Cover Story · New York Magazine

Baby, You’re Fine With Me

November 15, 2022·53 min·5 clips

Hundreds of emails between Mike and Amber reveal a twelve-year affair where he called her his sweet angel from heaven while setting up an LLC to disguise payments, telling her it would look like a real business transaction.

The tape starts in a tangle. Kathleen waits while Mistress Pasha fixes the audio and says she is somewhere in Oklahoma, a small awkward pause before the episode gets heavier. Then the record shifts. The excerpt moves into articles published around the world, where someone describes seeing a revolting public portrait and then realizing their own name and photo are attached to it. That is where the story turns. The language stays plain, but the damage is legal and personal: Gogan sued Amber back, his attorney called it revenge, and the countersuit alleged extortion. The judge sided with him. Amber was ruled to have defamed and extorted Mike, leaving her responsible for repaying $10 million plus interest. Still, the episode does not let that ruling do all the work. The narrator says there is no evidence that Michael Gogan is the monster in Amber's version, then refuses to turn him into the clean opposite. That matters because his own testimony is hard to sit with. In related lawsuit testimony, Mike acknowledges having sexual relations with Amber on the night they signed an agreement meant to end all contact. He says he feared rejecting her could undo the settlement and that he wanted to keep her happy and stable. It is a bad-sounding explanation, even before the texts arrive. When Mike told Matt about that night, the excerpt says he used less careful language and sent a photo, making the courtroom version harder to accept at face value. Nobody comes out simple. The episode sits with court findings, public shame, private fear, and ugly messages after the fact, without pretending they all point in one clean direction.

As heard by us

A court fight gets stranger when the private story keeps undercutting the public one.

Baby, You're Fine With Me follows a legal fight backward and sideways, letting court questions, statements, and memory rub against each other until the private relationship and the public dispute stop looking separate.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want the legal claim, the private text, and the gap between what was said in public and what was said in private.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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