The Oath Keeper's Ex-Wife

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Yesterday, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right group, the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after the conviction on seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Now, while Stewart Rhodes faces the consequences of his actions on the public stage, his ex-wife, Tasha Adams, feels she's to blame.

At least that's what she told Anna Sale, creator and host of the WNYC podcast, Death, Sex & Money, and Micah Loewinger, correspondent for WNYC's On the Media, when the two interviewed her about her experience of being married to Stewart Rhodes for two decades. During their time together, Tasha suffered from Stewart's abuse. She supported him through school, tended to his wounded eye after he had shot himself. Hence, the eye patch if you know what Stewart Rhodes looks like. Bore his children, thus making him a "family man," and helped him through the founding of the Oath Keepers.

Heck, she even picked the organization's name, the Oath Keepers. Tasha provided all of the crucial reproductive work, shall we say, that allowed Stewart to seize enough political power to lead an attack on the United States Capitol. Anna Sale and Micah Loewinger described this story as an example of the private origins of far-right violence. Let's get into the story with both of them now. What a treat to have the two of you together. Anna and Micah, welcome to The Brian Lehrer Show. Welcome back in each of your cases. Hello.

Anna Sale: Hello.

Micah Loewinger: Hey, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Micah, let's start with you. You have an episode of On the Media coming out today, in which you talk about being subpoenaed to testify during the Oath Keepers trial. Yes, listeners. If you don't know, On the Media's Micah Loewinger was a witness in the Oath Keepers trial. When you were there, you saw Stewart Rhodes in the flesh. Can you introduce us to Stewart at the level of impressions that you had of him before meeting his wife and reaction to his sentencing?

Micah Loewinger: Sure thing. Yes, I've been interested in the Oath Keepers for a while. As you mentioned, Stewart Rhodes founded the group shortly after Barack Obama was elected as president, which I think communicates a lot about the reactionary psyche that allowed somebody like him, this charismatic strongman, to take hold and recruit members. He is the kind of guy who would wax poetics about the Constitution and about conservative values.

Underneath that, to people who followed closely, there were very troubling conspiracy theories about gun control, about left-wing political groups, and election denialism. I think that he is certainly not the only militia leader or thinker that brought us to January 6th, but I think that his particular charisma and ability to manipulate people helped whip up the violent frenzy that we saw in 2020 and then, of course, on January 6th.

Brian Lehrer: We'll bring Anna in in just a minute. Micah, how did you meet Tasha Adams and why did you decide to tell this story about her relationship with Stewart Rhoads and to get Anna Sale involved?

Micah Loewinger: Sure, yes. I've been tracking militia groups for a couple of years prior to speaking with Tasha Adams. She and I got on the phone shortly after January 6th when I saw that she was opening up about her experience with the Oath Keepers and with Stewart. I was digging into the group at that time. She struck me as a very open person who could teach us, as you mentioned, about domestic life, what it's like to be close to somebody like Stewart Rhoads or like a militia member or somebody who had been deeply radicalized in the lead-up to that day. I am very interested in militias. Anna Sale is really an expert when it comes to digging into thorny, personal, hard-to-talk-about topics, so it seemed like a natural collaboration.

Brian Lehrer: Anna, from your perspective, why did you think this was a story for Death, Sex & Money, which does have more of a personal life focus, not so much things like January 6th than the Oath Keepers trial?

Anna Sale: To me, the work that Micah and I have gotten to do together gave me a very intimate portrait of manipulation and how manipulation works and how control works. I think that in the public sphere as we're trying to figure out as media, as journalists in the media, and also as citizens who we can trust, I felt like this was a really interesting window into that by looking at this marriage and looking at Tasha in this moment. She left this marriage with Stewart Rhodes back in 2018. The divorce was just finalized in the last week. She has been in this limbo for a number of years. During those years, she has been trying to piece together the narrative of what happened to her and what happened to her family.

