The streaming landscape is drowning in shocking and revolting true-crime tales, and yet Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster is in a disgusting class by itself. The in-depth story of the famed fast-food spokesman’s rise to national prominence and fall into disgrace thanks to his sexual appetite for young children. Directed by Sam Miller, the three-episode ID series (premiering Mar. 6 on ID and Discovery+) is the stuff of nightmares. The film is made all the more squirm-inducing by commentary from both the woman who spent years secretly getting him to confess to his urges on tape, and two of his 14 innocent victims.
(Warning: This piece features disturbing quotes describing child pornography and child sexual abuse.)
Reprehensible barely begins to describe all the nastiness covered by Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster, which is highlighted by a collection of covert audio recordings of Jared Fogle made by Rochelle Herman, a Sarasota, Florida-based radio host and single mother.
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When first given the opportunity to interview Jared on her program in Fall 2006 by the American Heart Association—this being a stop on one of the spokesman’s many Subway-sponsored speaking tours about healthy eating and living—Rochelle eagerly accepted. Little did she know that the course of her life would change forever when, while sitting next to each other in a middle-school gymnasium, Jared whispered in her ear that he thought the adolescent students in attendance were “hot.”
Rochelle was naturally horrified. Moreover, she was intensely motivated to do something about this wolf in sheep’s clothing. To get concrete evidence against Jared, she struck up a flirty long-distance relationship with him in order to cajole him into talking about his illegal impulses (largely by pretending that she shared them). Plentiful snippets from those chats are heard in Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster, and even if you can imagine what he had to say, hearing it aloud is another ghastly thing entirely.
“We should try to get some child porn videos to watch together,” he suggests at one point. Reminiscing about having sex with children in Thailand, he admits, “It was so hot baby. It was so, so fucking hot.” And discussing a children’s birthday party that he planned to attend (which was really a sting operation set up to catch him), he tells Rochelle, “I want you to watch me pound a little kid.”
Prepare for your stomach to churn throughout Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster, which goes a step further by revealing that, toward the conclusion of their “relationship,” Jared asked Rochelle the question she was (and viewers will be) dreading: “Will you let me see your kids naked?”
It’s no surprise that, in a prolonged new interview that forms the backbone of the docuseries, Rochelle remains profoundly shaken by these experiences with Jared, who’d go on to press her about which of her children she’d most like Jared to violate. The depths of his depravity are so great that there’s no need for director Miller to unduly press manipulative buttons. Unfortunately, he does so anyway, having Rochelle make an endless stream of soundbite-ready statements (“My soul was blackened;” “repulsed to the core”) and employing ominous musical cues that are so goofily over-the-top that they threaten to undercut the material’s genuine gravity.
Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster wallows in vileness, despair and suffering. In the aftermath of her toil, Rochelle was left with dire health problems and estranged from her daughter; even her older son Thomas, who expresses admiration for his mother’s courageous crusade, now lives in Taiwan, seemingly because he wanted to flee his past.
Rochelle admits that she came out the worse for wear from this ordeal—and part of that was due to the FBI. Though the agency originally collaborated with her on her undercover work, it so dragged its feet with regards to bringing Jared to justice that she eventually felt compelled to turn to local law enforcement for help. Between her intense frustration with that situation and her various harrowing encounters with Jared—including one at a motel room that she had to flee before it turned physical—it’s no wonder Rochelle continues to be a wreck.
This is all as ugly as it sounds, and it’s prefaced by a brief, archival clip-heavy recap of Jared’s ascension to pop-culture ubiquity courtesy of his losing 245 pounds in a single year on his “Subway diet.” Jared really was, at first, an inspiration to many (including former classmates and his one-time Subway co-star Pam Blakeman), which is why the revelations about his private proclivities proved so jaw-dropping. Still, amazingly, that’s only half the wretched story told by Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster.
Director Miller additionally focuses on siblings Hannah and Christian, whose teenage fortunes took an apparent turn for the better when their mother Angela married Russell Taylor, a wannabe-filmmaker who ran the Subway pitchman’s Jared Foundation. The girls remember thinking that they had struck gold with Russell, moving into a nice new home and going on multiple vacations.
The good times, however, were a mirage—something the sisters learned when, after years of being encouraged to drink, smoke weed, and talk about sex by their parents, Russell was caught trading in bestiality images, and an ensuing police search of his residence turned up hundreds of pornographic pictures and videos of children, including Hannah and Christian.
As investigators discovered, Russell had placed hidden cameras around his home so he could capture his stepchildren and their friends in the nude. Even more appalling, the girls’ mother had been an active participant in this project, as well as talked to her husband about having sex with her own children. That this was all done as part of a larger venture that also benefited Jared turns Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster into a portrait of systemic evil. No amount of clunky aesthetics (be it a pushy score or lame dramatic recreations) can overshadow the sheer wickedness perpetrated by these adults.
The fact that Jared was sent away for 15 years for possessing child porn (received from Russell) as well as having sex with two underage New York City prostitutes, and Russell and Angela are each serving decades behind bars, is cold comfort in light of their unthinkable and inexcusable crimes. Still, their fates at least serve as a satisfying conclusion to this most grueling of true-crime docuseries.
All three-parts of Jared From Subway: Catching a Monster premiere back-to-back Monday, March 6 @ 9/8c on ID and will be available to stream the same day on discovery+.
