Reality Hits | 4

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Wondery.

When you live in paradise, every day should be perfect.

For Jane, this means no cold grey skies, no judgemental neighbours,

no relentless school run.

But despite all her efforts, the picture-perfect paradise she's been working so hard to create over the past year

is falling to pieces.

Their kidnapping is all over the news,

the children are frightened,

and her partner Phil has just come out of hospital,

his burnt arm hidden under long sleeves.

Since that night, nothing has been the same.

Jane's determined to try to keep her dream alive, but it's hard.

Jane, especially, and Phil, were pretty wired and nervous.

And TV producer Billy feels the same way.

After returning to the island, he's been feeling nervous too.

What had started off as a fun half-hour documentary about a couple escaping to the sun

has transformed into a very dark drama.

One with an unknown ending.

I felt uneasy as well, knowing that what had happened could happen again.

It's fair to say everyone is on edge.

So when a new boat approaches the island one morning in October

and the passengers emerge into view,

Billy feels a cold chill run down his neck.

There was two armed people on the back of the boat I could see standing up.

He glances at Jane as she turns and runs towards their shack.

She was petrified, she was scared, she was really unnerved by what had happened.

But if he thought Jane had gone to hide, he's wrong.

She was always very, very angry at what happened to Phil

and what her family had been put through.

She comes back, gun in hand, marching defiantly towards the water.

Billy looks on, astonished, as she raises the gun.

You don't fire at people in Nicaragua and certainly in that area

without some kind of consequence.

Then Jane lines up the sight and closes one eye.

From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine, host of British Scandal.

And this is The Price of Paradise.

Episode 4, Reality Hits

I'm sure I'd be pretty high on the nervous scale

if I'd been kidnapped at gunpoint from a remote desert island,

staged a dramatic escape from a burning boat

and been forced to hide out all night in a swamp.

Yeah, my temper might be frayed, but I was as relieved as Billy

to realise that Jane was trying to scare away their latest visitors,

not kill them.

She was firing over their heads.

At the time, we didn't know who they really were.

It was only afterwards that we realised it was the Environmental Agency.

Not gangsters, not drug kingpins, civil servants,

armed with clipboards?

A group of ten officials from the Ministry of the Environment,

after pressure from Maria and her team,

were coming to Janik to speak to the Gaskins

about accusations of environmental damage.

They want to inspect the nesting sites of the endangered turtles,

who have also called the island home.

But the officials left with the sound of gunshot in their ears.

This is definitely going on the front page of their next report,

in bold, in red, maybe underlined too.

As night falls after another stressful day,

Billy can't quite believe what's been unfolding around him.

He's a London TV producer, with a lot of experience, sure,

but here he is as one of the sole witnesses

of a stranger-than-fiction story.

He's part confidant, part pseudo-family member,

but ultimately, first and foremost, he's after the story.

But that story was not supposed to involve a shootout.

That night, I remember being probably the most scared that I was.

Lying awake, Billy keeps thinking he can hear another boat approaching.

Should he get up and check? His mind is racing.

Would they come back with more people, more arms?

What was going to happen? That was pretty frightening.

All this just to make an hour of reality TV.

Is it really worth it?

Over the next few days, everyone's mood darkens,

and Billy's particularly worried about Phil.

I could tell that Phil was a little bit more depressed or unhappy.

Phil is a changed man.

Once the kind of guy who would race around the house with a power tool,

fixing everything in sight, running the kids to football,

keeping everything on schedule.

Now he's quiet, gaunt and unwell.

His asthma's been getting worse,

after inhaling so much smoke when their boat caught fire.

And his health is deteriorating, along with his spirits.

He had great breathing problems.

He was wheezing a lot more.

He was pretty fragile, mentally and physically.

He became even more paranoid, and he wasn't sleeping.

Phil's life in paradise is now punctuated

by regular trips to Bluefields Hospital on the mainland.

He's had enough of island life.

The two-hour boat rides, the lack of food or medicine,

the isolation, what once felt like freedom, now feels like captivity.

