With “Abducted in Plain Sight” on Netflix and “A Friend of the Family” on Peacock, which both look back at the horrifying case of Jan Broberg, we get a full picture of the dark side of people.
Even though the first one is a documentary and the second one is a drama, they both show how Robert Berchtold was able to catch her not once, but twice. So, if you want to find out more about the same thing, with a focus on their relationship, these events, and her current status, we have all the information you need.
Where Did Jan Broberg Go?
In the early 1970s, when the Brobergs moved to Pocatello, Idaho, they met the Berchtolds, who were their new neighbors. Almost right away, they became close friends. The two families then went to church parties, family dinners, and trips together until Jan, who was born in July 1962, started to think of Robert Berchtold as her second father. But as time went on, he became obsessed with her. He also managed to seduce her parents and convince them that he needed to sleep in her bed next to the child for “therapeutic reasons.”
Then, on October 17, 1974, Robert took the 12-year-old girl after telling her family he was taking her horseback riding. Jan woke up strapped to a bed in his mobile home on the way to Mexico. That’s where he raped the oldest of his three daughters by making her think she was half-alien and needed to have his child before she turned 16 to save the species. Jan was told that if she didn’t, either one of her sisters would have to take her place or her whole family would go blind or die, so she felt like she had no choice but to do it.
In fact, Robert tried to marry the girl before she hit puberty in Mexico, where the legal age at the time was 12. Five weeks later, local officials stepped in and saved her. But one of the strangest things is how the married father later tried to get Jan to keep quiet about the attack so that her parents wouldn’t press serious charges, which worked. But unfortunately, he took her again in August 1974. This time, he hid her in a Catholic school for girls in Pasadena, California, until the FBI found him four months later.
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What happened to Jan Broberg?
Jan didn’t start talking about her experiences for real until she was 16 years old, when she may have realized that the alien mission she thought she was on wasn’t real. This simple step helped her heal, and she went on to become an actress, singer, dancer, and writer. In 2003, her book “Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story” came out. The abuse survivor and child advocate has since said that neither she nor her family were stupid or careless. Instead, they made the mistake of trusting the wrong person blindly.
As for Jan’s current situation, as far as we can tell, she is 60 years old and lives in Utah, where she has built a good, happy, stable life for herself. She was a big part of making “Abducted in Plain Sight” happen, and she and her mother, Mary Ann, were also the executive producers for “A Friend of the Family.”
Also, it’s important to know that Jan has been in over 50 movies and TV shows since she started working in the entertainment industry in the early 1990s. ‘In the Line of Duty: Siege at Marion’ (1992), ‘Nadir’ (1996), the ‘Clubhouse’ film series (2002-2003), ‘Everwood’ (2002-2006), ‘Maniac’ (2012), ‘I’m Sorry’ (2017-2019), ‘Behind You’ (2020), and ‘The Gabby Petito Story’ are just some of the movies she has been in (2022).
Jan recently started The Jan Broberg Foundation to shine a bright light on the reality of abuse in order to prevent it, inform, educate, and heal. She was also the Executive Director of the Center for the Arts at the Kayenta Arts Foundation, but she quit after almost six years in the summer of 2022 so she could focus on her non-profit.
The new book by the host of the podcast “The Jan Broberg Show,” “The Jan Broberg Story: The True Crime Story of a Young Girl Taken,” came out in early October 2022.
Career
Broberg has been in more than a dozen full-length movies. Some of the movies she has been in are Slaughter of the Innocents (HBO), Poof Point (Disney), Message in a Cell Phone (Disney), The Secret Keeper (Columbia TriStar), Bug Off, Hope for Troubled Teens, Nadir, Family First, Little Secrets (Columbia TriStar), Mobsters and Mormons, and The Book of Mormon Movie, Vol. 1: The Journey. She also played the main character’s mother in Baptists at Our Barbecue and shared a role in Maniac with Elijah Wood.