It actually started, Brian, this reporting project together. Micah and I were talking at the WNYC holiday party, and he said, "I've been in touch with Tasha Adams, and also I've learned that one of the people that she reached out to when she was leaving the marriage and trying to gen up her confidence was she was in touch with Kelly Jones, the ex-wife of Alex Jones, but I'm not sure they've ever talked together. Do you think that would be an interesting story?" I said, "Yes, I think we should learn more about that and also to hear what they have to say to one another." That was also part of our reporting, getting together on a video call and hearing them talk together.

Brian Lehrer: Fast forward, the two of you end up meeting Tasha in person in Montana. She gets into talking about her relationship with Stewart. We're going to play a couple of clips in a minute. Listeners, these are really interesting from this OTM-DSM. That's our shorthand here for On the Media-Death, Sex & Money collaboration.

I want to ask you one thing about what she said to you first because you describe this phenomenon of Tasha's world shrinking while Stewart's expands, which reminds me of that saying, "Behind every great man is a great woman." Of course, it's outdated and cringeworthy at this point, but it's a historically-normalized notion we might call it. In what ways were Tasha's world shrinking, and I'll throw this to you, while Stewart's expanded as he was becoming the prominent founder of the Oath Keepers?

Anna Sale: In a lot of ways, but I will tell you, the detail that really stuck with me is early on in our interview together. She told us that from the time she was just getting together with Stewart Rhodes, she was 19 when they met up, until her 50s, she didn't go see a doctor. During that time, she had six children and also lost an infant. All of those births, she had help from midwives who were friends of the family, but she was not engaging with the healthcare system. Just imagine that. This is during a time when Stewart Rhodes is a student at Yale Law School while he's clerking. She's not going to a doctor because of this sense of there are systems that this family did not engage with. That really stuck with me as a sense of just how isolated and cut off Tasha was in this marriage.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to continue on that at all, Micah?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, I think that's well-put. I think that Tasha found herself in a precarious position where, on one hand, the family was in this deep economic precarity. Stewart had trouble holding down jobs. He was irritable. He would allegedly scream at people and get fired, and so she wanted stability for the family. I think on the other hand, in the early stages of the Oath Keepers, seeing her husband, supporting her husband through the early stages of running a political organization, I don't think she quite had a handle on the paranoia in the vigilantism that Stewart Rhodes was peddling in even 10 years ago. We got a really complex portrait of somebody in a difficult situation.

Brian Lehrer: Anna, here's a clip where you asked Tasha to talk about the kind of physical abuse that she endured in her relationship with Stewart Rhodes. You had asked that question and here's what she said.

Tasha Adams: He would never outright punch you, but he would do other things to hurt you because he always wanted deniability. He always saw himself as a great man. Being undeniably abusive didn't fit into that, though he would break out of that sometimes. [sound cut] It's just, "Oh, sorry about that. Oh, sorry about that." How often and how hard you got hurt correlated directly to how upset he was with you over something.

Brian Lehrer: All right, and listeners, you will hear that we bleeped out a word there that you can't say on the radio even if you can say it in a podcast. Anna, what did you make of him considering his public image when deciding how to abuse his family members and of this internal battle over how he wanted to be seen versus who he actually was?

Anna Sale: I think we should say we reached out to the Stewart Rhodes attorney and he declined to comment as we were reporting this episode, but that was sort of Tasha's-- the way she described him that it was difficult to pin down for herself for so many years, whether this marriage was rotten at the core or just what was going on. She credits that with Stewart's savviness that he was a very smart man. She told us many times, he's a very smart man.

What was interesting, fast forward to the federal criminal case, what she described listening in, she said it was so interesting that he could not pick his own audience, that so much of his collection of power and the raising of his profile was figuring out how to find just the right audience and how to speak to them so that what they were hearing, something they could hear and agree with. Then comparing how he described himself in his court testimony to the records of text messages, there you saw the contrast, and there you saw the lies, and there you saw the real criminality. I think that she was having that experience inside a controlling, abusive marriage.

