‘Don’t Date Brandon’ — An Explosive Docuseries Shows How Two Women Took Down Their Master Manipulator Ex
Amber met the “handsome” charming Brandon on Tinder in 2013 and, after six weeks of dating, he proposed.
Paramount+’s Don’t Date Brandon is a new three-part true-crime docuseries by director Grace Chapman that explores the real-life case of con artist and abusive ex-husband Brandon Johnson. Based on the Ex-Wives Undercover podcast, Don’t Date Brandon shows how Johnson duped and mistreated multiple women over two decades before two of his ex-wives, Athena Klingerman and Amber Rasmussen decided to team up and reveal the extent of his deceit and violence and to find their voices again after years of trauma.
Like many lovefraud stories, the documentary opens with the beginning of Amber and Brandon’s relationship. Amber met the “handsome” charming Brandon on Tinder in 2013 and, after six weeks of dating, he proposed. Amber quickly fell for the flattering, loving man who “treated me like a princess.” However he was lying about being single. He told Amber that his ex-wife Athena was “crazy” and addicted to him, as well as falsely claiming he suffered from leukemia. Amber was upset when she discovered his image on a dating app, but he dismissed it as an accident. She chose to ignore the warning signs until she began noticing inconsistencies in his story and a growing pattern of jealousy, gaslighting, and controlling behavior.
In Athena’s case, as shown later in the series, the sequence of events had been eerily similar. The two met on Match.com in 2007, married in 2011, and had a daughter named Sydney together. The marriage was quickly marred by an increasingly toxic relationship with controlling and emotionally volatile behaviors. Johnson was said to have threatened to commit suicide when Athena tried to leave the relationship, to have mistreated their older daughter Lexus by gaslighting and belittling her, and to have refused to leave the house when she tried to end the marriage. Athena divorced him in 2012, but that was only the start of a long saga of controlling behavior, which culminated in Johnson creating fake profiles of both women on their shared parenting app and using them to send false messages and try to turn Athena against Amber.
Amber’s and Athena’s meeting on that parenting app was the culmination of a full series of individual cases in which the women realized that they had been systematically played against each other and manipulated by Johnson, who Amber and Athena discovered had been using both women’s profiles to send misleading messages to the other. That discovery was only the start of their working together. After Athena and Amber bonded over what had happened to them, they launched a podcast in 2020 as a way of sharing information and warning other women about Johnson and working through their trauma.
The Ex-Wives Undercover, the podcast quickly gathered national attention and also additional witnesses, which made it possible to get a complete view of the extent of his crimes. One of the first was Kelly, who had dated Johnson back in 1992 when they were both students at Aberdeen High School. The “relationship advice” Kelly received from Johnson bordered on the psychotic, she said, recalling that he was excessively jealous, and she wasn’t allowed to go out with friends. She ended things but Johnson became abusive, attacking her with misogynist insults and making her question her own sanity. Multiple women shared similar stories, including stalking, harassment, financial and emotional abuse.
In 2019, Amber had made a move to end the relationship but Johnson reacted as poorly as you’d expect from a certified psycho. Johnson had reportedly threatened to kill himself and Athena, and was arrested and charged with unlawful imprisonment, death threats, and was court-ordered to stay away from both Amber and Athena. Soon, another of Johnson’s victims emerged. Rachel was dating him and also became the target of his abuse. Her story documents how Johnson’s behavior became violent. After she tried to leave, Johnson allegedly stalked her, planted GPS trackers and audio bugs on her car, repeatedly broke into her home and even damaged her property. In one particularly terrifying 2022 attack, Amber and Rachel were on video when Johnson entered her home with a taser and knife and attacked her. Her friend Austin, a jujitsu practitioner, managed to fight him off until police arrived. Officers discovered duct tape and handcuffs in Johnson’s car and concluded that he intended to abduct her. The video and evidence collected by Athena and Amber would be critical in the case against him.
In 2023, Johnson pled guilty to multiple charges, including assault and attempted kidnapping with intent to commit rape. Johnson also admitted to embezzling $392,396.23 from his employer, recruitment agency HTC and was sentenced to 10 years in a California state prison to run concurrent with a 36-month sentence for theft and ordered to register as a sex offender for life. He will be eligible for parole in May 2027.
Don’t Date Brandon wisely focused on details and wasn’t interested in speculation. The series avoids speculation on why Johnson did what he did. He did horrible, manipulative things to multiple women, yet this is not a docuseries about him. This is a docuseries about those women. By the end of the series, the full weight of their experience isn’t the way in which they managed to bring Johnson to justice but how they found their power and voice again and made the Ex-Wives Undercover Podcast a larger platform for women to tell stories of abuse and survival.
Don’t Date Brandon is streaming on Paramount+.
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