How Jon Uhler Put His Family Behind Him
Part 2 of our investigation into the 'safeguarding expert'
This is Part 2 of our investigation into self-styled “safeguarding expert” Jon Uhler.
In Part 1, we corrected Uhler’s public falsehoods about the ongoing investigation into his activities by the Office of Investigative Enforcement in the South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation. Uhler’s case, #2024-43, remains open at press time. We also debunked Uhler’s dubious expertise in sex offending as well as his absurd claims of experience counseling sex offenders. We disclosed Jon Uhler’s spiritual, physical, and mental abuse of his three children. And we explained that Uhler also abused members of various church communities, both as a counselor and as a business partner.
Part 1 of our investigation:
Our extended podcast interview with his daughter Nicole, in two parts:
In Part 2 of our written investigation, we now focus on the period when Jon Uhler was fired by the Pennsylvania state prison system, the mental health of his wife Patricia rapidly spiraled into suicidal attention-seeking, and Jon began letting go of his children. During this time, Jon’s church community, as well as his business partner Jimmy Hinton, saw Jon reveal a side of himself he had kept hidden. We now continue exposing that secretive dark side of Jonathan Knight Uhler.
Jon Uhler presents himself to the public as an expert on safeguarding women and children from predators. Our findings raise serious questions about his suitability and credibility as an expert in safeguarding anyone, even Jon Uhler.
Dateline February 2016
About two weeks before Patricia jumped from the wooden balcony of the Uhler family’s Johnstown, Pennsylvania home, Jon walked in on her as she began to “examine” the genitals of her adolescent son by telling Reed to pull his pants down in the kitchen.
“I need to physically examine you because I think you have demons in you and I need to cast them out,” she reportedly said. Having witnessed this abuse, Jon described the event to Nicole later. The behavior was all too normal for Patricia — and Jon had already known it was happening for years.
From the age of 16, his daughter Nicole had tried repeatedly to convince Jon that Patricia needed to be removed from the home. She was following his professional advice. “He always told me ‘if someone is ever making you feel like you can't speak up, you can always come to me and tell me, and I am that safe person because, don't you know, I'm a therapist. I'm the person who everyone should feel safe to speak to,’” Nicole recalls him saying.
Instead of responding as a professional, however, in 2013, when she was 19 years old, “Jon suddenly turned on me and said ‘You are the one causing problems. I can't afford this right now.’” Jon could not report Patricia for abuse, he told Nicole, because “‘that would really put me in a very difficult situation because of my job, and because of the businesses I'm building. If people find that out, they're going to have questions and I'm not ready to answer those yet.’”
Saying that Nicole could “jeopardize your brothers and make them be in an unsafe situation where we potentially could lose everything,” Jon gave Nicole a month to pack up and then sent her to live with his parents in California for several months. He did not protect his sons from their mother. He did not oversee their homeschooling, which had lapsed. He did not remove Patricia from the home.
Three years later, Jon had instead set Nicole up with an apartment in Somerset, Pennsylvania and begun staying there himself on most nights, leaving the boys alone with their mother. After hearing what Jon had witnessed Patricia doing to Reed, Nicole insisted that her youngest brother had to come stay with her. He did, but Lane, their middle sibling, remained in the house with his mother.
About ten days later, Nicole says, Lane returned home from a grocery trip to Walmart with incorrect food items. Irate, Patricia threatened to shoot Lane, went into the bedroom, and noisily began to prepare one of the family firearms. Lane “heard the gun being loaded, and he heard the clicking of the cartridge going back and getting ready to fire,” Nicole says. Running away to a nearby restaurant, Lane called the apartment, she says, and begged Jon to come get him because “Trish tried to kill me.”
After picking up Lane, Jon “did absolutely nothing,” Nicole says. “He in fact started using that trauma,” telling fellow parishioners at the Grace Bible Fellowship that “because of what's happening in my home, I'm even more qualified as a trauma therapist,” divulging personal details to inflate his own image. As explained in Part 1, Jon and Patricia had both threatened to kill the children with guns many times while they were growing up. Jon did not tell this part of the story to his fellow church members.
