Convicted child sex offender and former Subway spokesperson Jared Fogel is the subject of documentary series Jared from Subway: Catching a Monster, which is screening on Sky.
Convicted child sex offender and former Subway spokesperson Jared Fogel is the subject of documentary series Jared from Subway: Catching a Monster, which is screening on Sky.
Opinion by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
* Warning: This article references child sex abuse.
I ruined my nights this week by watching the true crime documentary series Jared from Subway: Catching a Monster. It’s vile. Repugnant isn’t a strong enough word. You should watch it.
The three-part series, which is on Sky, charts the inspiring rise to global celebrity and the plummeting fall into global disgust of Jared Fogel aka “the Subway Guy”. It’s a series that finally proves American showman and circus owner PT Barnum wrong. Turns out there is such a thing as bad publicity and Fogel be thy name.
Because having spent 15 years pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into making him famous all around the world through high-profile advertising campaigns, the fast-food sandwich brand Subway will forever be linked to paedophilia and child abuse. That isn’t just bad publicity. It’s cataclysmic publicity.
Fogel’s story begins inspiringly. He was an obese man, weighing just under 200kg, who lost an astonishing 111kg in just 11 months. He didn’t do this by intermittent fasting or keto diets. He didn’t hit the gym or start running marathons. He didn’t have his stomach stapled or liposuction. He did it in the most borderline ridiculous way possible. He did it by eating Subway.
Twice a day he’d eat two low-fat Subway sandwiches. A turkey six-inch for lunch and a foot-long Vege Delight for dinner, washing both down not with healthy water but instead with Diet Coke. After losing 45kg he upped his weight-loss regime by adding walking to his Subway eating routine.
Miraculously, he’d bumbled onto a weight-loss programme so powerful that Weight Watchers could only look on in envy.
Convicted child sex offender and former Subway spokesperson Jared Fogel is the subject of documentary series Jared from Subway: Catching a Monster.
A local journo heard about his remarkable transformation, and the remarkable way he achieved it, and wrote an article on him. Subway got wind of it and as they’d been marketing themselves as the healthy fast-food option quickly got in touch with Fogel. It’s one thing to tell people you’re the healthy option, it’s quite another to show them a slim guy holding up a giant-sized pair of jeans and saying he no longer fits them solely because he ate Subway.
Subway couldn’t have wished for a better spokesperson. Fogel became the face of the brand. They put him in ads. He led their campaigns. They flew him around the world to go to events and sent him in to schools to preach the benefits of healthy eating. In particular, the benefit of healthily eating Subway.
But, just as in fables, you need to be careful what you wish for because underneath Fogel’s benign grin and astounding weight-loss story was an evil secret. One that he befuddlingly chose to share with a radio journalist he’d been flirting with. The pair were giving a talk at a school and moments before the students were due to arrive he leaned over and whispered into her ear that he thought middle school girls were hot.
She was shocked. Not least because she had two children approaching middle school age. Her name was Rochelle Herman and in that instant she became determined to bring Fogel’s crimes to light.
To out him she led him to believe she was romantically interested. Because his job as Subway spokesman kept him away on the road they communicated through endless phone calls which she secretly recorded. Eventually, she gained his trust and Fogel began sharing his dark, twisted fascinations with children.
If this sounds like a honeytrap, you’re right. The FBI thought so too when she presented them with her tapes. Told they were inadmissible in court, they convinced her to become an official informant and to keep recording their conversations. It left her a nervous wreck as she continued encouraging Fogel in his depravity while processing the sick imagery he was putting in her mind.
All of which you hear in the series. Herman’s recordings are genuinely chilling, stomach-churning and completely nightmarish. Made the more so by Fogel’s obvious excitement and casual attitude towards his unforgivable crimes. I won’t repeat any of the things he says here.
As the person responsible for exposing Fogel, Herman is the main talking head of the series. But she’s also prone to being as dramatic and sensationalist as possible, which is detrimental. The story is both of those things already. It didn’t need this extra layer of faux zing or the overly dramatic music that plays on top.
Still, you can’t hold it against her. Because of Herman, Fogel is now a convicted sex offender, living behind bars for child sex tourism and possession of child pornography. Fogel’s sentence is 15 years. The same amount of time he spent working for Subway, going into schools and talking to children with a big smile on his face and despicably evil thoughts in his head.
