Transcript of Laura's Emails | BONUS New

Next Monday, our 2026 iHeart podcast awards are happening live at South by Southwest. This is the biggest night in podcasting. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is... Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display.

Thank you so much, iHeartRadio. Thank you to all the other nominees.

You guys are awesome. Watch live next Monday at 8: 00 PM Eastern, 5: 00 PM Pacific, free at veeps. Com or the Veeps app.

Ego Woda is your host for the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards, live at South by Southwest. Hello. Is anybody there? Raised by a single mom, Ego may have a few father-related issues. Are we supposed to talk about your dad? Her podcast, Thanks Dad, is full of funny, heartfelt conversations with actors, including fellow SNL alums, comedians, musicians, and more about life and their wonderfully complicated relationships with their fathers. I'm thinking, hope that's a good thing. Get to know Ego. Follow Thanks Dad with Ego Wotam and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.

I'm Clayton Eckerd. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

But here's the thing, Bachelor fans hated him.

If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would.

That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom.

The media is here. This case has gone viral.

The dating contract.

Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.

This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

I I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything.

I was a monster.

Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Stephanie, back with a bonus episode. We talked in episode three about the many emails Clayton received from Laura Owens during the summer of 2023. He compiled the emails into a Google Drive that he calls the LO file. There was so much more about the LO file and these emails that we didn't have time to get to in episode three. So I sat down with Clayton to hear a bit more. We're going to start with their back and forth about the paternity test. Laura claimed that Clayton was refusing to take one. He says that wasn't the case, and the emails seem to corroborate his account.

In the last episode, we talked about the paternity testing and who was paying for it. Now, the whole conversation gets messy see as the months drag on, but I mentioned that you agreed to pay for the whole thing yourself, so let's get into that a little bit deeper. In the email from Laura to you on June 24th, about three weeks after she told you she was pregnant, she says, I wanted to let you know that I will not be paying for the paternity test. It's of no use to me because I know I wasn't physically involved with anyone else, and therefore, no one else could be the father.

I promise that if it came back any other way, I will fully reimburse you.

But trust me, For me, it won't. I haven't lied to you yet, and I don't need to pay several hundred or $1,000 for information that I already have. Okay, so what was your response to that email?

My response to her was, I will pay for 100% of it. You have my word. Let this message serve as the proof. Just schedule it and let me know where you scheduled, and I'll pay.

Throughout this entire LO file, I don't see one email of you refusing to take a paternity test. I know you really wanted to take the paternity test based on what I was seeing in the emails. I found something in the emails that might explain why Laura said you were refusing to take it. Can you read that for me?

She had sent me an email saying, Just confirming that you are refusing a paternity test. No answer equals refusing it.

Okay, so it's my understanding, and I came to this conclusion by reading the emails and you telling me about how no response equals a response, that that's what's happening here. You weren't responding to her emails, and she was taking your lack of response as a no.

Yeah, it's ridiculous in nature, but you've heard even from a societal standpoint, people say, Silence speaks volumes. I think that's what she was trying to lean into is, I know you're reading this because I have the mail trackers. If you're choosing not to respond, that is still a response. I obviously didn't agree with that. I just didn't want to communicate with her. But she was just looking for ways to manipulate and gaslight me and eventually, the people that were going to see these emails and messages.

You just mentioned something that I want to talk about. You mentioned the mail trackers, which we do talk about in the episode with the emails. How did you know that she had those trackers on?

Eventually, she had told me, but I also just knew because whenever I'd open them and I'd read them, she had to send over another one right away. But if I was ever just busy and I couldn't get around to my emails, then, yeah, nothing would come through.

Then she eventually told you that she had a tracker on.

Yeah, and she eventually then told me that she had the trackers. I'm like, Okay, this makes sense to me why she continues to send them. I thought I was able to trick her by not responding and to thinking that I had her in a blocked folder and I wasn't paying attention. Again, what I wanted her to believe was that I wasn't looking at these emails. I had way better things to do. She had no power over me, and eventually, she would just give up.

All right, let's move on to another one. Here's another email. This one's dated July fifth. So this is about a month after she told you she was pregnant, but she had already hinted to you that she might be pregnant with twins. This is the email. I had an idea. What do you think about hanging out tonight and seeing if this is something you want to try out for a couple of weeks before we make a decision about what to do?

If either of us decide that we don't want to explore something more serious, then at At least we will know and we will both have clarity.

With you not responding about the possibility of twins or me giving you the chance to make a different decision about the abortion pills because of that new prospect, things feel unresolved and my anxiety is through the roof. I'm sure yours is as well. With my stress levels being where they are at now, if the baby or babies are born with any issues, I would blame you for not trying to help me reduce those by supporting me as you said you would. If you just pursued something romantic for a night, you have no idea how much it would me emotionally, and I definitely would not blame you for any problems the child or children would have. This was still pretty early on when I believe you still thought that there might be that 0. 01% chance that she could actually be pregnant. How did this email make you feel, and were you concerned for her mental health at the time?

