Caught in a Lie | EP 6

**Stephani Young** (0:03)
After months of avoiding accountability, Laura Owens was finally required to answer some questions.

**Greg Woodnick** (0:10)
I'm going to remind you again that you're not really supposed to be dishonest in depositions.

**Laura Owens** (0:15)
I'm well aware.

**Stephani Young** (0:17)
On March 1st, 2024, Laura sat for a deposition. The audio you're going to hear in this episode hasn't been made public before. On the other side of the desk was Greg Woodnick, the lawyer who two years earlier, she'd accused of orchestrating her alleged rape. Woodnick had some basic questions about Laura's alleged pregnancy with Clayton Echard's twins.

**Greg Woodnick** (0:40)
You're under oath. Are you just going to deny that you ever sent this email yesterday?

**Stephani Young** (0:44)
Woodnick had come prepared to hold Laura's feet to the fire.

**Greg Woodnick** (0:47)
At what point were you going to tell my office or your own attorney that you doctored a medical record?

**Stephani Young** (0:54)
The story had been a viral sensation for months. Not because people thought Clayton was the father, but because people thought Laura was lying.

**Greg Woodnick** (1:03)
You knew the world, because this is national news, you knew the world thought you were bullshitting the pregnancy, right? There's articles about it, correct?

**Laura Owens** (1:14)
Yes, Clayton has been very persuasive.

**Stephani Young** (1:18)
In the deposition, Laura's story would change dramatically, once again. But this time, it was under oath. I'm Stephani Young, this is Love Trapped.
By December 2023, Laura Owens would be seven months pregnant. She'd been barred from communicating directly with Clayton, but he was bracing for her next move, because she still had an active paternity case in the Arizona Family Court system.

**Clayton Echard** (2:16)
I ended up getting a notification that the Family Court case that Laura had opened against me was going inactive, which eventually meant if nothing else were to be filed, it would be closed completely.

**Stephani Young** (2:32)
This happened because Laura and her attorney hadn't followed up with the filing. The paternity suit that she'd originally brought to the tabloids would be closed entirely without a resolution.

**Greg Woodnick** (2:43)
It wasn't necessarily surprising that she went quiet. We obviously suspected exactly what it was, and that was the facts didn't align with her legal position, and she didn't know what to do. And we at this point had had a good amount of experience with her.

**Stephani Young** (2:58)
But it left a big question. Was she still claiming to be pregnant? The last time she'd answered this question under oath was about a month prior.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:09)
And how far along are you as you sit here today with respect to the pregnancy?

**Laura Owens** (3:15)
I am 24 weeks along.

**Stephani Young** (3:20)
In Arizona, a pregnancy loss after 20 weeks is legally a stillbirth, which would require the heavy step of filing fetal death certificates within 7 days, which Laura hadn't done. So if she claimed a pregnancy loss now, the math wouldn't add up. She'd already testified to being 24 weeks along. And now, if the paternity suit went inactive, there would be no closure, no proof of what happened to Laura's alleged pregnancy.

**Clayton Echard** (3:50)
That didn't sit right with me. I felt it was very unfair that she got to make a accusation against me and get away with it without any repercussions.

**Stephani Young** (4:04)
Clayton felt strongly about this, so he called Woodnick.

**Clayton Echard** (4:08)
I said, hey, this case is going inactive here soon, and I'm not okay with that. I would like to file something to have her prove that she was pregnant, because she won't be able to. Can we do that?

**Stephani Young** (4:27)
Actually, there were a couple of things they could do. First, they filed a motion to establish non-paternity. That means that Clayton wanted a court record saying he was not the father. Here's one of Woodnick's associates on the case, Isabelle Ranney.

**Isabelle Ranney** (4:43)
If you have a paternal DNA test that says he's the father, then he's the father. But we had none of that. And because of this fictitious filing, he was entitled to a determination that he was never the father.

**Greg Woodnick** (4:58)
So we notified the court that, hey, we're here and we're doing this and we need a hearing.

**Stephani Young** (5:03)
Two years earlier, Isabelle worked on Greg Gillespie's case with Woodnick. Greg was another man Laura claimed had impregnated her with twins. Isabelle decided to try and anticipate Laura's next move.

**Isabelle Ranney** (5:17)
At that point, we were very familiar with her pattern, and we knew that she was going to either claim abortion or miscarriage, or maybe she was going to allege that there was another assault on her that my boss was involved in.