From prison cells to Bitcoin conspiracies, one woman’s fight to reclaim her life collides with the man who may hold the greatest secret of our time.
I’ve been writing since I could hold a pen. That love of words grew into a career in strategic and nonprofit communications, where I’ve used storytelling to move hearts and minds. While incarcerated, I filled more than 2,500 handwritten pages of journals. Pieced together, those fragments became the raw material for this book. CONVINCINGLY INNOCENT isn’t only my memoir; it’s a lens on cycles of abuse and the unyielding spirit it takes to begin again.
CONVINCINGLY INNOCENT opens with the click of a hotel door in San Diego—and the realization it wasn’t a business trip. Bernadette had been lured there by her boss, a man who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin. To the world, he was the Iron Man of cryptocurrency, a billionaire mythmaker whose brilliance blurred into paranoia. To her, he became captor and interrogator, staging an “interview” spun from riddles, surveillance, and psychological warfare. By the end, one question echoed: how does a small-town nonprofit director wind up trapped by the man the world is desperate to unmask?
The path into his orbit began long before San Diego: a violent marriage, the death of a child, and the impossible task of raising three kids without support. Years of silence and financial strain finally led to a crime and prison sentence that left cracks he later exploited. What looked like a lifeline carried the allure of answers to one of the greatest mysteries of our time: who really created Bitcoin? But chasing that question unraveled a maze of conspiracy and control—a labyrinth of stories he pressed her to record, confident no one would ever believe.
To break free, she had to confront the fractures she’d long buried—and reclaim the only story that mattered: her own. CONVINCINGLY INNOCENT is a tale of captivity and betrayal, but also of survival—from prison cells to crypto schemes, from a violent marriage to the grip of a man determined to rewrite history. Along the way, unforgettable survivors, mentors, and a sabbatical sisterhood in prison reminded her that endurance can pierce even the darkest walls.
Gripping and head-spinning, CONVINCINGLY INNOCENT carries the psychological pull of Unorthodox, the conspiratorial intrigue of Bad Blood, and the devastating intimacy of Wild. In the tradition of Orange Is the New Black, it charts an unflinching path of survival and reckoning
