All the Bombshells Explored in Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster

Warning: This story discusses child sexual abuse

There was once a time when "Jared from Subway" brought something else to mind.

The striking imagery of a college senior named Jared Fogle showing off the enormous pants he used to wear before he lost 245 pounds in a year while subsisting mainly on Subway sandwiches  resulted in a viral ad campaign for the fast-food chain in 2000.

Fogle, aka "The Subway Guy," became a daytime-talk-show-visiting, motivational-speaking, everyman-with-a-story-you-can-really-get-behind celebrity. He started The Jared Foundation to combat childhood obesity and visited schools all over the country. South Park started parodying him as early as 2002. He appeared as himself (and was spoofed) on Saturday Night Live. And Subway continued to feature him in commercials for years.

Until July 2015. The company cut ties with Fogle after the FBI raided his Indiana home in connection with the arrest of Russell C. Taylor, the longtime executive director of his foundation, on child pornography charges. 

Following a whirlwind of shocking allegations, crude jokes and his own arrest, Fogle was sentenced on Nov. 9, 2015, to more than 15 years in prison (188 months per charge, to be served concurrently) after pleading guilty to a count apiece of possessing child pornography and traveling across state lines to have sex with a minor.

Meanwhile, Taylor was sentenced last May to 27 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to 30 child pornography and sexual exploitation crimes for molesting nine children, aged 9 to 16 years old, and setting up cameras in his home to film the victims without their knowledge. His now ex-wife, Angela Baldwin (formerly Taylor), was convicted in October 2021 of four child exploitation and child pornography crimes and also sentenced in May to more than 33 years in prison.

Fogle remains locked up at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Englewood, Colo. A new Investigation Discovery docuseries delves into his rise and fall, revisiting chilling audio recordings of Fogle talking to a radio host who was trying to get him to admit to committing crimes against children. Producers also interviewed two survivors—Taylor's stepdaughters, who are speaking out for the first time.

Here are all the bombshell details explored in Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster:

Why did Rochelle Herman suspect Jared Fogle was a predator?

Florida radio host Rochelle Herman says in the ID series that she first met Fogle in the fall of 2006 when the American Heart Association reached out to her about doing an interview with the Subway pitchman. He was at least 30 minutes late, she recalls, though once he arrived, he was "very cordial, personable, but he had an ego." And he was flirtatious, which Herman—a divorced mother of two—admittedly found flattering. Afterward, Herman recalls, she told Fogle that her daughter, Angela, wanted to meet him. 

In the series, she takes a photo of Fogle with her child out of a box. "Looking at it brings back horrible memories," Herman says. "It's like putting your children in the mouth of a shark."

After their first meeting, Herman also sat down with Fogle in the auditorium of a Sarasota middle school to film an interview segment for TV. 

Just before the cameras started rolling, she says, he leaned over to her "just out of the blue, and tells me how hot he thought middle school girls were. I just shut down. Did I really just hear what he just said to me?"

Why did Rochelle Herman start taping Jared Fogle?

Acknowledging in the series that she had no "tangible evidence" to take to police, but determined to find out who Fogle really was, Herman started looking for proof of any past misbehavior. Long story short, she didn't find any. No arrest records or charges, no negative stories from people who knew him.

"I could never find anything of a deviant nature," she recalls.

With no other proof, Herman says, "I knew I needed to get Jared on tape in his own words, his own voice, expressing his desires, his confessions and especially his plans for children."

She admits, "It wasn't the most thought-out plan." (Florida is also a two-party consent state when it comes to recording a conversation, and Herman says, when she first brought her tapes to the FBI in Sarasota, she was told her actions could be considered a crime and the tapes would not hold up in court.)

When did Jared Fogle tell Rochelle Herman his fantasies involved young kids?

When another opportunity to interview Fogle arose six months later, Herman accepted—and, she says, during that meeting she got his cell phone number.

They talked a few times, she says, and he didn't say anything inappropriate about children. So, Herman decided she had to get closer to him. They arranged for her to meet him in West Palm Beach on one of his motivational-speaking trips. 

She recalls going to his hotel room, where Fogle became very "hands-on," Herman says. As she pulled away, she alleges, he leaned over and told her "how hot it would be if I put my hair in pigtails and would I do that for him."

That, combined with what he told her at the school, "made my skin crawl," Herman says. "I was shaking, and I was trying not to allow my sickening feeling inside to be expressed on my face. I had to get out. As soon as he went to the restroom and closed the door, I grabbed my bag and walked to my car as quickly as possible."

Fogle called her and she made an excuse. But then, Herman continues, she found out that the Dictaphone she'd tucked in her bag hadn't recorded Fogle as clearly as she had hoped it would. 

They continued to talk on the phone and, Herman admits, she was using herself as a "honeytrap" in hopes of getting Fogle to open up about his desires.

In one recording, excerpted in the series, she asked him what was the "craziest" thing he wanted to do—and he replied, "I want to do everything." She then asked him if he was interested in "someone that's young" and, if so, "How do we do that?"

