Abducted in Plain Sight proved to be one of the most shocking and controversial true crime documentaries we’ve ever seen.
The insane true crime doc left viewers “disturbed beyond words” due to the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the double-abduction of Jan Broberg as a child.
One of the most controversial moments came when the documentary detailed how Jan’s kidnapper, Robert ‘B’ Berchtold was allowed to sleep in her bed as part of his therapy.
Berchtold convinced Jan’s parents that his therapist had told him that by doing so, it would help him overcome his childhood traumas.
However Broberg has now denied this was ever allowed to happen in an interview with ET Online.
She explained: “That is one part of the documentary that I want to be changed because he did not sleep inside of my bed. He laid on the top of my bed just like mum, dad, or anybody else when I’m 9, 10, or 11, reading a story, tickling backs, you fall asleep.
“I was asleep, he had told my parents: ‘I have these tapes I was given by this psychiatrist. I’m supposed to lay by a child who was the same age as I was when I was abused as a kid. And then I lay by the child and I listen to these tapes, and it’s supposed to help me overcome the trauma that I went through in my childhood’.”
Speaking to Vulture, the documentary’s director, Skye Borgman says that she can understand how the Brobergs might’ve thought Jan and B’s relationship wasn’t a sexual one.
She claims that they could’ve been under the assumption B wasn’t sleeping with Jan — in that way. “They convinced themselves of that, even though so many people [and] the FBI said that this is something that happened,” she said.
Borgman continued, “I think it really has to do with the fact that they placed so much faith in experts, in doctors who said, ‘There has been no sexual abuse because her hymen hasn’t been broken,’. They didn’t have any real concept that anything else could be sexual abuse. It was purely penetration, really, that they thought was sexual abuse.”
“The shame they feel [about] the affairs they had threw them into such denial,” claims Borgman. “Between the time Jan was 16 and 21, when they weren’t really talking about this stuff at all, when they hadn’t realized any of the sexual abuse – I think they literally were able to convince themselves that if Jan’s not telling us about this, it didn’t happen.”
Borgman explains that it was only when “Jan started becoming sexually active, started liking boys, started figuring all of this stuff out” that the Brobergs realised what Berchtold had done to their daughter. She concluded, “It is hard to understand, but I think it really was that they could not believe it.”