Nobody goes into marriage expecting it to end in restraining orders, ugly domestic violence allegations, a pair of criminal cases and a reality TV show.

The beautiful woman with impeccable posture stands in the expansive bedroom of her soon-to-be-former Pasadera home. She wears a silvery tank dress; wavy blonde hair cascades down her shoulders and a pile of clothes sits on the floor in front of her. She’s cleaning up so she can clear out and start a new life, and she has some friends along for encouragement.

“Now that I’m done with it, I don’t even want to see it,” she says, standing outside her walk-in closet, gesturing toward the clothes on the floor and waving her hands over the pile. “Just like, remove the energy from the house.”

Standing next to her, a man named Christophe who’s described as a “fashion friend” tells her in a heavy French accent, “Yes, yes. And when you do that, then you are done. All the things of the past, we are liberated.” Sitting in a chair next to her bed, holding what appears to be a glass of Champagne, a sharp-dressed man named Misha, decked out in a dark blazer, French-blue shirt and a color-coordinated pocket square, smiles and nods along.

“Sneak peak!” reads the caption on the clip posted to Facebook for the new unscripted reality show Moms of Monterey. “Heather purging from her married life to start anew.” Some of the hashtags on that post include: #momlife #raw #truestory #unscripted #docuseries #Pasadera

On Sept. 23, 2019, Philippe Denham, a veteran television director and producer whose credits include Whale Wars, Out There with Jack Randall and Expeditions to the Edge, premiered a “proof of concept” version of Moms of Monterey at the Carl Cherry Center in Carmel. A proof of concept is shorter than an actual pilot, meant to draw attention from networks or streaming services that might be interested in funding a pilot and ordering multiple episodes. The HBO series Big Little Lies, in which the beauty of the Monterey Peninsula and the Central Coast are featured characters of their own, had become a huge hit; Denham wanted to spin off that show’s popularity by telling real stories about real women who live on the Peninsula.

Outside the Cherry Center, there was a “step and repeat” – something de rigueur for red carpet events – where Denham and cast members posed in front of a Moms of Monterey-branded screen for photographers and friends to take pictures. Inside, he showed viewers the 28-minute demo, and it opened with this line: “Seven women navigate the pressure of life behind the glamor.”

There’s a remarkable amount of tragedy in the lives of some of those seven women. Among Denham’s cast members: A woman whose husband of 25 years died by suicide in front of her and who finds release and community in roller derby. A therapist who has separated from her husband and is trying to heal from the trauma of being attacked and stabbed as a teenager finds joy in equine therapy. A single mom navigating life after her estranged husband, a Pebble Beach caddy who became addicted to drugs, murders his lover. A young mom in a loving marriage whose husband’s entry into the family business – mortuary services – keeps him at work for long hours. An African-American woman who teaches elementary school while raising her black sons in predominantly white Pacific Grove and worries about what could happen to them if they’re pulled over by police. There’s also an aggressive real estate agent who grew up a child of privilege in Pebble Beach and now sells luxury homes.

Then there’s Heather, the long-limbed mechanic’s daughter who grew up in Salinas with good grades and athletic prowess and who is described in the opening of her segment as the “princess losing her castle.” She says she married into Monterey County’s’ No. 1 industry – Salinas Valley agriculture – but she never wanted to live the country club life in a grandiose house behind iron gates. “With my ex, I was never going to be good enough, I was never blonde enough, I was never skinny enough,” she says. “I was never going to be good enough for him.”

She drew a line in the sand, she tells the show’s hypothetical audience during the segment, and left him. “I gave, gave, gave, gave and at the end of my marriage, my self-esteem and my confidence was in the gutter.

“I’m learning to color outside the lines,” she says, adding, “Losing it all, if that’s the price I pay for my freedom and this new life, I’m ready for it.”

Sometimes coloring outside the lines has unintended consequences.

And Heather Church, the ex-wife of ag industry leader Brian Church, CEO of Church Brothers Farms, might indeed lose it all – her freedom included – because of it.

IT COMES DOWN TO A CELL PHONE – how they collect data about how and where we use them, and how users often don’t know how their movements and actions are being tracked, recorded and stored on the same devices.

On June 4, 2017, Heather Church dialed 911 to report that her husband of nearly 15 years had punched her repeatedly in the face while in a drunken rage. As laid out in both a report she filed with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office and a restraining order application she later filed in Monterey County Superior Court, Church wrote that she and her husband had spent that day, along with their children and a babysitter, at a birthday party at the Santa Lucia Preserve.

She claimed that he had consumed a lot of margaritas at the party, and was inebriated when they got home that afternoon. When he went to lie down on a futon in the children’s playroom, she followed him to talk to him about his drinking and that’s when all hell broke loose.

