Russell Taylor turns on Jared Fogle as he awaits sentencing
Russell Taylor and Jared Fogle had much different backgrounds, but their lives became intertwined to the point that people started calling them "an old married couple."
Fogle was sent to prison last month for more than 15 years on child pornography charges, and Taylor will stand before the same federal judge Thursday to learn his fate.
While degrees of depravity for child pornographers might be hard to accept, the man leading the prosecution used his toughest designation on Taylor.
Russell Taylor sentencing: 27 years for Jared Fogle accomplice
"In every respect, he's a monster," Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven DeBrota said at Fogle's sentencing.
But, DeBrota added, Taylor is a monster Fogle helped create.
The sentencing in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana marks the end of a shocking Hoosier child pornography case that attracted international attention because of Fogle, the former Subway sandwich pitchman.
Taylor, who headed Fogle’s charitable foundation from 2009 until his arrest in April, has agreed to plead guilty to 12 counts of producing child pornography and one of distributing. The production charges involve images of a dozen children between the ages of 9 and 16, including family members, that Taylor secretly recorded in his home and then shared with Fogle.
As part of a plea deal, prosecutors are asking for a sentence of 35 years, while Taylor’s attorneys want a prison term of 15 to 23 years. Taylor has been in jail since his arrest.
The length of Taylor’s sentence will be decided by Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, who is not bound by terms of the plea agreement.
Under federal law, Taylor faces a minimum sentence of 15 years. The maximum is 380 years if Pratt issues the longest sentence on all counts — 30 years for each count of production, 20 years on the distribution count — and orders them to be served consecutively, not concurrently.
The sentencing will close the door on the criminal case. Yet questions will linger, including why nobody, especially Taylor's wife, knew or intervened until an Indianapolis woman alerted police in September 2014 to Taylor's interest in child pornography and bestiality.
The facade of Fogle and Taylor promoting healthy lifestyles and helping young people came crashing down months later, revealing two married fathers who sought out strippers and prostitutes, drank heavily and dove into the seamy world of child pornography with virtually no level of depravity too taboo.
They were, literally, partners in crime.
The prospect of growing old in federal prison, however, brought an acrimonious end to what Taylor described as a “12-year run” in which he and Fogle lived the high life, traveling the world and meeting celebrities — while carrying on debauched double lives.
Since their arrests earlier this year, Taylor and Fogle have turned on each other, admitting their own guilt but attempting to minimize their roles and cast the other as more reprehensible.
The rise and fall of the men is detailed in hundreds of pages of court records from the two criminal cases. How much of their stories are true is hard to tell. Both men were desperately maneuvering to avoid long prison sentences when they submitted their version of the facts to the judge.
Low self-esteem
Taylor and Fogle came of age at about the same time — children of the '80s — but under much different circumstances.
The son of a school teacher and doctor, Fogle, 38, was raised in Indianapolis. He had his bar mitzvah while visiting Israel as a teen and graduated from North Central High School in 1995 and Indiana University in 2000.
Taylor, 44, grew up in troubled households after his parents divorced. He claims he was physically abused by his mother and sexually abused by a friend and that boy’s father. After his mother married a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, the family bounced from one place to the next, and Taylor attended 11 different schools.
He wanted to go to college, but his devout mother and stepfather were convinced the rapture was coming in 1989. Taylor, they insisted, was better off studying the Bible than getting an education.
Despite the differences in their early lives, Taylor and Fogle shared traumatic childhood experiences that might help explain their relationship. Both said they grew up feeling isolated, not fitting in at school or the world.
"I overate to compensate for my social awkwardness ... But as I grew fatter and fatter, I felt more isolated. Eventually I felt that I didn’t have any real friends in the world except for one. Food," Fogle said in his 2006 book “Jared, the Subway Guy, Winning Through Losing: 13 Lessons for Turning Your Life Around."
"But by the time I entered the fourth grade, slights and insults became big things. I felt I didn't fit in very well, and now that I was getting chubby, I felt even more isolated. I thought no one liked me and there was nothing I could do to improve the situation."
Taylor's low self-esteem, on the other hand, stemmed from his family's instability.
"I changed schools so much. I was always the new kid," Taylor told a psychologist after his arrest. "I was bullied. It was really tough. But I couldn't complain because it was 'the Lord's will.'"
Taylor said he grew up with few friends. And one of the only friends he did have as a child was the boy who repeatedly molested him.
"He was the only friend I had and as I got older, I tried not to think about it," he told the psychologist.
Later, after he moved in with his father as a teen, Taylor said he was sexually abused by older women his father had picked up at bars.
'Our 12-year run'
As adults, Fogle and Taylor had two other things in common — highly sexualized lifestyles and careers that brought them into regular contact with children.
Fogle's attorney said he traded his addiction to food for an addiction to sex and pornography, even as he traveled to schools to promote wise eating habits for Subway.
Taylor's emotional instability led to acting out sexually, a psychologist's report said. He said he and his wife were "swingers" who engaged in sex with other couples and in orgies. Taylor secretly had sex with several male friends.
During this time, he became a youth program manager for the American Heart Association.
It was through that work that he met Fogle, who was doing a presentation for the association at an elementary school. It didn't take long for them to find their common interests.
The pair went out to dinner the night before the presentation, and Fogle asked Taylor to help him write a speech. The next day, Taylor claims, he first learned about Fogle's sexual interest in young children. As the Subway spokesman was preparing to address a group of students, Taylor said Fogle told him "an inappropriate knock-knock joke which referenced having sex with children."