The kidnapping had really brought home to him

how much he didn't like it there.

I think there was a part of Phil that was slightly broken.

This really was the last straw.

And it's not just Phil who's feeling broken.

The kids wanted to go home.

Everyone seemed stunned, I think, about what had happened,

because it seemed straight out of some terrible film.

But, and you know what I'm going to say,

Jane still has no intention of leaving.

And she's certainly not leaving to return to miserable England.

She seems crushed that everyone else is abandoning the dream

she's been fighting for.

I chose to come on the island.

I'd love the island.

I know what I want, unlike some people.

And when I get this, I don't not want it anymore.

I still want it.

And I'll continue to want it and enjoy it.

Regardless of the fact that all your family,

the people that are the same inhabitants of the island,

would rather be somewhere else?

Well, no, that's a problem.

It is a problem.

On that, we can all agree.

So Phil has been canvassing the children,

drafting a list of the benefits they're missing out on at home in England.

TV, friends, even school.

Every week I ask them, who wants to be here?

Who'd rather have civilisation?

And then I pick on the individual little things that each person would like,

and then we have a vote.

And when you have that vote, Jane loses every time.

Phil is nothing if not democratic,

even if co-opting the kids to outvote Mum

is perhaps not the greatest way to achieve consensus.

Eventually, the Gaskins reach an agreement.

They're not going back to the UK,

but they will start looking for another tropical home.

Surprisingly, not from the same website as the first time.

Now they just have to decide on where.

Jane would like somewhere similar, just safer,

which to me seems like a good upgrade.

Phil seems keen to be somewhere a little busier,

somewhere he can build a business,

with schools for the kids,

a hospital, maybe even a pub.

Jane thumbs through a guidebook for inspiration.

It was pre-Instagram, guys.

Do you think there's anybody in the Seychelles

that would swap a small place for an island?

Phil would like it better because they've got supermarkets

and proper hospital and rich people spending their money.

I would like it better in the Seychelles.

No, I'd like it better in the Canary Islands.

And so would the boys as they grew up.

All those tourists coming, they couldn't go wrong, could they?

I can see the timeshare advert now.

Would like to swap a four-bed condo in the Seychelles

for a tropical island in Nicaragua.

Comes complete with millions of sandflies,

a local land dispute and visiting cocaine traffickers.

The details will need ironing out,

but it sounds like there's finally a sense of hope in the air.

A future together as a family

that might make sense of the Janik experience,

as the first step on a journey to the perfect final destination.

But for Phil, the journey's end is coming much sooner than expected.

It's a balmy evening in Bluefields.

Maria is having a quiet night in with her now-husband, Frank.

They're in their bright yellow house on the hill,

enjoying the breeze that's blowing in from the balcony doors.

The spare apartment downstairs, the one they sometimes rent out,

is empty at the moment,

so she and Frank are planning to enjoy a relaxing evening

to themselves.

Maria hears Frank answer the front door

before returning to the balcony with a man she's not seen before.

The visitor is pretty well-dressed, early 40s, a notebook in his hand.

Maria's seen plenty of journalists in her time,

so she can spot one a mile off.

Maria's often asked to comment on stories in the local paper,

but this is different.

He's from one of the big national newspapers,

based in the capital, Managua, 150 miles away.

Maria knows straight away what it's about.

The Gaskins.

First, the sale of the islands made national press.

Now everyone's talking about the kidnapping.

Everyone wants to know what's happening on the Pearl Keys.

Including this journalist, it seems.

Then he asks Maria a question she didn't see coming.

Did she help organise the kidnapping of the Gaskin family?

And was it connected to the land dispute?

OK, whoa, that was not an avenue I'd even considered exploring.

Maria as kingpin in the local mafia kidnapping.

Maria is also baffled at this line of questioning.

But it doesn't take her long to discover the source of this outlandish story.

He was like, well, I'm here because Peter Martinez paid all the expenses

and he went to the newspaper and asked us to come to do this report.

Peter Martinez.

Always turning up in this story.

Fingers in pies.

We're just never too far away from him, are we?