From the report filed by Monterey County Sheriff’s Deputy Josh Knutsen, who responded along with Deputy Juan Ayala, to the couple’s multimillion-dollar, Mediterranean-style home at 301 Pasadera Court: “When she started speaking to [Brian], he got up, charged towards her, pushed her against the wall and struck her with his fist and forearm in the face about five times. While Brian hit her, he called her a ‘fucking bitch’ and other names… Heather stated there was a lot of blood.”

And indeed, Knutsen notes in the report, she had a black eye and bruising around her nose.

It wasn’t the first time he physically assaulted her, Heather Church told the deputies. In one prior instance, he put his hands around her throat. She had called a domestic violence shelter, she told the deputies, only to be told that if her husband was in a bad mood, she should stay away from him until it passed.

Brian Church left the house by the time deputies arrived that day. Knutsen’s report was forwarded to the District Attorney’s Office and on June 29, 2017, Brian Church was charged with a misdemeanor of causing corporal injury to a spouse. On Aug. 11, Monterey County Superior Judge Mark Hood signed an arrest warrant.

Before calling 911 that day, though, Heather Church sent two cell phone pics to her husband, and she sent them with a warning: “I am calling 911 and filing a report. Calling all your family members, I’m gushing blood.”

One picture was of her eye, a cut opened below her eyebrow. The other was of a napkin or paper towel smeared with blood. She told the deputies she didn’t want medical attention, but she wanted the event documented.

“I just want to have something on record because if I do divorce him, I don’t want him to be with my kids,” she told the deputies, according to a transcript of the conversation placed in the court file. “I want to have full custody and the system is really tricky, um, and I don’t know – do you guys have any advice?”

Cell phone pictures contain what’s known as metadata embedded in the image file. You might be able to, for example, see from the data where the photo was taken, the date and time the photo was captured and the image file size and format.

The images always contain GPS data recording where the picture was taken, as long as the user has GPS enabled. Since so many cell phone apps require GPS to be enabled to use them, most everyone keeps GPS enabled, although it can be turned off.

Brian Church hired defense attorney Juliet Peck to represent him on the domestic violence charge, and the case moved through the justice system at a normal glacial pace. He was arraigned in December 2017, pleaded not guilty and had a few routine pre-trial hearings in the ensuing months in 2018.

But on May 31, 2018, almost a year after he allegedly hit his wife in a drunken rage, the District Attorney’s Office dismissed the case against Brian Church in the interest of justice.

That’s because of the metadata.

HANY FARID, PH.D., IS A GUGGENHEIM FELLOW AND PROFESSOR with a dual appointment in electrical engineering and the computer science department and the School of Information at the University of California who has made digital forensics, image analysis and human perception his life’s work.

“I’ve been thinking about these problems for over 20 years,” he says, “and in that time metadata is still the single most important piece of forensic data I use. Most people don’t know about it. Or they forget about it.” What they forget, he says, is that because almost all images now are taken with cell phones, they store “a phenomenal amount of information.”

“They store date and time, the GPS telling where you were, the camera make and model and in some cases, they record the serial number too,” he says. “And they contain information that may seem innocuous, like did the flash fire, and the aperture size and length of exposure.”

Who cares if a flash fires or about the length of the exposure? For example, Farid says, if the flash doesn’t fire but someone in an image has their face lit up, it could mean that photo has been manipulated and that image was placed in the photo after it was taken. If a long motion capture doesn’t show image blurring, it could also be because the image has been manipulated.

“The physical properties used to create images forensically can be used by people like me,” he says. “Metadata is easy to read and easy to manipulate… I can get in and take someone’s image and modify the date and time and nobody would be the wiser if I’m careful.”

But the date, time and GPS are the “big whopping signals” that can tell you about what’s happening.

“The geolocation information can be used to prove innocence, or it can be used to prove you were lying,” Farid says.

FARID DIDN’T WORK ON THE CHURCH CASE, but Peck’s paralegal, Bernie Cerna, consulted with a forensic expert on how to extract metadata from a picture. Using a free program called Ifran View, Cerna found that the pictures Heather Church had sent to Brian Church – the ones with the message in which she claimed blood was gushing from an assault – were taken three days before the alleged beating.

Further investigation of the metadata revealed the pictures were taken near the office of a plastic surgeon where Church underwent an outpatient cosmetic procedure – ptosis and blepharoplasty – in which extra skin is trimmed from around the eyelids and fat is either removed or repositioned to reduce puffy appearance around the eyelids. The day she took the pictures, Church had returned to her doctor’s office because the glue around one of the incisions had failed and the incision had separated. The District Attorney’s Office ran its own forensic examination of the metadata, and came to the same conclusion about the date and location the picture was taken.