Brian Lehrer: Micah, Tasha noted that when recruiting members of the Oath Keepers, Rhodes targeted people who are also wrestling with wanting to be seen as a great protector, a great family man, while simultaneously dealing with maybe PTSD or drug abuse, very private issues that could seemingly prevent one from embodying their values. Why does this split within oneself prime someone for right-wing indoctrination and perpetuating domestic violence if that's how you see it, if that's how Stewart Rhodes saw it?

Micah Loewinger: Well, when it comes to Oath Keepers recruitment, it's worth keeping in mind that Stewart very purposefully and openly targeted current and former police and military, people who had "taken the oath to defend the Constitution." There's a lot of distortion in the way that he spoke about the role of police and military, but he was clearly zeroing in on a sense of purpose and higher calling that these people had already exhibited in their life. If they had left the military and were experiencing PTSD, they may still think fondly upon the time when they did something great for their country.

A lot of people have spoken about, in analyzing militia recruitment, looking for the hierarchy and the purpose that comes from being in a militia where you have a leader and you have little cells. It feels like the service that you would have committed. We can't say for sure whether all of his recruits had violent histories with anyone around them or PTSD, but he clearly tapped into something that's in the conservative mindset, which is protecting what are seen as the great American ideals. There's a universalism of that that I think is dangerously applicable to public violence. Sadly, somebody like Stewart Rhodes, I think, had a clear vision of that.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking with On the Media's Micah Loewinger and Death, Sex & Money's Anna Sale. They've done a collaboration around an interview that they did with Tasha Adams, the now ex-wife of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, just troubling intersection of where the personal met the political. If anybody wants to ask a question or say anything in reaction to what you've been hearing, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can text a comment to that number as well.

Something remarkable is how Tasha wasn't granted access to doctors during her time with Stewart. You mentioned that briefly before. She birth all of her children at home, you report, with a midwife. Not that there's anything wrong with that. She discussed how her pregnancy complications led to her emotional rupture from her relationship with Stewart if these weren't her choices as to how to birth their children.

Specifically, one incident where she was experiencing a miscarriage. Stewart essentially broadcast this experience live during a call with the board of directors of the Oath Keepers. She describes it as 10 guys on a speakerphone while she's learning that she's in the process of losing her baby. Here's a clip. Listeners, this is a little difficult to hear but worth it. Listen.

Tasha Adams: It was a real shake-up moment because I always told myself that deep down into the surface, Stewart is a kind, loving person with this gruff exterior. When it really, really counted and I really needed it, this kind person would show itself. Then when I really needed it, he's just irritated that I'm staining the carpet with blood. Then, again, two years later, I had a full-term little girl who didn't live. It was the same thing again. He didn't care. That was a very, very ending of thinking that he had any type of emotion whatsoever toward other people.

Brian Lehrer: Ugh, I can't imagine, Anna, hearing the story of her miscarriage being broadcast live at an Oath Keepers board meeting. It's just so disturbing. What do you make of that incident in the context of their marriage? What does it shed light on? It is so difficult to listen to.

Anna Sale: I think what I hear there is you hear her describing the moment where the story changed internally for her of, "Is this a man that I'm helping to become a better version of himself or is this a very cruel man who can't love, can't love me, can't take care of me the way that I need?" You hear her describing those two moments when she realized that this wasn't a marriage that she wanted to be in anymore.

Then I think we should think about that it was years before she felt like she could safely extract herself and her kids from that environment. Speaking about the isolation that you brought up before, just that sense of isolation, it's physical isolation where they were living in Northwest Montana. It was financial isolation. It was transportation isolation. Just the difficulty of getting out of the house and getting away.

Of course, at the root of it was the fear of her own physical safety if she couldn't safely leave or if she would somehow lose her kids because of Stewart's ability to manipulate the family court system. Those were the stakes for her. She knew from that moment, those two moments, very painful moments, that she needed to get it out, and then it was a long process of figuring out how.

