WATCHING the yellow balloons drift up into the sky, Becky Mackintosh looked over at her friend Coco and felt heartbroken for the young woman next to her.
“By the end of the month, Coco claimed the lawyer who’d contacted her had actually been hired by her mother in a ruse to lure her back to Germany, where the family were intent on silencing her,” Becky says.“Coco told me that lots of people had cut her off because she became too much for them, so I wanted to learn how to set boundaries so I could help her.Coco demanded Becky’s attention all the time.“She wanted me to lie next to her, so she felt safe.
“For a while afterwards, I couldn’t talk about her without crying – there was so much pent-up emotion,” says Becky. In August 2021, Utah-based investigative journalist Lynn Packer released a YouTube video exposing what he called: “The Coco Berthmann Hoax”.