Nor was Reed safe yet. He had a job in Johnstown, and he had enrolled in school there, too. Around 8 March 2016, Reed elected to stay at the family home for three days in order to attend school and walk to work. Three days later, Jon picked up Reed from his job for “some father-son time” and took him out to eat. When they returned to the Johnstown home, they found Patricia on the ground outside “in a daze” and “out of it.”
In fact, she had jumped from the balcony shortly before the time she expected Reed to arrive home on foot, fracturing several spinal discs. Confused at first as to what had happened, Jon eventually called 911 to have an ambulance come get Patricia. It was only when she was at the hospital that anyone realized how she had injured herself, or the extent of her injuries.
“I remember later that day being so angry and yelling at my dad and screaming and crying and saying, ‘I told you that this was going to happen. Why didn't you listen to me? Poor Reed had to see this. Why didn't you do what I said and what I asked?’” Nicole tells The Distance. “I'd asked to be a guardian of Lane and Reed prior to this happening,” she explains. “So it was very upsetting to me that my brothers are trying to finish school, that I'm just trying to be a young adult and suddenly I'm being thrown into the middle of this very dangerous and crazy situation.”
Patricia was now hospitalized, awaiting surgery to install titanium rods in her spine. According to Nicole, Jon insisted on visiting her mother’s hospital room every day for the next five days. “Are you sure you want to go?” Nicole asked him. “She jumped to get attention, and you going is only going to make it worse.” Jon replied that he felt it was “the right thing to do.” However, every day “she refused to see me,” Jon reported. Jon’s visits agitated Patricia so much that the staff reportedly told him to stop coming.
Nicole makes it clear that although “Jon certainly had his share of issues,” Patricia was the more violent and dangerous parent. “I was home all of the time growing up. I never saw Jon threaten Trish. I saw Trish threaten Jon. I saw her get in his face,” she says. Nicole had cut off contact with her mother for two years at this point. However, Patricia had gotten her address from a piece of mail her father had taken home “because Jon unfortunately did not respect my boundaries.” As a result, Patricia “came and stalked me at my apartment.”
This hardly absolves Jon, however. Indeed, he and Patricia had worked as a team to abuse the various church communities the family had joined over the years.
Nicole says that there were “16 to 20 different churches that they became part of” at different times in Pennsylvania. The “ultimate goal for both of them was to try to find people who were usually pastors, or in leadership, to start group-slash-treatment homes with,” she says. As explained in Part 1 of our investigation, Jon “wanted to have a treatment home for females, usually women or girls” and pursued this line of business with many different people.
Meanwhile, “Trish was behind the scenes writing very long emails, and these emails would be pages and pages of very hateful vitriolic gossip.” For “if the people in these churches did not agree with Jon, he would essentially send her to be the mole, to write threatening emails to people in the churches, so that they would feel compelled to work with Jon.” If they refused, she would tell them that “God was going to curse them, that God was going to kill them.”
At every church, Jon “would case the joint” to “find the people that seemed to be the most charismatic, and the ones with the most power and privilege.” He would tell Patricia “to talk to the wives and the children” of those men “to find out essentially information that they could use later on as blackmail towards the couple and the family.”
Then, whenever the couple’s standing in the church unraveled, Jon would have Patricia “craft these emails and direct them towards the wives, their children, with these emails with these private details. And so if you've heard of some organizations that they'll interview you privately, they'll get information, they'll use it as blackmail. That's what was going on.”
This is consistent with statements to The Distance from members of Grace Bible Fellowship who knew the Uhler family in 2016. As her family came apart, Patricia started writing scandalous emails again — but this time, without Jon’s knowledge or permission.