So let me just get this straight.

He's Mr Fix-It for the Pearl Keys.

The kind of guy who knows everyone.

He's a lawyer by trade and now, it seems, a news commissioner.

And an amateur sleuth.

Truly a man of many talents.

But Maria doesn't have time to explain to the journalist in her living room

how ridiculous this whole story is becoming.

Instead, she offers him her view on what's really been going on in the land dispute.

After he leaves, Maria can't stop her mind reeling about Martinez.

This is a man she thought she knew well.

A fellow lawyer.

Someone she used to respect when they first met.

He had prestige.

I always thought he was smart and he would have a good career.

She knows about his role in trading the Pearl Key Islands.

Martinez has never hidden his relationship with the man behind tropicalislands.com.

Peter Sokos.

In fact, he's happy to show off about it, on the record,

when a film crew visit him in his downtown office.

That's pretty unambiguous.

Martinez says he's personally responsible for all the Pearl Keys that have been sold.

But Maria has been starting to question why he stayed so involved in the islands

and the lives of the new islanders, long after the sales were completed.

Something just doesn't feel right.

It is not normal that the same lawyer who sells you the property

will represent you now in everything you do.

And not only things related to property, but your personal matters.

I mean, it was so weird.

It's beginning to feel like very little happens on the islands

without Peter Martinez being involved.

He's even been the go-to guy for producer Billy

and the TV crew filming the Gaskins for Channel 4.

Every time we went to Bluefields to pick up food and do stuff,

we'd always pop in and usually see Martinez.

Anything that Jane and Phil wanted on the island, he would fix.

Fine. Maybe he's just a very well-connected guy with a keen sense of civic duty.

He was slick and he was charming.

He was always really smartly dressed.

If you walked down the street with him,

people would come up and shake his hand and smile and joke with him.

You certainly got the impression that he was a big player in Bluefields.

Slick, charming, well-dressed.

As Billy says, a big player.

And one who should have been on the same side as them,

according to Maria's son, Alvaro.

I thought it was a shame because he was a Creole from the Caribbean coast

and the people who were getting disenfranchised

were other Creoles from the Caribbean coast.

In fact, Jerry, the Creole community leader, knew Martinez.

They used to get on well.

Martinez was a good lawyer. He did a case for me.

We were friends.

It's hard to have a confrontation with someone you've been dealing with, a friend.

But I had to defend the people's right

and defend the land he was trying to take away.

We decided to confront him and treat him like a stranger.

Our friendship was on hold.

He became an enemy and we wanted to win the fight against him.

With so many connections about town,

Maria and Alvaro know that Peter Martinez will be a tough adversary.

If they plan to take him on, they'd better be prepared.

Over the next few months, Maria and the indigenous communities

work tirelessly to try and raise publicity for the Pearl Keys case.

And they're succeeding.

More headlines are hitting the local and national press.

The sale of the keys could be a scam.

The legal advisor of the residents of Pearl Lagoon, Maria Acosta,

did not rule out the possibility that Peter Sokos

has defrauded citizens of different nationalities by selling them four keys.

Some articles even name Phil and Jane.

One island, Lime Key, was sold to an English couple, the Gaskins.

The Gaskins have cut off the island from the indigenous inhabitants of the area,

disrupted the environment of the island,

and most especially the habitat of the hawksbill turtle.

The dispute over the Pearl Keys is escalating fast.

Maria's name and her organisation are quoted regularly in the papers

and she's becoming a key figure in the fight to reclaim the islands.

There's some people that hate me, some people that admire my work.

Maria's at the centre of a row that's turning hostile.

It was very tense. I could feel it.

After a particularly long and tiring day at work,

Maria returns home to try and relax.

She sits down in front of the telly with Frank

to watch a film her son Alvaro has recommended.

But you know that feeling of turning on the wrong film at the wrong time?

She needed a rom-com, maybe a Pixar adventure.

Instead, she gets a sombre documentary

about a Brazilian activist called Chico Mendes.

He was murdered in 1988 for trying to help a local community

win back land that had been sold to a rancher.