Brian Lehrer: Micah, from what I understand from your piece, it wasn't even like a coincidence that he was on a board of directors call with the Oath Keepers, and she happened to be having a miscarriage at that time. It was like he orchestrated it to have this board of directors call, knowing that this was going on, somehow for political gain. Is that overstating it?

Micah Loewinger: I don't think so. I think that he was just very difficult to work with. He was erratic. He was irritable. I think that at that time, as Tasha told us, even the board of directors of the Oath Keepers, the organization that he started, were kind of getting sick of him. This offered him an opportunity to appear sympathetic at a time when he needed it.

I think that's part of why post-January 6th, Stewart Rhodes is kind of persona non grata within his own movement because he burned so many bridges on his way to the top. I think, unfortunately, that may offer a bit of an excuse to the Oath Keeper chapters that are still around all across the country just to say, "Well, Stewart, he was just the bad guy. He was crazy and he got off plan, but that doesn't represent who we are." It cuts both ways.

Brian Lehrer: Eve in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with Micah Loewinger from On the Media and Anna Sale from Death, Sex & Money. Hi, Eve.

Eve: Hi. I heard the podcast. I grew up in an evangelical church. I heard the podcast and I sent it out to quite a few friends. There are so many pieces to this, Brian. I appreciate this kind of work. I'm no longer a part of the church I grew up in. I'm also divorced. The abuse that we are taught to take, and it's not physical, but the coercion, the emotional, the financial abuse supporting men while they're in the ministry. Your world continues to shrink while theirs increases.

I think that complementarianism and some of the teachings in the evangelical church, including now identity politics, are just going to be a reckoning. There's a lot of women that are starting to open their eyes, and that's my prayer, to realize what abuse really is. It's not just physical, but just the other pieces to it. The fact that the church is not equipped, the evangelical church is focused on things like the LGBT, the abortion, and yet the human rights violations that are taking place within marriages and families is appalling.

As someone who grew up in there, as someone who-- I came from a military family as well. Me and my sisters, we were already vulnerable. When we connected as teenagers to this kind of thinking, we grew up in that. It wasn't until we grow as human beings and we realized, "Wait a minute. This is not really Christ teaching, love, tolerance, humility, compassion, nonviolence."

The sad thing is that when you leave, you are ostracized. Now, you go through a different type of isolation. It's a healthier isolation than realizing that you're a part of this. It could become a little cultic honestly. For those of us who have left and those of us who are in contact with some people who are still in it, we appreciate the light that is being brought to all the different pieces, including the abuse that children are growing under and spouses, particularly women.

Brian Lehrer: Very powerfully put, Eve. Wow. Anna, what are you thinking?

Anna Sale: Eve, thanks so much for your call. We haven't mentioned this yet in this conversation, but I think about so much the way Tasha described to us being a 19-year-old who started dating Stewart Rhodes. She'd grown up in a Mormon family in Las Vegas. Stewart seemed exciting and adventurous and something that wasn't part of her what she felt like was boring home life. They got together. They started a physical relationship. Within three months, she had this sense of like, "Wow, this guy's pretty controlling," but knew that because she'd had a physical relationship with Stewart that it might be difficult to go home and be accepted in her Mormon community.

Then as Brian said, that's right around when Stewart had his injury where he had the firearms accident and shot himself in the eye, and then she became his caretaker. She described this choice where she was actually, right before his accident, being in a parking lot and thinking, "Do I go and turn to be with Stewart on this date or do I go home?" She turned to go to Stewart when she was 19. Now, she's in her 50s and all of this has unfolded.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play one more clip that I think goes to how she wound up in this position. Tasha witnessed Kelly Jones', wife of the conspiracy theory talk show host who's in that same world, Alex Jones, custody trial, saw what her future looked like. You two spoke with Kelly Jones. Here's 25 seconds of what she had to say about her trial.

