Love Trapped host Stephani Young was wedding dress shopping in Arizona in September 2023 when she first read about the headline-making case against Clayton Echard, former star of The Bachelor. The article in the U.S. Sun, blaring the headline “Baby Mama Drama?,” detailed how an anonymous ex-girlfriend of Echard was claiming she was pregnant with his twins and demanding he take a paternity test in court documents.
“I remember thinking — and I’ve said this to Clayton’s face since — ‘Oh, that sounds about right,’” Young tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I didn’t watch his season. I had just seen clips online, and his reputation as the Bachelor preceded him.”
Echard, then 28 and a former NFL athlete, had ended his season 26 run on the popular ABC series as an unfavorable lead, to say the least. After telling his final three contestants that he loved all of them and that he slept with two of them — a big no-no on the decades-old franchise — he walked away from the show single, and fans didn’t hold back their feelings on social media.
“If you look online and they ask, ‘Who are the most-hated Bachelors?’ — I’m always on the list,” Echard, who starred on the reality dating series in 2022, admits when chatting with THR earlier this summer. “I got death threats and people tearing into me by the thousands. There was a point where I really blamed the show for everything. But I have to take accountability,” he says. “The version of me that people saw on TV was a version I had manufactured, who I thought everyone wanted me to be.”
No one would blame Young for her reaction at that time, not even Echard. But that headline was just the beginning of a bizarre, three-year legal saga that remains ongoing. It’s a story every bit as wild as any episode of The Bachelor, and it’s attracted an even bigger audience with Young’s megahit podcast from iHeartPodcasts and Glass Podcasts pulling in over 25 million views to date.
Love Trapped details the investigation that eventually unraveled how that unnamed ex-girlfriend — later identified as Laura Owens — attempted to entrap Echard into a relationship by altering an ultrasound image and other medical records, and fabricating a pregnancy video. According to one early ruling, she lied multiple times while under oath during hearings in the paternity and related protective order cases. In one court proceeding, now infamous online, she is seen adjusting what appears to be a fake pregnancy belly and drinking from a large Monster Energy can.
Echard isn’t denying a relationship with Owens, even if it was extremely brief. Back in 2022, after finishing his Bachelor turn, he moved to Arizona to begin a career as a real estate broker. That’s when he met Owens, the daughter of longtime San Francisco radio host Ronn Owens, and engaged in what he describes as a one-night stand, during which they had oral sex. “Laura initially reached out to me via LinkedIn,” Echard recalls. “If I wasn’t the Bachelor, I don’t think I would have popped on her radar.”
After the dalliance, Echard says he never had sexual contact with Owens again. Although she attempted to continue the relationship, he had moved on — until, several months later, when she filed the paternity claim. “I sat down and was like ‘Who is this girl?’” he says. “We pulled up her Instagram, and the last 20 guys she followed were either athletes or local guys who were super successful. All good looking. She was targeting successful men in the area.”
Nearly two years after that paternity accusation was made public, radio journalist Young was approached by Glass Entertainment in May 2025 about hosting what would become the Love Trapped limited series podcast.
“I remembered hearing about this story. I love the intersection of true crime and pop culture, and I was like, ‘Sign me up. I’m in,’” says Young of hosting what started out as a 10-episode weekly release that soon became the No. 1 podcast on Apple after launching Feb. 26, 2026. Love Trapped stayed in the Top 10 series of Apple Podcasts for over 30 weeks. It peaked at No. 1 in Top Series and No. 3 in True Crime and, in July, the series was named one of the best of 2026 so far on Apple Podcasts. It’s now eligible for a 2027 Golden Globes nomination.
Young had a background in radio, storytelling and podcasting, but admits she was in uncharted waters hosting a project of this magnitude that required such a significant amount of research.