Maria and Frank watch in silence as the story unfolds.

A small land dispute escalates into death threats and eventually murder.

In the 80s, the Mendes story had stirred outrage

in newspaper headlines and TV bulletins.

The victim was devoted to preserving Brazil's irreplaceable rainforest.

He paid for that, apparently, with his life.

Francisco Chico Mendes was an environmental leader

little known outside of the Brazilian Amazon.

But his assassination by local cattle ranchers

had international repercussions.

The news of his murder had sent shockwaves around the world.

As Maria watches the documentary about his life,

she can't help worrying about what she's letting herself into.

Is Alvaro trying to warn her?

Later on, as she's sitting on the balcony with Frank,

she tells him that, for the first time in her career,

she's frightened, scared about where her work might lead them.

I asked him, what happens if they kill us?

And he just looked at me and he said,

Maria, we are in God's hands.

To be honest, I thought, what a big help.

Now when I see back and I realise that we were in God's hands.

Now Maria looks at that night as a turning point,

a warning about what lay ahead.

On a cold and dreary night in January 2002,

millions of British families are flipping over to Channel 4

for an hour of sun-drenched escapism.

Last week's episode of No Going Back

had featured a middle-class couple

sauntering off to Spain to grow some olives.

This couple are about to live out their dream.

They're swapping the urban 9-to-5 for an idyllic Spanish farm.

Sure, sounds like a nice relaxing watch.

But with all due respect to the producers, I think it's fair to say,

the cliffhangers were not exactly up to soap opera standards.

They're off in search of the good life with their two small children.

Harvesting their own almonds, picking olives, growing grapes and making wine.

But they won't have a regular income,

they've never farmed before and they don't speak the language.

Episode one goes roughly like this.

Will an early frost ruin the crop? No.

Will the locals turn their noses up

when they sample their olive oil at the village fair?

Yes, the stakes basically could not be lower.

So as episode two begins, viewers aren't ready for what's about to unfold.

A couple called Jane and Phil

are moving to a beautiful remote island in Nicaragua?

One year ago, this Hampshire family left Britain in search of paradise.

They bought their own palm-fringed desert island

off Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast.

As the programme starts, TV researcher James

is watching nervously at home with his friends.

He hasn't seen the final version of the episode yet,

so he's wondering how the audience will react.

I don't think anyone saw it coming.

And how could they?

Protesters turning up on the island,

Phil calling them racist,

Teodoro getting sacked,

Jane admitting on camera that they'd slept together,

Phil, rather calmly,

recounting their kidnapping to the local magistrate.

First of all, I recognised his voice,

and the children also recognised his voice.

And when we were sitting in the panga,

they were going, it's Teodoro.

And then his daring escape,

which frankly still shocks me,

let alone the unsuspecting British public.

I picked up the gas, which was in a two-gallon can,

and I was throwing it over the man.

I just picked up the matches, struck them and lit them.

And I was still pushing the gas out of the can,

and my hand was catching the light,

and I did it for as long as I could,

and dropped back in the water to put my hand out.

Over the past year,

James had been watching all the footage as it came back,

documenting the family's ups and downs,

the triumphs and the tragedies.

So he knew what was coming.

But as the episode finally airs,

nothing had quite prepared him for the fallout.

It was like a bomb going off.

It caused an absolute explosion of viewers.

Hundreds of people contact Channel 4 to voice their opinions,

and almost all their opinions are about one thing.

Jane Gaskin.

They gave us this medieval scroll of complaints,

and it was absolute outrage at Jane.

She became kind of public enemy number one really quickly

for being a bad mother,

seeming to be a bad wife as well.

I think just generally she became labelled as evil.

TV critics and tabloid journalists follow suit

with observations which run the gamut from moralistic

to shamefully sexist and grossly objectifying.

A real full house.

We last see Jane perched on her island shore

like a black widow spider,

flaming red hair, impertinent bosom

and determined little thighs on display,

touting for a new mate to share her idea of paradise.

Another writer describes Jane shockingly as a...