Yeah, so of course, I was concerned for her mental health reading these messages, but I had my guard up, and I was like, There's no way that I can explore intimacy. It has to be off the table. I can date her, quote, unquote, for a week and give her attention. At the end of it, I was going to say, Oh, I just don't think it's going to work between us. But we gave it a fair go. All right, I guess this is the end of it, right? That's essentially where I was going to head with it. But she obviously was like, No, we have to be intimate if we do do this. And of course, I wasn't willing to go there.

Okay, so I'm going to jump into another document that I found in the LO file. This one is from August 13th, so this was just a few days after that dating contract that you received. Do you remember getting another contract-like document after the dating contract?

So many emails came in that maybe she did sandwich another contract in there, but I don't recall off the top of my head.

Okay, well, I'm going to read it to you. It appears to be sent through DocuSign, and the title of the document is Agreement between Laura Owens and Clayton Echard. It begins, We, Laura Owens and Clayton Echard, agreed to meet up tonight, August 13, 2023, for the court-mandated good faith consultation. I'll pause here for a second. She's mentioning a good faith consultation because this document came through two weeks after she filed in court to establish paternity. A good faith consultation is basically a formal requirement for opposing parties to attempt to resolve a dispute that was brought to court, and you handle it. Sincerely, honestly, it's like a good faith attempt to resolving it before you seek further intervention from the court. Okay, so back to the document. In addition, Laura Owens will alert the court to the fact that there is no longer a need to take action against Clayton Eccard for his refusal to participate in the good faith consultation. Laura Owens agrees to take and pay for both her and Clayton Eccard to take the prenatal paternity test at RAVJEN to be taken at the earliest possible date and promises not to cancel. Clayton Eccard agrees to unblock Laura Owens and not block her again.

Now, Laura signed this document, but I don't see a signature from you on that document.

Yeah, because it just wasn't a fair trade-off. I was willing to negotiate with her. I was working at every moment to try to find that little common ground where she would say, Yeah, this could work. But as far as this contract went, I'm like, You're not going to do what you say you're going to do anyways. And no, I don't want to unblock you because it doesn't accomplish anything. You're just going to send me another barrage of emails and text.

This was another theme I noticed in a lot of these emails is that she really wanted you to unblock her phone number. Now, she could still get in touch with you via email, it seemed, even though you had her blocked, they were still getting through. But why do you think that the unblocking of her phone number was such a priority for her?

To me, it's completely stemming from a hurt ego. I feel that she felt less than if she was blocked. Therefore, if I unblocked her, there wasn't as much hostility because it's like, okay, now we have an open chain of communication like two people that respect one another would have. I mean, who do you block, typically? You block people that are individuals that you don't want to talk to, people that you don't want to have access to your life, people that are extremely rude. I mean, you don't block just the average person, right? You're blocking people that you do not want to have any interactions with. So there's a negative connotation around being blocked. And I believe Laura just wanted to remove that.

A lot of your correspondence with Laura happened almost three years ago now. What has it been like for you going back, reading these messages, and reliving this time of your life?

It's been very agitating. Anger has been the main emotion that I feel arise whenever I have to reopen this box that I've compartmentalized as much as possible because I still have a life to live beyond this this matter. But Laura makes it really hard. I mean, she's always reopening the box. And so for me, this is a still ongoing matter, and I am hoping to have a outcome where we can close this completely because it's tiring. I am so tired of talking about this, feeling this, dealing with this. In my eyes, and what I would have thought would have occurred was this would have been done over course of six months at max. Here we are on year three, and we're still going.

Thanks so much for listening. If you want to see the emails we mentioned, you can read them for yourself at our Instagram at Glass Podcasts. And stay tuned for new episodes and bonus episodes on the Love Trapped feed.

Next Monday, our 2026 iHeart podcast awards are happening live at South by Southwest. This is the biggest night in podcasting. We'll honor the very best in podcast testing from the past year and celebrate the most innovative, talented creators in the industry. And the winner is... Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display.

Thank you so much, iHeartRadio. Thank you to all the other nominees.

You guys are awesome. Watch live next Monday at 8: 00 PM Eastern, 5: 00 PM Pacific, free at veeps. Com or the Veeps app.

Ego Woda is your host for the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards, live at South by Southwest. Hello. Is anybody there? Raised by a single mom, Ego may have a few father-related issues. Are we supposed to talk about your dad? Her podcast, Thanks Dad, is full of funny, heartfelt conversations with actors, including fellow SNL alums, comedians, musicians, and more about life and their wonderfully complicated relationships with their father. I think and hope that's a good thing. Get to know Ego. Follow Thanks, Dad, with Ego Wotam, and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.

I'm Clayton Eckert. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

But here's the thing, Bachelor fans hated him.

If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would.

That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom.

The media is here. This case has gone viral.

The dating contract.

A agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.

This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.