Her prep, which began in June 2025, consisted of pre-interviews with content creators like The Rush Hour host and comedian Dave Neal, whom Young calls one of the “torchbearers in this story,” along with Bachelor franchise blogger “Reality Steve” Carbone and YouTuber Schnitzel Ninja, all of whom are participating voices on the podcast, which has since expanded to 27 episodes that include “Bonus” listens to track the ongoing Owens case. A new episode will hit the week of Oct. 19, with one final episode planned for after that.
Young also clocked 40-plus hours of conversations and interviews with Echard, who had already signed on to Love Trapped by the time Glass approached Young. “He was ready to tell his story. I was just the lucky one who got to do it,” says Young. “The person that I know Clayton to be today is not the person that I saw on TV.”
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When Glass first came to Echard, the former reality star was struggling to reclaim his own narrative. When the paternity case made headline news, Echard started receiving emails from production companies interested in telling his story, but they didn’t pan out. “At first I was getting a lot of companies I just wasn’t impressed with, who backed out because they were concerned about getting sued by Laura,” he says. “Then Glass came around and said, ‘Hey, we would like to do a podcast and a documentary.’ A storytelling podcast.”
Echard was drawn to the idea of a longform, investigative podcast that was produced at a high level. Glass Podcasts, which launched in 2019, is a division of Glass Entertainment Group, which has been producing award-winning unscripted TV and films for over 20 years. Founder and CEO Nancy Glass has had a string of successes in recent years, ever since pivoting to the true-crime genre, with adapting their true-crime podcasts into docuseries — Betrayal, Burden of Guilt and Curse of America’s Next Top Model among them.
An investigative journalist and true-crime obsessive herself (she was the last person to interview notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in the early ’90s before his death), Glass says she and her award-winning producing team, which includes her heads of podcasts Andrea Gunning and Ben Fetterman, know a good story when they see one.
“Podcasts are theater of the mind. They’re evocative and really get to your emotions. None of our crime stories involve a murder — they always involve emotions,” Glass tells THR of their slate.
And there was a reason she was interested in telling Echard’s story. “There was no doubt in my mind that Clayton was telling the truth all the way along,” she says. “He’s incapable of making stuff up. It’s what got him in trouble on The Bachelor. This is a guy who always tells the truth, for better or for worse.”
Echard wasn’t trepidatious about opening up, but he was wary of trusting another set of producers after his experience on The Bachelor. Once Young was brought on, Echard reached out. “I said, ‘I’m going to be honest with you. You’re going to have your work cut out for you. There’s a lot here,’” he recalls of their first conversation. “‘You’re going to really have to want to do this and also, I have trust issues with producers because of my prior experiences. I would really like to believe that you’re going to be a producer who treats me more in a way that I would want to be treated.’”
The result was their 40 hours of recorded audio, “and she’s probably talked to me for another 30 hours,” he says of their collaboration.
“Clayton was extremely vulnerable and available,” says Young. “Anytime I had a question, I could reach out to him and I’d have an answer. Anytime I wanted him to do another interview, he was available. Knowing this story, imagine the awkward conversations we had to have? It was hard conversations and he was incredibly vulnerable.”
When Young began her work on Love Trapped, Owens had just been indicted on seven criminal charges in the state of Arizona related to her relationship with Echard. After a June 2024 trial, a Maricopa County, Arizona, family court adjudicated that Owens was never pregnant with Echard’s twins as she had falsely claimed. The judge in that case, Judge Julie Ann Mata, saw a pattern of behavior and referred Owens for further criminal investigation, which eventually resulted in her 2025 criminal indictments and subsequent guilty plea on Aug. 28, after several delays, avoiding a trial that had initially been set for January 2026.
“The judge in that case was like, ‘Hey, I think this is something bigger. You might want to look into this.’ It was then the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office who eventually charged Laura with the felony indictment,” recaps Young.
Young had reached out to Owens before the podcast launched, via their respective teams, and she says the “understanding was she would think about it and wanted to do it.” But when the host reached back out in early 2026 before the podcast launched, Owens sent back an email indicating she had no desire to participate. (THR has reached out to Owens’ current attorney, Christian Lueders.)