More or less mad woman, or at the very least

a manipulative and wildly selfish middle-aged minx.

It felt like the TV critics and the nation and the tabloids

were looking for their next public enemy number one.

And Jane just fitted the bill perfectly

because of the way she looked and the way she behaved

and what she said and what she was prepared to do.

Jane ticked every box for a tabloid takedown.

She was a woman who was not ashamed of her body,

who was sexual and who was outspoken.

And the icing on the cake,

she did all this while being, how dare she, a mother.

She simply had to be brought down a peg or two.

And the names they call her?

Which is about as close as I can come in a family newspaper

to calling her what I really want to call her.

OK, OK, but credit to them,

at least they didn't invoke a full-on medieval tr...

Oh, no, sorry, there it is.

Several hundred years ago,

women like Jane Gaskin would have been burnt at the stake.

And so the way they did that was in the public domain.

They annihilated her, they character-assassinated her,

and she had no way of answering.

There wasn't social media, there wasn't Twitter,

there wasn't Instagram, she couldn't answer back.

And so, in a way, it felt like an easy target.

And it wasn't just the papers that targeted her.

In online forums, the British public blamed Jane

for everything that went wrong on the island.

The local protest? Jane's fault.

The kidnapping? Jane's fault too.

No matter who had sold her the island,

or taken them hostage, or put Phil in hospital.

Producer Billy was pretty taken aback by the vitriol.

One part of me could understand the reaction,

but another part of me was really deeply troubled

and thought it quite unfair.

Spending time with her on the island,

Billy had seen a very different side of Jane.

A side that clearly didn't reveal itself to viewers.

I think people perceived Jane as being a bad mother,

which she certainly wasn't.

I mean, she'd obviously made her decisions and her choices,

but she loved the kids and she was really close to them.

As the episode draws to a close,

Phil and Jane have decided to move on from Janik

to find a new home,

which sounds like a pretty wise decision to me.

After days of arguments and family votes,

a compromise is reached.

Jane and Phil will sell.

Phil gets to leave the island.

They've decided to look for paradise somewhere safer

and to start again.

But viewers couldn't have prepared

for what they were about to hear at the end of the show.

Over the next few days, Phil's asthma attacks get much worse

and his health deteriorates.

They decide to leave the island

to be near to a hospital on the mainland.

As haunting music starts to play,

the screen turns black and white text reveals...

Four weeks later, Phil died from a massive asthma attack.

Just as the Gaskins had taken the decision

to leave the island and find a new home,

Phil's health had taken a turn.

After contracting a chest infection,

he was admitted to hospital,

where he collapsed and was transferred

into intensive care to recuperate.

They'd gone to the mainland, back to Bluefields,

to get hospital help.

But on December 3rd, 2001,

just a year after they left the UK,

Phil collapsed once again,

this time in front of Jane and the children,

in a serious asthma attack.

And then the next thing I knew, he'd passed away.

Phil is gone, and paradise feels further away than ever.

Next time, on The Price of Paradise,

Jane is not the only one

whose life is about to be turned upside down.

I didn't know what my life was going to be like

after all this.

My mind couldn't process it.

Like, I couldn't believe it.

That level of shock is just horrible.

At that moment, I felt I went into a deep black hole.

From Wondery, this is episode 4 of 7 of The Price of Paradise.

A note about this podcast,

not everything was captured on film at the time,

so we can't always know exactly what was said in every moment.

In places, our script is based on the testimony of our interviewees

and all other sources available to us.

The Price of Paradise is produced by Forest Sounds

and is hosted with additional writing by me, Alice Levine.

For Forest Sounds, our producers are Ella Cattle and Aaron Keller.

The assistant producer is Valeria Rocker.

The managing producer is Anne Fitzgerald.

The production coordinator is Nina Abdullah.

The researcher is Tom Cass.

Executive producers are Pete Sale and Jeremy Lee.

For Wondery, our producer is Theodora Leloudis.

Our managing producer is Rachel Sibley.

Our consulting producer is Brian Taylor-White.