He said, "I'll have to figure it out, we can work on that." 

Herman asked, "How young?" and he suggested "middle school." Then she countered with, "Like a 9 or 10?" and he agreed, "Yeah, that'd be hot, that'd be really hot." 

She continued to record conversations with Fogle for three years, in part under the oversight of the FBI's Sarasota office, with agents advising her how to begin and end each call, after which she'd immediately turn over the tapes. But as former FBI agent Bob Hamer recalls in the series, there was no proof Fogle was acting on any of the vile things he said about kids—including a claim he had sexual relations with a young boy on a trip to Thailand—and therefore he was not arrested or charged as a result of what he told Hermann.

What was Russell Taylor's family life like?

In the docuseries, Angela Taylor's daughters Hannah Parrett and Christian Showalter—speaking out for the first time—recall their mom's parenting style changing when she started dating Russell Taylor, who'd been working for the American Heart Association when he met Fogle on the speaking circuit and was hired to run The Jared Foundation.

Angela went "from being this strict Christian woman, going to church every Sunday," Christian says, "to being this partying, carefree person I had never met before." She was about 13 at the time, while Hannah was 10.

Taylor was a film buff, the women recall, and Hannah says that's why she initially shrugged off a video he made, shot from "all these different angles of me playing softball, and some of my teammates and coaches," as his way of being supportive. Even though, she says, "to me it felt a little weird."

What did Russell Taylor's stepdaughters think of Jared Fogle?

Hannah and Christian remember in the series thinking it was great when their stepdad brought Fogle into their lives, recalling it felt "glamorous" to be able to tell their friends they knew a celebrity and he was "like our uncle, he's family."

When they first met Fogle at a dinner, Hannah says, "he seemed very shy and kind of reserved." Adds Christian, "Like he just had this very careful personality...He talked but he wasn't very outgoing. He was more of a listener, more of a watcher. I would describe Russell and Jared's dynamic as, Jared's the producer, Russell's the director, making a movie. Jared was the money, Russell did the job."

But their perception took a turn when Taylor arranged for them to introduce one of their friends (unnamed in the series), who was about 15, to Fogle. It was an uneventful dinner, Hannah recalls, but after the meeting Fogle started texting Taylor about the friend and "would make comments about her breasts, about her looks, and [about] having sex with our friend."

Christian admits in the show that, at the time, she "just looked at it as, 'They're just perverted.' You know, you have that pervy uncle [waving it off]...But it was more than that."

When Hannah told her friend about the texts, she says, the friend "got very uncomfortable. Very quickly, she questioned me about it, 'Why is he saying these things about me?' I instantly felt awkward and uncomfortable because in that moment I started to realize that something isn't right here."

Whatever happened to Rochelle Herman's tapes?

By 2010, Herman says in the series, she and Fogle were no longer in contact. Unhappy with what she felt was the FBI's inactivity and feeling like her own life was unraveling (in the series, her son Thomas attests to the strain that his mom's one-woman sting operation put on their family, as well as the physical and mental toll on Herman), she went to the Sarasota Police Department to report Fogle.

Now-retired Sarasota PD detective Chris Catanzaro recalls interviewing Herman on May 13, 2012, and admittedly wondering, at first, "Is this a person that is enamored with a celebrity?" But then, she says, Hermann "showed us her evidence."

The evidence included recordings, played in the series, of Fogle telling Herman to describe her kids for him and asking her if she'd let him see her kids naked.

"When I listened to Rochelle's tapes, I was shocked," Catanzaro says. "I genuinely was shocked. He comes across as a clean-cut guy. But predators come in many shapes, forms and oftentimes can be people we have a lot of respect for. I was very disturbed, I was concerned there was a possibility this man was going to do things."

But, the detective explains, while she confirmed with the FBI that there was an active investigation, since Fogle lived out of state and there was no evidence he had committed a crime in Sarasota, the police couldn't arrest him.

Herman recalls telling the detective she was going to play her tapes on her radio show. And Catanzaro says she told her, "Don't do that, that would not be a good idea."

What led authorities to start investigating Russell Taylor?

In the ID series, former Indiana State Police Captain Chuck Cohen recalls getting a heads up from a state trooper he knew, who told Cohen that he had a friend who'd "been in communication with a man sending images that depicted bestiality."

Cohen brought this to an investigator and that led to Taylor being identified as the guy sending messages that mentioned sex acts with animals. The act of bestiality was illegal in Indiana, Cohen explains, but it wasn't illegal to possess images or videos depicting it. But if there were images, that could mean activity, so authorities executed a search warrant at Taylor's house to look for bestiality images. And they found a photo showing Taylor's wife "in contact with an animal," Cohen recalls. Also during the search, investigators "inadvertently discovered hidden cameras built into things that looked like something else, like a clock, in places like children's bedrooms."

Taylor initially told investigators the cameras were set up for security purposes, to prevent theft.