She was sending the pastor messages “sixteen pages long,” according to one source close to the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity. These epistles were so “insane” that it was obvious Patricia was unwell. As Jon began to leave, the messages grew altogether too “spiritually intimate.” Patricia wanted the pastor to be her substitute father-figure and counsel her through her problems with her real father. Patricia’s stories of abuse at her father’s hands became increasingly bizarre, such as a scene in which he was combing the carpet with a rake. Her requests became unreasonable.
The pastor told Patricia to stop sending him emails. When she kept it up, he confronted her and Jon at the Johnstown home with two elders of the church. At first, Patricia was delighted by the visit because she thought they were going to address Jon’s shortcomings as a husband. When she realized that they were there for her instead, Patricia began making “strange” accusations about Jon being “dangerous.”
Jimmy Hinton, another local pastor that Jon had roped into a different business scheme, says that he also got an email from Patricia during this time. “She said, ‘I need to meet with you. I need to tell you who Jon really is.’”
“By this point, there were a lot of things that made me really uncomfortable with him,” Hinton says, so he agreed to meet with her two weeks before she jumped. It was the first time they had ever met or spoken. When she arrived, “the first thing she did” was ask Hinton to unplug the church telephone. “She made me turn off my cell phone and she said that people were listening in” because “the place was bugged.”
“She started going on and on about how I shouldn’t be partnered with Jon, he’s not a good guy, he’s very deceptive.” This interview was “more like a rant” than an explanation, Hinton says, because Patricia never revealed anything specific Jon had done. Instead, she told Hinton “you need to run from him.” Over the course of two hours in which he barely got a word in edgewise, Patricia told Hinton that she was descended from Noah, which she could supposedly prove through biblical genealogy.
As Patricia was taken away in the ambulance after her jump, Hinton says Jon told him later, “she kept saying ‘talk to Jimmy Hinton, he’ll tell you who Jon is!” After repeating this at volume, Patricia reportedly removed her wedding ring and threw it at Jon. Sensing it was his duty under the circumstances, Hinton told Jon about his recent meeting with Patricia. Jon would later use it to taunt her. He also shared deeply personal emails from Patricia with Hinton.
In one such message obtained by The Distance, dated 22 December 2016, Jon remarks that that the email from Patricia proved “psychopaths come in all shapes and genders.” Jon forwarded another email from her on 21 March 2017 “demonstrating the feeble attempts at obfuscation and blame shifting by a psychopath.” Two more emails seen by The Distance continue on this note, telling the recipients that Patricia is a psychopath.
None of the messages we have seen contain even a hint of empathy for Patricia.
“I thought it was pretty inappropriate,” Hinton says. “Even if he hated her guts, and even if she hated his guts,” the presence of minor children in the home meant “it’s not a time to taunt your former wife.” Jon seemed “obsessed with trash-talking her, and to me that was very telling.”
Worse, within a few weeks, Jon had already begun to share his new interest in a high school flame with Hinton as well as members of his church. He had been to visit his parents in California, Jon said, and “bumped into” Susan, “rekindling their friendship,” and now he wanted to spend more time with her.
Only a few months later, Hinton says, Jon told him that he wanted to marry Susan. He was still not divorced yet. He asked Hinton to officiate the wedding. Hinton declined.
Patricia had a problem. To blow the whistle on Jon would require admitting to her own criminal behavior. Her solution to this dilemma was to lie about Jon. In the hospital, she called the police and told a detective that Jon had been keeping her as a sex slave in a basement dungeon for the entire 22 years of their marriage.
According to Nicole, the detective told Jon that Patricia claimed “you've raped her, you whipped her, you starved her, and she's calling to report to say, that you're a very dangerous and scary man. And she wants to report you and press charges.”
In fact, Nicole says, Jon had “actually shared with me on multiple occasions without any shame or embarrassment that Trish withheld marital intimacy and they would only have intimacy about once a year maximum.” Her account is corroborated by emails obtained by The Distance in which Jon accuses Patricia of “commonly withholding [sex] for 6-9 months at a clip” and having “held the heart of marriage hostage for years.” Jon shared these emails with other people hoping to buttress his own image at her expense.