Kelly Jones: If I can lose my kids to Alex Jones, anybody can lose their kids in an American family court. The point is it's not just about me and what's happening to me and my family. It's about America and how all this came to transpire. If you're protecting an abuser, a violent abuser, and an extremist in court, think about the impact, how that resonates out to America.

Brian Lehrer: Out to America. We're almost out of time, but we have two callers who want to make the same point. If two people are calling in with it, then probably other people are also thinking it. We're going to let Jennifer in East Harlem represent. Jennifer, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jennifer: Good morning. Thank you so much for taking my call again, Brian. Also, this is directed to Anna. I listened to your excellent series, Hold On, and it's very relevant to this topic. When we're talking about profiles like this, I think we do an enormous disservice to the public when we don't call a spade a spade here. These are psychopathic personalities.

When you are talking about this level of callousness, this level of irresponsibility, neglect, abuse, disregard for law, for individual rights, for care of their family, insubordination of this degree, these are psychopaths. They are an enormous detriment to anybody and everybody. We have to help the public better understand this because what they do is entirely consistent with their profile. It's altogether predictable. Their trajectory is very destructive throughout their lives, so none of this should be surprising.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer, thank you very much. Well, Anna, this relates to the other DSM, right? Your DSM is Death, Sex & Money, then there's the Diagnostic Statistical Manual on Psychological Disorders. Jennifer and the other caller who wanted to say it say, "We're talking about a psychopath here," and there's more than one in the movement.

Anna Sale: Thank you for your call. One of the things I was left really haunted by after reporting this with Micah, after visiting with Tasha, was just the tragedy of the lack of mental health care available in Tasha's community for Tasha and really for all of us because I think you're right. I think we need more help figuring out when we have these dynamics in our intimate relationships, what is happening, what we're responsible for fixing inside our home lives, and what we're not. Thank you for that call. Of course, Micah and I weren't in a position to diagnose Stewart Rhodes, but I think you can hear by listening to the patterns in his family life and then seeing what he's done in public. Tasha uses the word "sociopath" when we talked to her, but thank you very much for your call.

Brian Lehrer: A last word from you, Micah, on Tasha's politics. I was wondering this at the beginning of hearing that you two were doing this like and what she went through with Stewart Rhodes personally. Does she agree with his out-there politics? I think you came to the conclusion that she doesn't know what she believes. Micah.

Micah Loewinger: That's right, yes. Early on, I think she was sympathetic to a broad libertarianism. I think that's how Stewart probably described himself very, very early on. Nowadays, I think that she is pretty disgusted by what the Oath Keepers became, what they did at January 6th, what they did all along their 10 years of activity prior to that day. I've heard her say in conversation to us things that I would think of as liberal or progressive. I've also heard her feeling hesitant about moving one way or the other. I think she's really just in a moment of trying to figure out what her life looks like now that Stewart has been sentenced to 18 years.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to leave it there with Anna Sale, creator and host of the WNYC podcast, Death, Sex & Money, and Micah Loewinger, correspondent for WNYC's On the Media. Together, they spoke to Tasha Adams, now the ex-wife of Stewart Rhodes, who I guess has had a bad week in court. He got sentenced to 18 years yesterday for his January 6th involvement. The divorce got finalized this week too, I think you said. Just tell people how they can hear this collaboration. Is it in both places? Anna, is it on Death, Sex & Money?

Anna Sale: Yes, you can hear the episode that Micah and I co-reported in the Death, Sex & Money feed. Micah's episode, the hour of On the Media this week that's dropping tonight, right, Micah-

Micah Loewinger: That's right.

Anna Sale: -is about this reporting on Tasha and also Micah's experience, his reporting, and his experience being a witness in the criminal case against Stewart Rhodes for which he was convicted and, as Micah said, sentenced to 18 years this week.

Brian Lehrer: Amazing work. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Micah Loewinger: Thanks for having us.

Anna Sale: Yes.

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