy plays Robert ‘B’ Berchtold, a seemingly loving husband, father, and respected business owner in ’70s Idaho. As previously chronicled in the Netflix documentary Abducted in Plain Sight, Berchtold repeatedly sexually assaulted his underage neighbor Jan and kidnapped her on two separate occasions, when she was 12 and 14 years old—and embroiled her parents in his abusive manipulations, prolonging his bizarre hold on the family. (After pleading guilty to felony kidnapping, he ultimately served only 10 days in prison, according to the documentary. He died by suicide in 2005.)
“When laid out in detail, the incredibly disturbing yearslong saga would surely seem too strange for fiction; that the adult Jan would decades later involve herself in the TV version might sound even more outlandish. But the 60-year-old actor, producer, and activist is determined to help others recover from, or altogether avoid, the kind of singular trauma her family experienced. ‘I’ve had a lot of opportunities to tell my story, and I keep telling it over and over again because I want to help people see it before it’s too late,’ Jan says now. ‘This is the most common kind of abuse. It’s not a scary stranger. It’s someone you know, someone you often love and usually trust. We don’t talk about it enough.’”
Additional reading:
The Atlantic, February 7, 2019: The Strangest True-Crime Story Yet
The Guardian, February 6, 2019: 'He was a master manipulator’: Abducted in Plain Sight and the truth about abuse
news.com.au, February 9, 2019: Girl in shocking Netflix abduction documentary has stark message about child abuse
