‘Love Trapped’ Podcast Gets TV Treatment at Peacock

Love Trapped is getting the TV treatment as a four-part documentary at Peacock, coming in 2017.

The hit podcast from Glass Podcasts and iHeartPodcasts quickly became a sensation after first releasing in February. Love Trapped was initially a 10-episode weekly release; however the series expanded to 18 episodes, along with several mini “bonus” episodes, to track what has become a bizarre three-year ordeal chronicling the criminal case against Laura Owens, the Arizona woman who attempted to entrap former The Bachelor star Clayton Echard with paternity fraud.

The final episode released on Thursday timed to the announcement, with a bonus episode to the 18th episode, “The Bitter End,” teasing the doc.

After Love Trapped became a top Apple podcast of the year, The Hollywood Reporter reported in a feature that the audio story had become a hot Hollywood property, and that Glass Podcasts, which has had a string of recent podcast-to-TV adaptations, had been in talks about bringing Love Trapped to television.

Now the news is official: Peacock will adapt the story into a four-part docuseries titled Love Trapped: The Case of Laura Owens (wt).

Based on the podcast hosted by Stephani Young, the documentary will chronicle “the extraordinary story of former Bachelor star Clayton Echard and his tumultuous relationship with a woman named Laura Owens, which began with a brief encounter and, following her pregnancy claim, spiraled into a years-long legal battle that captivated social media and sparked widespread public fascination.”

Through exclusive interviews — including with Owens herself, speaking for the first time (she did not participate in the podcast) — the documentary brings together Echard, his legal team, Owens’ mother Jan Black, other men who were targeted by Owens, Young and the online detectives who helped unravel the story that shockingly extends far beyond one relationship.

The doc is executive produced by Glass Podcasts founder and CEO Nancy Glass, Emmy-winning documentarian Erin Lee Carr, and Keayr Braxton for Glass Entertainment Group, along with Danny Passman for Crybaby Media. Braxton is director.

The description continues: “Love Trapped: The Case of Laura Owens (wt) follows an astonishing story when Laura meets Clayton through a potential real estate deal and after their short connection, she tells him she’s pregnant with his twins. Their private dispute erupts into a nationally followed story fueled by citizen sleuths and social commentators that join the media firestorm that implodes into a shocking trail of deception, legal threats and public humiliation. The deeper the investigation goes, the more unbelievable the revelations become, while raising a disturbing question: when does the desire to be loved turn into an obsession?”

On Oct. 23, Owens, who pleaded guilty in August to four felony counts for falsely claiming she was pregnant with Echard’s twins, was sentenced to one month in jail and seven years of supervised probation. If she violates the terms of her probation, Owens could be sent to prison for more than 15 years.

In the Nov. 12 final episode of Love Trapped, Echard reflected on being disappointing in Owens’ sentencing, telling Young, “Does there always have to be a happy ending? Or maybe this is just one of these circumstances where there isn’t one, and that’s just life. This is where I think if you want a happy ending it’s, what do you do with that disappointment? I can let go of the pain and the anger and anything that doesn’t serve me because I ultimately won. And I did. I beat Laura head to head.”

Young concluded the podcast by saying that she “realized now that my questions are useless” and threw away the questions she had for Owens, who never participated on the podcast. “Even if I could ask them, I don’t think she’d be honest,” she said. “Laura will always be living in her own reality, but at least at the time I’m recording this, the truth is, that Clayton Echard finally gets to move on with his life. And Laura Owens woke up this morning in jail as a convicted felon.”