“We had a little more correspondence throughout the course of the podcast,” says Young, but Owens never speaks on record. “I do detail some direct quotes in episode 12,” she adds of what was planned to be the final episode, titled “All the Best.” Episodes have since continued, with the most recent bonus episode, “Guilty,” covering the Aug. 28 plea deal hearing. “[Laura] had no intention of participating based on the responses that I received from her,” says Young, who still hopes for the chance to connect. “I’d still like to interview her.”
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Winning the 2024 paternity case was “a good day,” Echard recalls. But it wasn’t over. “It’s like a double-edged sword because on one end, you win. On the other end, you’re like, ‘Why am I in this in the first place?’” Echard’s role in the Owens case would continue, as he remained a victim in her criminal case and is set to share a victim-impact statement at her upcoming sentencing, which is scheduled for Oct. 23 in Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix, Arizona.
“For me, it’s over when everyone stops talking about it,” Echard says, recounting what he’s lost, both financially, in brand deals and speaking engagements, and personally, with his reputation. “I was at the time hoping to get more into mental health speaking to youth because that’s what I needed when I was a kid, and I was on the path towards doing that. And then, of course, when she came out with this, it was an accusation that was very heavy and so I lost all my speaking engagements.
“There were very low moments. She had me definitely in a very, very dark place,” he adds. “I’ve always had a family that’s loved me unconditionally, no matter what I’ve done or went through. It’s been hard on my family, to put them through this. They didn’t sign up for this. But what I’ve become through this experience, I think, has counterbalanced what I lost. At least that’s what I’ve chosen to believe.”
Young and her Love Trapped team continue to update listeners on the case, with the most recent extra episode covering the 36-year-old Owens entering her guilty plea. Under her agreement, she pleaded guilty to four felony counts, including two counts of fraudulent schemes and artifices, one count of taking the identity of another and one count of perjury.
“When the very first article came out, much like me, a lot of people wanted to believe Laura. They wanted to believe this woman was telling the truth — and people had their pitchforks out for Clayton because of his reputation. But the narrative changed pretty quickly,” says Young of how fans and franchise voices helped break open the case, ultimately leading to a plea deal that Young, Echard and others doubted would come.
Back when this began, in September 2023, Owens had shared on The Bachelor subreddit a since-deleted Medium.com post identifying herself as the anonymous woman who was suing Echard. She also shared a Dropbox link with evidence, which is when a devoted population of armchair detectives, a community called “Justice for Clayton,” first started dissecting Owens’ claim and siding with Echard. It’s that community, and their GoFundMe page, that led to Echard gaining legal representation, which includes his lead attorney Gregg Woodnick. What started as a subreddit has grown to communities across Instagram, X and Facebook.
“The armchair investigators and internet detectives got involved because stuff happened to them like Laura said happened to her, and they knew what she was saying wasn’t right or didn’t make sense: That’s not how pregnancy works,” says Young. “A lot of people have experienced pregnancy loss or having to make the difficult decision to have an abortion; and they didn’t feel she was being truthful about things Laura claimed happened to her. Red flags were waving, and that’s why a lot of people got invested.”
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In July 2023, Echard scored that major legal victory when he won the paternity suit. But not until Owens accepted the plea deal did Echard begin to get closure.
“It’s the first time that we’ve seen Laura take any accountability,” said Echard in a reaction video shared to his Instagram after her guilty plea. (THR spoke to Echard for this story before Aug. 28.) “Laura was never able to take an ounce of accountability until [Aug. 28], and that’s not lost upon me how huge that was. I believe she needs to go to prison to be separated from her environment so that she can hopefully heal from there and give her a second chance to come out to the real world and prove that she can be a better person.”
Up until that moment, Echard didn’t feel capable of predicting what Owens would do. “This entire time when I’ve tried to guess her next move, I’ve been wrong every time,” he said leading up to Aug. 28. Young, who was in the courtroom that day, says she was shocked when she heard Owens accept.