Nicole understood that her mother was “flipping” this on Jon. She says she told the detective that her mother was lying. After examining the basement, and seeing that there was no sign of a sex dungeon, the detective left Jon alone. However, the incident highlights Patricia’s campaign to hang on to her family, even if it killed them, as well as the toxic dynamic that Jon Uhler, a professional family and marital counselor, had developed within his own marriage.
The Red Flags Around Jon Uhler - Part 3
For Jon, the spiral began at his workplace: Somerset prison.
Nicole says that as a result of his whistleblowing at a previous location, SCI Cresson, as well as his support of some inmates disliked by the prison employees, Jon was having “very toxic interactions” with the prison guards and some staff at SCI Somerset.
He had started working there after an investigation by the federal Department of Justice led to the closure of the Cresson facility. They were “trying to find every single excuse possible” to fire him. “And Jon would come home and say, you know, I found someone in my office or I found my computer taken and missing,” Nicole says.
On top of this stress, Jon was creating criminal exposure for himself by using prison time and property “to build websites and to build businesses,” Nicole tells us. Jon would use tracking blockers and incognito tabs in a vainglorious attempt to escape detection, for “he was absolutely trying to be covert. He knew that he was doing illegal action.”
To “sneak” prisoner files and reports out of the prison, Jon would wear “a large overcoat with pockets,” even in the heat of May. “He would refer to himself as ‘the mole,’” Nicole says. “He gloried in this.” Removing staples to avoid metal detectors, “he was bringing these papers home, hundreds of them, every couple weeks, every couple months.” Jon would read them at the desk in his home office, show them to the entire family, and discuss the personal details of inmates with people outside the family as well.
This behavior had begun at SCI Cresson and continued at the Somerset facility. Jon also continued to “completely go off script” in group therapy sessions at the prison, Nicole says. He was “very proud of this fact. And he would even reenact at home … what these groups looked like for us. And he would start sharing about religious personal beliefs” with the prisoners in these sessions. “Jon did this every single meeting. It was every single time. And I know that because he would tell us.”
He also fraternized with inmates who could not attend group sessions during the one-on-one sessions he held at their cells. “Jon would try to get into the inmates personal life, which I know is absolutely illegal and forbidden,” Nicole says. “He was asking them about their personal details that had nothing to do with his job. And then when he would meet with them one-on-one in his office,” where there was no guard, “it got even crazier.”
Instead of following therapeutic practices, Jon “would diagram for them and actually write out these very complicated boards of their life,” telling them “‘this is the life path God wants for you. And this is what I want for you. And this is how I can benefit and help you finding the right life path for you,’ which isn't even therapy.”
These private sessions frequently went over their alloted time. “He was late meeting with many inmates because he took too long with some of them,” Nicole says. While it is important for a counselor to get to know their counselee, there were “times where he was proselytizing for so long, like an hour and a half, that he would be late and he wouldn't get his caseload done.”
At home — which, by the end of 2016, was Nicole’s Somerset apartment — Jon Uhler slept 3-4 hours a night because he was so busy working on his websites and “businesses.” Nicole begged him to get more sleep. Instead, she says, one evening Jon arrived at the apartment and told her that he “did something today that I think I might get in trouble for.”
As we reported in Part 1, Jon Uhler was charged with forging the signatures of three prisoners in February 2016. According to court documents cited by the Daily American, a local newspaper, Uhler was interviewed on 17 February, less than a month before Patricia jumped from the balcony.
“I was so tired,” Nicole recalls Jon telling her on 3 December 2015, the same day he had committed the forgery. “And I had met with some inmates earlier in the week or a week or two ago, and I forgot to have them sign after I met with them. And so I went ahead and I signed their signatures for them.”
