Famous poet Molly Brodak had a secret life as a ‘serial cheater’

Famed poet Molly Brodak’s secret life as a serial cheater was only unmasked by her grieving husband as he searched for pictures to use at her funeral, he has revealed. 

Brodak, 39, an award-winning writer and star of the Great American Baking Show, killed herself in March 2020 after battling a brain tumor and mental health issues for years. 

Her stricken widower, thriller author Blake Butler, 44, cathartically wrote about dealing with the tragedy in his new memoir ‘Molly’, which he told DailyMail.com was the result of a ‘brain dump’ in the wake of his crushing loss. 

In a devastating revelation, Butler wrote how he discovered his wife had cheated on him with a number of men when he went through her phone for pictures to use in a slideshow tribute at her funeral. 

He said the phone included lewd images of Brodak posing in lingerie with sex toys while moaning the names of other men, alongside evidence she had a fling with a student just five days after their marriage. 

‘This couldn’t really be what I imagined, I kept thinking, despite the evidence before my eyes,’ Butler wrote, unable to tear himself away as he was ‘somehow compelled instead to hurt myself by looking longer’. 

He discovered his late wife’s cheating extended beyond online picture sharing, finding receipts for secret trips, ripping apart his heart only days after Molly’s sudden suicide. 

‘The secrecy only redoubled the lacing shame and sickly pain wracking my guts, scraping its claws across my shattered plates of memory in their becoming redefined,’ he wrote in ‘Molly’, published by Archway Editions this week.

In the horrific aftermath of Brodak’s suicide, Butler told DailyMail.com the graphic writing poured out of him as he was filled with ‘a lot of anger.’ 

‘The early versions of the book were personal, a lot more like brain dumping,’ he said, spitefully admitting in the memoir that Molly had quietly justified an affair ‘because I’d cheated on her – never mind that we’d forgiven one another long ago.’ 

Brodak won numerous awards and legions of fans for her poetry and writing – featuring in Daily Mail’s You magazine – including sharing her experience growing up with a bank robber, fugitive father and her struggles with depression. 

Despite her success, behind closed doors she was struggling, as Butler offered a heartbreaking look at Molly’s last days when she struggled to even get out of bed.

‘Molly on the front looked like she had her stuff together, and she was almost afraid to confront parts of herself because she thought no one would like it in her anymore,’ he said.

As young published authors, Butler and Brodak were seen as something of a power couple in the literary world, and her death sparked a wave of shock and grief in the industry. 

But for the first time, details of her suicide were revealed in visceral detail by Butler, which he said was because his cathartic thoughts on her death ‘mutated into something that I realized had a public purpose.’ 

‘I see Molly’s story as a tragedy – I felt her story needed to be told and had a purpose in the world for others who are in a similar situation to her.’

On the morning of march 8, 2020, Butler jogged out for his everyday morning run, leaving Molly at home as she slumped through a depression that had consumed her for some time. 

He said she was silently reading in their bedroom in a distant stupor, and hardly reacted as he held up one of their pet chickens to her window in an attempt to cheer her up.

Instead she looked back at him blankly, ‘her eyes like dents obscured against the glare across the dimness of the room.’

As he moved through his normal running route through the neighborhood, Blake had no idea his wife was leaving her suicide note in the front door for him to find when he returned.

In her opening lines, he reveals, she told him: ‘Blake. I have decided to leave this world.’

Choosing to shoot herself to make the act as quick and painless as possible, Molly told him she had gone to a forested area they used to take walks together.

The discovery led Blake on a frantic chase to find her that he described as ‘moving through somewhere so far beyond adrenaline it felt like the world had finally actually gone flat, my blood replaced with poison, being dragged.’

Butler, the author of several thriller novels, uses graphic, visceral language to describe the moment his life was destroyed, a decision he said he made as he was solely focused on telling the brutal truth.

‘There are certainly things in the book that are hard to talk about, but I trusted that it felt like the right thing to say, even if it was extreme for others,’ he said. ‘It should be extreme, it was an extreme situation.’

Nowhere was this uncompromising take on the tragedy seen more heavily than in his own battle to stay alive in the days after Molly’s death, which he wrote felt ‘at once compulsory and impossible.’

‘Like all there’d ever be left to expect at best was treading neck-deep in blood that looked like water, with a black bag over my head, its fabric lined with mural-style dioramas of the scene of Molly’s suicide inscribed into them, interlaced with miles of smoke,’ he wrote.

Blake said the early days were ‘chaos’ in his mind, and as an author he did all he could think to do – write.

After the shock of her loss wore off, he said one of the most valuable lessons was learning to accept help from others, despite his trust being shattered.

‘When Molly died, that was not just something I could stand up from on my own,’ Butler continued. ‘I had to allow people into my home, and I had to trust people with my emotions.’

While initially writing about the tragedy for catharsis, Butler said he hopes the long journey to eventually deciding to publish the book could help others who may relate to his struggle.

‘Tragedy and trauma are completely disorientating to each person and it takes time,’ he said when asked about advice for others who may be in a similar situation.

‘You might need to buckle down and just eat cr** for a while, but you will get better and you will start to adjust.’

Looking back, he said there were signs that Molly had a darkness inside her, including her remarking one time that ‘if there was ever a gun in this house, I would end up using it on myself.’

‘That would be a shocking thing for most people to hear, but for me coming from having read her poetry and how she processed things… it wasn’t a threat,’ he said, adding that they bonded over their shared ‘morbid humor’.

‘We shared an intimacy over the darkness of the world,’ he said.

Despite her success as an author and award-winning poet, Molly’s tragic suicide note detailed how she ‘never even came close to achieving anything I wanted in my heart’ and felt how she ‘simply wasn’t good enough.’

Blake said he wished he had told her more often of her brilliance, as she ‘never gave herself any rope’, and ‘any good thing that happened just went in one ear and out the other.’

In an unflinching glimpse into the darkness that consumed her, Butler took the difficult decision to publish her last diary entries to show how she was secretly struggling behind their regular-looking life, a sign that anybody can be struggling in secret. 

‘Took a bath, said goodbye to my body. We ate grilled halloumi and made love after dinner and watched our favorite things on TV,’ the excerpt read. 

‘Feel like I can see everything with such clarity this morning. I’ve been pretending my entire life.’