“I was absolutely floored when the judge came out and said that she had signed the plea agreement,” says Young. “Then the judge asked her if she was pleading guilty or not guilty to each of the counts. There were four different counts, and she had to say guilty to each one. And that, to me, was a big moment. It was a big moment in covering this case, hearing the word ‘guilty’ come out of her mouth.”
Owens faces a maximum of 12.5 years in prison at her sentencing. Echard will attend the hearing and he, along with another man she had falsely accused, Greg Gillespie, will get the opportunity to share victim-impact statements.
Owens had also been appealing a domestic violence restraining order against Mike Marraccini in California that was dismissed Sept. 4; Marraccini is not a listed victim in the Arizona prosecution, since the alleged fraud involving him occurred in California, where there is a fourth man who also claimed to be a victim of Owens. Marraccini also participates on the podcast.
“I feel confident enough to be able to give it on the spot,” Echard says of his statement. “I could make it in the moment because my belief is that whatever I’m meant to say is what I always will say. And there really is nothing better than to speak on the spot — not produced, just raw, and let the emotions out. Standing there in front of that judge, they need to feel how painful it’s been.”
Woodnick, Echard’s attorney along with DeAndra Arena, tells THR he thinks Owens made the “smart choice” by accepting the plea deal, instead of going to trial. “Laura had blazed a path that she was committed to taking this to trial and after she had said she would fiercely defend herself — but she was in a corner and facing significant prison and overwhelming evidence. Her attorney did excellent work by encouraging the plea, but he will have his hands full at sentencing. Laura is looking at years in prison. The way for her to minimize her exposure is with full and contrite acknowledgement of the damage she has caused. I think that’s going to be tough for Laura. We’ll find out.”
Justice may look different for each of the men involved, notes Young, but at the end of the day, some sort of accountability for what they’ve been through is what they are asking. “I want her to get put behind bars so that she stops. Not only for me, but so she doesn’t do it for anybody else in the future,” says Echard.
The Love Trapped team, including Young, will be there for sentencing. “We’re going to see it through to the finish line,” Young promises.
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Love Trapped will return for a second season with a new story, one still to be determined by Glass and the team. Young will also return as host.
In the meantime, Glass Podcasts is in talks for its next TV adaptation. “Let’s say we’ve been approached,” says Glass of speaking to networks and streamers about bringing Love Trapped season one to the screen. “There’s more interest in this one. Did I think it was special? Yes, because it involves pop culture. You can’t beat that.”
Both Echard and Young are hopeful that Love Trapped could take on a second storytelling form. As talks are ongoing, Young says, “I think the goal would probably be documentary first, with the actual people. The story is so entertaining and juicy, but at the end of the day, this really happened. This is people’s real lives. I think that’s super important. I’m so incredibly proud of what this podcast has done, and I’m mostly proud that we were able to share the stories of the people who experienced this. I believe their stories deserve to be told.”
Echard is inching back into the spotlight — he says he’s receiving more dancing requests on Cameo now than he was on The Bachelor, a hobby he launched on TikTok. So while he muses about an A-lister like Chris Hemsworth or The Rock playing him if the adaptation were to be scripted, he’s also open to audition to play himself. “I’ve had discussions with Glass about if there is a way that I can be part of this moving forward. So we have some other things we’re discussing,” he says. But “I think a lot of streamers are like, ‘How does it end? We can’t tell a story without an ending.’”
Right now, he’s just thankful to be a part of something bigger than him.
“I was just a catalyst,” he says. “I was just a person who had a public reputation and that was the initial interest. If I didn’t have that, there would have been no community. Now the podcast is a top podcast of 2026. People are listening. I feel like I’ve done something, right?”
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All episodes and bonus content of Love Trapped are available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are available. A new episode drops next week, with a final episode to be announced. All Glass podcasts including Love Trapped drop at midnight on Thursdays.
Original Article on Hollywood Reporter