This excuse is contradicted by the Daily American, however, which reports that at least one inmate, Yousuf Pettey, was not even assigned to Jon Uhler. “Because Pettey’s assigned psychology staff had already submitted a plan for him, authorities suspected that Uhler did not meet with the inmate,” they write.
He was suspended after the interview on 17 February and fired in April, Nicole recalls. During the next six months, she says, “Jon underwent such a negative and concerning transformation personally that I didn't even recognize him as the same person. And it really scared me, quite frankly.”
As the case proceeded against him, Jon gaslit members of his church about his legal predicament, claiming that “this is all false, I didn’t do anything wrong.” By this time, however, at least one parishioner says they “didn’t really believe anything that came out of his mouth” anymore.
Nevin Hersch, one of the people Jon tried to rope into his scheme for a treatment center, says that by this point “there were huge questions in my mind about his integrity, and questions in my mind about his religious or secular authority.” This corroborates what Nicole says about Jon’s practices in the prison.
As we reported in Part 1, Hersch says that he “started to get uncomfortable with what [Jon] said he was trying to do with” the inmates because “it didn’t sound logical or legitimate from a secular perspective or a religious type perspective.”
“There was no clarity in what he was trying to help the prisoners with,” Hersch says. “Anything he talked about would just become a tangled mess that confused people.” We will return to the troubling questions that have arisen regarding Jon Uhler’s inmate ‘counseling’ in a future update.
Patricia would need time and therapy after her surgery. Jon soon realized that he did not want to be stuck with caring for her, so he called her family in British Columbia. Patricia’s mother and sister arrived, entered the Johnstown house while no one was home, and removed “probably about $30,000” worth of items, including “my mother's jewelry, wedding rings, her wedding dress, parts of my personal collection in my room, things from the basement that my parents had saved for me for my wedding and for my marriage,” Nicole says. Then they flew back to Vancouver with Patricia.
Now unemployed, Jon started trying to re-home his sons. Hinton tells The Distance that “at one point he had asked me if I could take his boys in.” His home was too unstable, Jon said, so could Hinton find room for them among his own young children? “Absolutely not,” Hinton says he replied. “That’s not okay, that’s not possible.”
Instead, Jon needed to take responsibility, Hinton says he told Jon. “It is your job as a therapist to help families that are dysfunctional to find some semblance of unity and reconciliation, to work through problems.” Instead, Jon was “creating problems” and then “pawning them off on other people.”
Hinton adds that Jon also asked members of Grace Bible Fellowship to take his children in. “I wasn’t the only one,” he says. This is corroborated by sources at the church who spoke to The Distance on condition of anonymity. “What parent does that?” Hinton asks.
Jon had spent all his money refurbishing Nicole’s apartment while maintaining the family home. With Patricia out of the way, he announced that he was pursuing his longtime dream of becoming a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC). Patricia had held him back from this dream, he claimed. Yet “within about a week,” Nicole saw that he was already distracted again, for he had begun online dating.
First, Jon got hooked by a Russian bride scam. Nicole says that he announced one day that his new Russian fiancée would be coming to live with them soon, and that she had to convince her father that he was just being scammed. Nicole, who had quit two of her jobs to care for her brothers, both of whom were making minimum wage, says that Jon did not look for any sort of paid work at this time.
Instead, just three weeks after the embarrassment with the Russian scammer, Jon admitted that he had reconnected with Susan.
Nicole had to pull this news out of Jon: God had given him a dream in the middle of the night which indicated that he was supposed to reach out to his old high school sweetheart, he told her.
But Nicole was not fooled. “Instantly, my heart dropped because I had met Susan.” For during her time in California during 2014, when Jon had shuffled Nicole off on her grandparents, “he requested for me to start getting to know her,” raising Nicole’s suspicion “that there was something fishy going on.”
