On August 24, 2010, Pete Crooks, a senior writer at Diablo magazine, received a call from a Los Angeles-based publicist representing Chris Butler’s private investigation firm. The pitch he got was intriguing: Butler had hired a group of local mothers to run surveillance on cheating husbands, and business was beginning to boom. The firm was featured in People, The Today Show, and Dr. Phil—and most recently, Lifetime Television had just greenlit a new reality show called P.I. Moms San Francisco about its East Bay operation.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Butler had a proposal for Crooks: Take part in a ride-along with one of the mothers, watch them catch a philanderous man in the act, and write about it. It smelled like a great story and Crooks eventually hopped in a car with Denise Antoon, one of four moms Butler had employed. The mission went like clockwork. The man they were following met up with a young woman and began kissing her in a parking lot, all while Denise grabbed photos and video. Crooks understood why Lifetime was eager to turn this into a series.
But did everything go down a little too perfectly? Soon after returning home, Crooks got an email from someone named Ronald Rutherford that made him question everything. “It would be a mistake to write a story on the P.I. moms and Chris Butler,” the email stated. “Chris totally played you. The case that you sat in on was totally scripted. All the participants or employees are paid actors. I hope that publishing it is not in your plans.”
As chronicled in Netflix’s new documentary Trainwreck: P.I. Moms, that mysterious message was just the beginning of a scandal that involved lying, cheating, wire-tapping, methamphetamines, and jail time, and would ultimately kill the Lifetime reality series before it ever aired. In this retelling, director Phil Bowman interviews a couple of the moms, Lifetime producers, and several others involved with the show to paint a better picture of how Butler’s enterprise wasn’t everything it seemed to be.
Reality show origins
When Butler started his investigation firm around 2000, the former police officer hired a lot of off-duty, law enforcement officers to work on cases, but he found that the men were all too competitive and impatient to be good investigators. “Then, I hired a mom, and she was the best investigator I had worked with,” he told Crooks. “She was patient and a good team player, and she could multitask.”
Eventually, he hired moms Michelle Allen, Charmagne Peters, Denise Antoon, and Ami Wilt to fill out a team. Butler used their skills and inconspicuousness to perform undercover operations, stings, and other kinds of investigative work, which secretly included a “Dirty DUIs” scheme in which they’d encourage men to drink alcohol, encourage them to drive, and then alert the police. (The doc doesn’t interrogate this aspect of the business.) As the moms started getting media attention throughout the reality TV boom, Lifetime saw potential for a show—along with spin-offs in other cities—centered around them.
The network soon reached out to Lucas Platt about showrunning the series. The TV veteran liked the general concept of “showing this group of women busting criminals together,” he says in the doc, but he also wanted to explore their lives outside the job. As Denise and Ami attest, the moms didn’t want to be treated like a group on Real Housewives and create fake drama, so Platt agreed to share more personal and meaningful anecdotes about their lives.
Lifetime eventually gave Platt three camera crews and a four-million budget to produce eight episodes with Butler’s group, which also included Carl Marino, a former law enforcement agent who helped with cases that needed a male presence. But Platt and the moms could tell there was something off about him—that he was eager to be a television star at any cost. “It felt like egotism run amok,” Platt says. “Its called P.I. Moms, and he’s not a mom.”
Repeated sabotage
After Crooks received the anonymous tip about the staged ride-along, he reached out to Platt to share the information. “If Chris did this to me, how could he not do it for TV?” he thought. The showrunner was confident in the veracity of the women and the cases they were pursuing, until their next sting operation, when their target told Denise that he’d been tipped off.
Now Platt was curious. He began investigating and soon discovered the tipster (and the man responsible behind the Rutherford email) was actually Marino. The show wouldn’t work if employees were breaking up operations out of spite and jealousy, so Platt told Butler that his employee had been sabotaging the show. But instead of firing Marino, Butler told Platt not to worry about it—an odd reaction, especially for someone hoping to make bank from a reality series. “Clearly he had other things that were happening that were taking precedence,” Denise says.
Marino knew all about those other things, and was willing to spill the information. He continued corresponding with Crooks and explained that Butler was involved in serious criminal activity, selling marijuana, prescription Xanax, and steroids that had been confiscated by a Contra Costa Country Task Force commander. Once in possession of the drugs, Butler would then give them to Marino inside the office. “I have not sold any and don’t want to,” Marino messaged Crooks. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
At the same time, Marino continued to scheme, eventually using insider case files to solve a missing person’s case that Platt and the P.I. Moms had hoped would be their opportunity to save the series. As both Ami and Denise remember, Marino was determined to have his 15 minutes of fame, even if that meant continuing to sabotage the show he was so desperate to be on. “How dumb are you that they’re going to push this out and you’re going to be the star of the show?” Ami says.
The final sting
After Crooks reached out to Contra Costa D.A. Daryl Jackson with his information, Marino ultimately came forward and agreed to wear a wire for law enforcement, who was ready to bust Butler after discovering he had planned to sell three pounds of methamphetamines. They arranged a buy at the P.I. firm between the corrupt officer, Butler, and Marino, and as soon as the sale went through, authorities quickly arrested Butler.
The news officially sealed the show’s fate. Lifetime cancelled P.I. Moms San Francisco and forced Platt to break the bad news to the women and crew. It was an emotional moment, especially for Ami, who had opened up over the course of the show’s production and shared intimate details about losing her son at an early age. She hoped her testimony would help other women struggling with something similar. Instead, it would never air.
On May 4th, 2012, nearly two years after telling Crooks to write a story about him, Butler pleaded guilty to selling drugs, extortion, robbery and planting illegal wiretaps, and was later sentenced to eight years in prison. The fallout also impacted the P.I. moms themselves—they were called frauds and took heat from their community for collaborating with Butler. (Crooks eventually did write a 10,000-word story about his experience.)
Marino eventually got his moment in the sun, playing lead Detective Lt. Joe Kenda, on the Investigation Discovery TV show Homicide Hunter. But to everyone involved with P.I. Moms, he and Butler will always be known as the ultimate schemers that killed their TV careers. “Chris and Carl just took it away from everybody,” Denise says. “They put their desires above everyone else’s.”