Taylor said he initially laughed off the uncomfortable comment, and wouldn't know until a few years later that Fogle was serious.
Despite his uneasiness, Taylor agreed to help him write the speech. That prompted Fogle to ask Taylor for more assistance, promising to "make it worth my while," Taylor reported.
It wasn't long before Fogle asked Taylor to accompany him to a Colts-Patriots playoff game in New England. Fogle paid for their first-class flight tickets and a room they shared at a ritzy hotel.
"We went to the game and met the announcers," Taylor recalled. "It was the coolest thing ever."
After the game, the pair headed to a strip club, where they settled into the "Champagne room," Taylor said.
"A stripper came back with us ... and Jared said, 'If you can convince her to come back to our hotel room, I'll pay you,'" he said.
Taylor was successful and he and Fogle had sex with the stripper.
"That began our 12-year run," Taylor told the psychologist.
Friend and boss
Over the next decade, Taylor and Fogle would continue their double lives — first as friends and then as employer-employee.
The relationship, Taylor said, revealed a mean side of Fogle that the public didn't see. It belied the marketing star's genial, everyman image as a person who overcame morbid obesity and dedicated his life to helping others.
Taylor took over Fogle's foundation in 2009 and the pair traveled even more extensively. During the day, they would often visit schools and promote healthy lifestyles to children. At night, their focus shifted to partying and picking up women for sex.
"We would go to a bar and women would know who he was," Taylor said. "We would go and party with them, have sex with them. ... We were always aware of the age of consent. In Indiana, it's 16."
Fogle also spent at least $12,000 a year on prostitutes, his attorney said. He told some of them about his desire for minors.
"As early as 2007, witnesses from Florida, Georgia, and Washington state have proffered that Fogle repeatedly discussed his interest in engaging in commercial sex acts with minors," prosecutors said at Fogle's sentencing.
The two men, Taylor said, "would drink like fishes" and Fogle picked up the tab.
"He'd pay more for wine in a year than he paid me to work for him," said Taylor, who earned about $40,000 a year from Fogle's foundation.
It was around 2008, Taylor said, that he noticed Fogle becoming more serious in his pursuit of underage sex partners. But still, Taylor insisted, he did not see Fogle take steps to fulfill his fantasies.
"We went to Thailand and he was seeking out 18-year-old prostitutes," Taylor said. "We've been to Korea, Japan and other countries and I'd never seen him have sex with a minor."
The sordid pursuits crossed the line into criminal conduct after a "nanny cam" set up at Taylor's home captured a teenage family friend having sex. Taylor claimed he used the motion-activated, hidden cameras to protect him from thefts because a lot of people were in and out of his home when he traveled with Fogle.
"I made the mistake," Taylor said, "of mentioning (the video) to Jared."
Fogle pushed his friend to show him the video.
After that, Taylor claimed, Fogle pressured him "to let him see video of other activity in the house" and to purchase more sophisticated video equipment to set up in bathrooms and bedrooms used by children living in his home and visiting. Some of those 12 children were related to Taylor and his wife Angela. Others were family friends.
After Taylor was arrested, he told investigators his wife also had a role in hiding cameras and reviewing video. The Star was unable to reach Angela Taylor, who has not been charged with any crime. Tim Horty, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney, said he couldn't comment further.
Court documents describe a restaurant meal with her husband, Fogle and three of the victims. According to the documents, Taylor and Fogle knew they would soon be secretly recording the children sitting with them.
At other times, Fogle even asked Taylor for images of some young girls he knew, between the ages of 9 and 16, by name.
The Subway spokesman upped the ante, according to Taylor, in 2012 when he "asked me to get (a date rape drug) to drug kids so he could see them in person."
"He wanted me to drug kids," Taylor said, "to knock them out (so he could) touch them."
'Who is paying for this stuff?'
The dysfunctional relationship between Fogle and Taylor continued as Taylor provided his boss — who also owned the home where Taylor and his wife lived — with more secretly recorded videos of naked young girls.
Taylor claims Fogle used his position of power to push him deeper into their criminal conduct.
He claimed Fogle was "psychologically abusive," and would make Taylor "call him Daddy," according to court documents.
"He would say, 'Who is paying for this stuff?'" Taylor claimed. "And I would say, 'You are, daddy.'"
Still, even after his arrest and a failed attempt to hang himself in a Marion County Jail cell, Taylor told his psychologist "how he loves Jared."
"His statement suggested that he idolized Mr. Fogle, to the degree that Mr. Taylor would justify his behaviors and/or explain how Mr. Fogle 'forced' him to act in certain ways," the report said. "He did not seem to be aware of how odd these statements were."
By last week, though, Taylor's attorneys were trying to shift more blame to Fogle.
"Mr. Fogle maintained control over Mr. Taylor's job, owned the home Mr. Taylor was living in, and provided a lavish number of experiences to Mr. Taylor," they wrote in a court document seeking leniency.
"Mr. Fogle had the perfect person to carry out his sexually deviant pursuits, all the while attempting to insulate himself from the risks of the conduct."
Contact Tim Evans at (317) 444-6204 and follow him on Twitter: @startwatchtim. Contact Mark Alesia at (317) 444-6311 and follow on Twitter: @markalesia.