Although neither Jon nor Patricia had filed for divorce yet, Jon allegedly told Nicole that Susan was “the person I’m supposed to marry,” she says. It was mid-June, just three months since Patricia jumped. Reed’s 16th birthday was at hand. “I can’t believe that God has answered my prayers,” Nicole recalls Jon saying.
Now Jon explained that “I prayed to the Lord and I asked him three specific miracles so I knew that it was the right time to divorce your mother.”
First, she had removed her wedding ring — and thrown it at Jon — during the scene in the ambulance. Second, Patricia had taken the wedding pictures from her bedroom wall and smashed them. Third, she had left on her own for British Columbia. This series of miraculous signs proved in his own mind that it was time for him to move on.
Church members say that Jon talked to them about Susan during 2016 and 2017, but never Patricia. When prompted, Jon said “she’s crazy, she got put away.” Hinton says that Jon referred to Patricia during this period as a “witch” who was “into all kinds of evil things.” He had put her aside.
During July 2016, Jon began talking to Susan all day, every day. Nicole says that she and Lane were supporting their father financially at this time, but he was not studying for his LPC. Instead, at the end of August, Jon announced that he was flying to see Susan in California, purchasing an expensive last-minute ticket with their money.
He was gone for a month. During this time, Reed elected to go to Canada and live with his mother’s family. Lane remained with Nicole, but she says he now began to spiral as well. With Jon out of the house, Lane finally felt free to talk about his father, or yell, or scream, giving vent to long pent-up emotions.
Nicole was happy that Lane was finally processing his feelings until he started talking about plans to kill Jon. “Lane told me, based on the evil that dad has done, he shouldn't be here anymore. I hate him. I hate him so much. He's ruined my life, he's almost killed me, and he deserves to die.” Once again, Nicole felt obligated to disclose this information to her father. “Lane is saying things that are scaring me that are making me feel unsafe,” she says she told Jon, “and I need you to do something.”
Matters were coming to a head at the beginning of November, while Jon was home. Emails obtained by The Distance, dated 2 November 2016, show that Jon was at the “Psychiatric Hospital” with Lane the previous day, the same day he finally consulted a divorce attorney. “It is a good thing my Masters Degree was in Marriage and Family Counseling, eh?” he writes in one message. In another, Jon complains that Patricia has “no inclination…to accept any responsibility for his emotional state.”
Finally, “Lane poisoned himself and tried to commit suicide on Thanksgiving Day to get John's attention because Jon was ignoring him,” Nicole says. “And so it was after that that John, within a couple days of Lane being taken to the hospital, having his stomach pumped, his life was saved — and then Jon sends him right out to his parents” in California “instead of admitting Lane to the psych ward and getting him some help.”
Stunningly, Jon did not inform his parents that Lane had attempted suicide. “They had no idea what they were receiving,” she says, and were not equipped to care for Lane.
Rather than deal with the situation, Jon — who was still married to Patricia in the eyes of the law — flew back to California to be with Susan for Christmas, this time telling Nicole by phone that he intended to stay and propose to Susan. Nicole says she realized “that that was my chance for Jon to leave and to never come back. And so I pretended to be happy. And I said, ‘That's great.’” He then spent thousands of dollars more on engagement and wedding rings.
During a visit to Pennsylvania in January 2017, Nicole says that Jon told her “I'm just going to go ahead and move in because Susan and I know we want to be together. And so, sorry, but you're going to have to figure out your own plans now.” She was living alone in a Johnstown apartment with a basement full of what remained of the family’s belongings.
Jon returned to Pennsylvania in October 2017 to clear out the apartment. At the same time, however, Nicole was graduating from flight attendant school and unable to assist him as he wanted. Jon was unwilling to ask his church or Jimmy Hinton for help, since he had already cut them off.
Frustrated, Jon took the majority of the family belongings to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or the dump. Nicole notes that “my parents were in debt for years because they bought all those things.” Now an experienced businesswoman, she estimates that Jon threw away around $100,000 worth of furniture, antiques, clothing, and other items.