During her initial conversation with the sheriff’s deputies, Church hadn’t mentioned the surgery. Several weeks after she made the 911 call, she sent them an email saying she had inadvertently neglected to mention it.

Peck petitioned the court to find her client factually innocent, meaning her client flat-out didn’t commit the crime he had been charged with – it’s a step beyond being found not guilty. If a defendant is found factually innocent, it also means they can petition to have their arrest and court records destroyed.

Factual innocence is a rare finding, but on Dec. 6, 2018, Judge Thomas Wills granted Peck’s request. In the petition, Peck wrote that Heather Church fabricated the story because she feared Brian Church would divorce her and seek full custody of their children owing to her “violent and erratic behavior.” The false report, Peck wrote, was done “to gain strategic advantage in a divorce and custody battle.”

Brian Church was unwilling to comment for this story. Peck, in a brief interview, says her client was “clearly vindicated in court” and “he’s been through enough.

“He does not want to speak to the press about this matter and his goal going forward is to protect the well-being and privacy of his children,” she says.

ALMOST SIX MONTHS AFTER WILLS RULED THAT BRIAN CHURCH WAS FACTUALLY INNOCENT, Church filed for a restraining order of his own. In his application, made on April 16, 2019, he included 33 screenshots of text messages Heather Church sent, a sampling of what he said was more than 100 messages she sent between 4:02pm and 7:42pm on March 27, 2019. In the messages, she threatens to go to the board of his company, Church Brothers Farms (and the vegetable processor True Leaf), and to the press.

“I can no longer take the stress and anxiety that is created from her annoying and harassing text messages,” he wrote in the restraining order application. “I have kept my mouth closed during this process. I never thought it would get to this point wherein I would be required to seek assistance from the court, to restrain the respondent from her abusive threatening conduct.”

On May 8, 2019, Brian Church sued his ex-wife for intentional infliction of emotional distress and malicious prosecution, both for the false report to police that led to him being charged, and for false claims on the restraining order application she filed in November 2017.

And on May 30, 2019, 43-year-old Heather Church was arraigned on a charge of felony perjury, just weeks before Denham cast her in Moms of Monterey, on allegations she made false claims on a restraining order application. Prosecutors added a second count alleging she prepared false documentary evidence, another felony, for statements to the deputies who responded to her 911 call.

“I believe the evidence will show that there was a physical altercation that night,” says Charles Shivers, Heather Church’s defense attorney. “What’s in dispute is who did what to whom.”

The record of Brian Church’s arrest and prosecution is due to be destroyed by the end of this year.

Last year, around the time he sought a restraining order and sued his estranged wife, the state Department of Justice asked Monterey County Superior Court to forward Brian Church’s court records to them because he was undergoing a background check so he could purchase a firearm.

BRIAN CHURCH’S LAWSUIT AGAINST HEATHER CHURCH is scheduled for a case management conference on April 7.

Heather Church’s own criminal case, the one in which she faces the two felony counts, is also wending its way through the system at a normal glacial pace. On Feb. 26, Shivers told Judge Andrew Liu he planned to seek diversion for his client. If the motion he files, which will be heard on April 29, is successful, it’s tantamount to putting the case on timeout. Church would instead undergo intensive therapy and the case against her could ultimately be dismissed.

Shivers allowed his client to respond to a few written questions not related directly to the charges she’s currently facing. Here’s what she had to say, when asked what she hopes her life looks like, after her trial is over, regardless of the outcome:

“My hope for the future is for my highly contentious, toxic divorce to finalize. The effects on children specifically are harmful, especially when it is a high-profile divorce and media is involved. I am in the process of reclaiming my life, finding my true self and rediscovering who I am,” she writes.

“I desire a simple, peaceful life surrounded by kindness. Continuing to be the best mom possible to my wonderful children who are my world is my top priority,” she adds.

“Art has always been very important to me. In recent years, art has tremendously enhanced my life, provided me with a creative form of self-expression and transformation, as well as boosting my self-esteem. It’s also a lot of fun.”

Asked if she has any advice for women also going through contentious divorces, Church says: “A high-conflict divorce will wreak havoc on your overall health and well-being… surround yourself with a strong support system, find other women in your situation, self-care is crucial. Know your self worth, love yourself fully, honor your needs and take it one day at a time.”

Denham, who splits his time between New York, Los Angeles and Carmel, says he plans on pitching Moms of Monterey to bigger production companies to see if anyone will take it on and sell it to a network. He’s philosophical about Church, and says her story is the story of “many, many women,” and some men too.

“You get into a marriage and it looks great on paper, but one person erodes the other until you have no self-confidence anymore,” he says. “The person is no longer recognizable and you’re subtly pushed into a smaller corner until you take action.

“From what I can see now,” Denham adds, “she is in the process of rebuilding who she was. Everyone is a fan of hers.”