Broberg has been in many TV shows, such as Touched by an Angel (CBS), Promised Land (CBS), Remember Me (PBS), Death Row (PBS), The Man with Three Wives (the Norman Grayson story), Harmful Intent (NBC), Siege at Marion (NBC), Deliver Them from Evil: The Taking of Alta View (CBS), and Ancient Secrets of the Bible (CBS) (CBS Miniseries). Nurse Louise on the WB show Everwood may have been her most well-known role.
Broberg has been acting on stage for a long time. She has been the lead in shows like The Sound of Music (Tuacahn Theatre), I Do! I Do! (Sundance Theatre), Jane Eyre (Glendale Center), My Fair Lady (Scera Theatre), Carousel (Idaho State University), Trixie True Teen Detective (BYU), and No No Nanette (Playmill).
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Life at home
Broberg was taken when she was 12 and again when she was 14 by a family friend who was also the kidnapper both times.
On October 30, 2003, she and her mother, Mary Ann, put out a book called Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story. It was heavily edited and left out all information about her father’s sexual relationship with the person who did the crime. Abducted in Plain Sight was a movie about a real crime that was based on Broberg’s story. It took three years to film and make, and it came out in January 2019.
Jan Broberg is well-known all over the world because of the 2019 Netflix documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight,” which became a huge hit. It told the story of how her neighbor groomed and kidnapped her twice, and how she not only survived horrifying sexual abuse as a child but has gone on to thrive and live a very full and productive life.
This fall, NBC’s Peacock channel will show a nine-part, scripted, true-crime series about Jan’s life. Jan is one of the producers of “Friend of the Family,” which stars academy-award winner Anna Paquin as Jan’s mother, Colin Hanks as his father, Jake Lacy as kidnapper Robert Berchtold, and Lio Tipton as Jan. The series will show how things like this could happen right in front of everyone’s eyes by showing how predators use “grooming” techniques to get victims to trust them and give them access to them.
Jan is an expert in this field, and she uses her skills as a public speaker to teach and involve more people in these issues. She is also an actor and a producer, and she runs the Center for the Arts at Kayenta in St. George, Utah, as its executive director.
Jan started The Jan Broberg Foundation in 2022 to bring attention to her mission to help victims of abuse heal and do well, and to stop abuse from happening in the first place by focusing on the sneaky crime and mental illness of the “groomers” who do these things.
After telling her terrifying story in the Netflix documentary Abducted In Plain Sight, the 56-year-old actress got a lot of support, but her parents got a lot of hate.
The movie, which was directed by Skye Borgman, told the unbelievable story of how Broberg was kidnapped twice by Robert Berchtold, a pedophilic family friend who abused and raped her for years.
Her parents waited days before telling the police about the first time she was taken, and after Berchtold was arrested, they let their daughter keep in touch with him. Two years later, he took her from her home again.
Broberg talks about how her abuser was able to get close to her whole family in the current issue of PEOPLE. He even had separate sexual relationships with Jan’s parents, Mary Ann and Bob Broberg. These friendships helped him gain their trust and pay them not to say anything about the abuse he did to Jan.
Broberg tells PEOPLE that her parents have made her feel a lot of different things. “We went to counseling as a family,” she says. “When I was in my early 20s, I was very angry.
She says, “My parents didn’t deny or downplay what they did.” “They said, ‘We made the worst mistakes in the world.'” They said that it was their fault. They listened to me and didn’t try to argue back.”
“I felt like he was using me and my whole family against us,” she tells PEOPLE. “If I could go back and erase one thing from my life, it would be him. He was a pro at making everyone feel like he was their most important thing.”
Mary Ann remembers how her daughter would show how hurt and angry she was. “There were times when she was so angry that she would say, ‘We can’t talk about this anymore, you don’t understand what I went through,'” she says. So, we’d say, “Take a break, and if you want to talk more, we can.”
Despite the trauma, Jan Broberg was still able to get along with her parents. Last year, Bob Broberg died.
Mary Ann tells PEOPLE, “We never felt like she didn’t love us or care about us.” “She was always grateful that we were there for her. She got mad a few times when she was a teenager. I thought it was good for her to show how angry she was.”
She tells PEOPLE, “My message to everyone who has been abused is, ‘You are strong.'” “You can get past what happened, but you might need help along the way. You don’t have to take it on yourself.”
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