But authorities found videos, ultimately proved to have been produced by those cameras, Cohen says, "of children undressed; of children involved, in some cases, in sex acts."

How did Russell Taylor's stepdaughters react to his arrest?

Christian recalls being "in a very traumatic, frozen state" when talking to the FBI after the cameras were found. "I couldn't even believe what was happening to me...He was watching us. In the shower, watching us getting dressed in our rooms, watching us masturbate. We were being watched 24/7...It's just really hard to accept that that even happened."

She and Hannah had to identify each other, and "some of my closest friends," in the tape for the feds, Christian says. "I think I was starting to reconcile what was really going on, everything that ever happened with Russell finally made sense." 

The women recall the permissive atmosphere their mom and stepdad created, Christian concluding that "allowing us to drink and smoke and party made us vulnerable to talk about sexual things." Their mom would share details of her sex life with Taylor and, Hannah says, "I was 12 and Russell was telling me, 'You should be having sex, you should be exploring your body.' And I told him, 'No.' He proceeded to make fun of me because I hadn't done those things."

Christian says in the series that one day she got a text from Taylor saying he'd left something on her bed—and it was a sex toy and a laptop ready to play pornography.

"He was doing all these things to catch us on camera," Hannah says, "literally setting up scenes to put into his film."

How did Russell Taylor's cooperation lead to Jared Fogle's arrest?

Investigators found thousands of text messages and numerous "horrible" images and videos of children in Taylor's possession, police captain Cohen details, and overall they identified 12 victims. They soon found that Taylor had sent an image of a naked child to Fogel, and Taylor told investigators that Fogle had actually been out to dinner with the child in the picture.

And instead of reporting it to police or telling Taylor not to send him anything like that again, Cohen says, Fogle responded with a lewd message.

That exchange prompted the investigation into Fogle, Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Debrota recalls in the series. And on July 7, 2015, the FBI raided Fogle's house, much to his neighbors'—and most of the rest of the country's—astonishment.

When prosecutors shared in court documents released in August 2015 that Fogle had admitted to possessing child pornography involving 12 minors and having sex with two minors, Subway—which announced it was cutting ties with its longtime pitchman immediately following the raid on his house—posted on the chain's Facebook page, "Jared Fogle's actions are inexcusable and do not represent our brand's values. We had already ended our relationship with Jared."

Addressing the court before he was sentenced that November, Fogle told Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, "I went from being raised with good solid morals and values to living the life of deception, lies and complete self-centeredness. I had become dependent on alcohol, porn and prostitutes. The victims that I have harmed as a result of my decisions will carry a huge burden for the rest of their lives. Not a day will go by that I don't think about them. I take full and absolute responsibility for what I have done."

His defense team brought in an expert who testified that Fogle had "mild pedophilia," which the judge shot down in court as "not a diagnosis."

While there was no concrete evidence Fogle had done any of the things he talked about, DeBrota says in the series, "the existence of the tapes showed he had a sexual interest in minors and a longstanding and persistent pattern of behavior. It's not one moment of bad judgment, it's not a small addiction—it's a major problem."

And Pratt invoked audio recordings as proof Fogle had spoken of having an interest in minors as early as 2007, on her way to sentencing him to 15 years and eight months in federal prison, several years longer than the prosecution had asked for.

What did Angela Taylor do to her daughters?

Christian and Hannah, who describe Fogle as "the puppet master" and their stepdad "kind of just his puppet," recall in the series finding out from the FBI in 2020 that their mother was also being investigated for child pornography.

"They showed us text messages and text messages and text messages of our mom talking about wanting to have sex with us, wanting to let Russell have sex with us," Christian says. "She was watching us live on these cameras. You just feel so unloved, just how someone who is supposed to love you and protect you, supposed to be your mom, is dangerous."

She continued, "We were asked to testify against her and I wanted to tell the world what she had done, because she stole so much of my childhood away from me. I felt, You exposed me, I'm going to expose you."

In October 2021, Angela (last name Baldwin by then) was convicted at trial of two counts of production, one count of conspiracy to produce, and one count of possession of child sexual abuse material. 

After she was sentenced to 400 months in federal prison and her ex-husband given 324 months in May 2022, U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Myers said in a statement, "The Taylors have finally been held accountable for their years of heinous sexual exploitation of children." Added FBI Indianapolis Special Agent in Charge Herbert J. Stapleton, "Sentences like this one send a clear message that adults who participate in this type of despicable abuse will be held responsible for their actions."

Hannah says in the series she's asked herself many times, "Why would our mom do this to her children?"

And Christian, who's now a mother herself, straight-up calls Angela "evil."

"She just was not a good mom," Christian says. "I would definitely say having a child has changed my life. I've never loved somebody so much. I just want to give my daughter what I didn't have."

All three episodes of Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster are available to watch on InvestigationDiscovery.com or On Demand 

For more true crime updates on your need-to-know cases, head to Oxygen.com.