After he dropped off some things she had not wanted, and nothing that she had wanted, Nicole says that she did not hear from Jon again for weeks. When she tried texting Jon, he replied: “You know what you did.” In a brief phone call that followed, Jon denounced Nicole, saying “you acted like you weren't my daughter because you didn't come to my help in time of need.”
“I said, ‘What person doesn't ask for help and gives themselves three weeks?’ And basically he hung up on me.” She did not hear from him again until Christmas. At about that same time, “I start to hear from Lane and Reed that some very sketchy and scary stuff is going on with them and Trish.” Lane had left his grandparents’ home for Canada to be with them. “He's been homeless” at this point, she says, and “had no support, and he's been given psychological medication.” She worries about him to this day because, she says, Patricia’s family is also abusive.
During 2018, Patricia filed for divorce. When he joined in the proceedings, “Trish refused to sign the papers because she was again baiting John,” Nicole explains. When her brothers reported that Patricia had resumed her behaviors from 2016, she tried to tell Jon that he needed to intervene.
But the boys were “almost grown up,” Jon replied. “They can handle this. They're going to be fine,” an attitude that Nicole found “shocking.” Her worst fears were confirmed in May when Patricia threatened to attempt suicide again and was hospitalized in Vancouver. Reed had to make the emergency services call himself.
Patricia was supposed to be under 24-hour observation. However, she took advantage of a brief window of opportunity when her minders were not present to hide in a closet and stuff wet rags down her throat. Paramedics were able to remove the rags and restore her heartbeat, but she was left in a vegetative state for three months. Her family “forced Reed to be part of that and they didn't give him a say in what happened to his own mother. And Jon was not supportive of Reed,” Nicole says.
Instead, Jon was delighted at the prospect of being free to marry Susan. “He even told me inappropriate details such as, oh, well, we're not having intimacy. We're not having sex,” Nicole recalls. “We're just going to live together because we basically should be married together. And as soon as Trish signs the papers, we're going to get married the next day, which is exactly what happened about five months later” when Patricia’s family pulled the plug.
Patricia’s brother threw Reed out of his apartment, so he went to live with Nicole, who had gotten married herself by this time. Nicole says that she repeatedly tried to get Jon to help bring Lane back to the US and give her guardianship because he was not getting support in Canada. But “Jon did not really acknowledge that. He just said, well, Lane's an adult. He can handle himself.”
If anything, Jon seemed to resent being asked to act as a father to his son, who suffers from autism and ADHD. “‘Based on how Lane has, quote, “treated me,” why should I do anything for him?’ He said that.” Nicole says she began cutting off contact with Jon in 2019. Their final communication was in February 2020, when Jon yelled at Nicole over the phone because she was going to be late with a $200 car payment. He blamed her for his own failure to provide for Reed, whom he cut off two weeks later.
By that time, Jon had moved to South Carolina with Susan, purchasing a $350,000 home on a golf course that he cannot afford. According to Nicole, “the most outrageous lie that he told me, and I know it was a lie” was “the reason we got this house is because we can't wait for you and Lane and Reed to have bedrooms to come live and come stay.”
“This was after I was married,” Nicole says. “And that definitely didn't sit right with me. That was very creepy. I've never heard of a dad saying that, when you've abandoned your children, and now they're all adults, and they're all almost in their 20s.” He had “never even consulted us. I didn't even know he had a new home. He hadn't talked to me for two months” at the time.
Leaving his family behind was the only real success Jon Uhler ever had. He has consistently failed at every job he held or business he started up in adulthood. Nicole, herself a mother now, regards both of her parents as examples of “what not to do. Here's the legacy. You should never leave your children. And so I will say tongue in cheek, Jon, you've taught me how not to be.”
In Part 3, we will examine Jon’s business and employment history, revealing the damage that he has wrought on other families for decades through his unique form of ‘counseling.’
