American Nightmare: What Happened to Mat Mustard, the Controversial Police Officer From The Docu-Series?
The first true crime that Netflix released in 2024 is being a phenomenon. American Nightmare dissects in just three episodes one of the most terrifying cases that the genre has offered in recent years because it confronts the viewer not only with the fear of being the victim of a crime but also of the institution that is supposed to protect you and seek justice. In the years following the publication of Gillian Flynn’s popular 2012 novel Gone Girl and its film adaptation starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, a disturbing narrative emerged in public forums, especially on social media. Was it the case that, like Amy in the story, women often faked their kidnappings to get revenge on people who had slighted them in the past? The three-episode series directed by Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins (The Tinder Scam) follows the case of Denise Huskins, a woman who was kidnapped and raped by her attacker, and who, when narrating her nightmare after being released, had to see how the police ignored her trauma and made her the villain, claiming that she had faked it all inspired by the movie Gone Girl.
American Nightmare: What Happened to Mat Mustard
While it may seem like an extreme line of thinking to authorities, this misguided approach had real ramifications, as in the case of Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins. In 2015, the Californian couple found a masked intruder in their home who tied them up, blackmailed them, and kidnapped Huskins. What followed is now the subject of a Netflix documentary, titled American Nightmare, directed by Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins, who previously worked on The Tinder Swindler. The events occurred just one year after the release of the film starring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, and the media was quick to construct a narrative calling the case “the real-life ‘Missing’. “The strategy sold many headlines and also made Denise the most hated person by public opinion, while she retreated in fear because she knew that her attacker was still free of her.
The series reveals the consequences of the general tendency to judge everything by appearances and the damage that authorities do when from the beginning they distrust the accusations and decide to confirm their own version based on prejudices, instead of investigating and pursuing the truth. One of the representatives of that negligent authority who appears in the Netflix series from the beginning is Mat Mustard, the Vallejo Police Department officer who was assigned to the Huskins case. In the recording tapes of the interrogations, you can see how from the first moment their only approach to the case is to condemn the victims as suspects, using intimidation tactics, and without dedicating any effort to opening an investigation aimed at finding the possible culprit. Which, as was demonstrated a year later, could have been done following clues from other events that had recently occurred in the area.
Where is Mat Mustard Now?
As revealed in the final minutes of the series, Mustard was awarded the title of Officer of the Year in 2015, the year Denise Huskins was kidnapped. Although Dublin police, thanks to the dedication of the heroine of the case, Detective Misty Carausu, were able to prove that Mustard’s Missing Case theory was wrong and that in 2018 Huskins and Quinn successfully sued the city of Vallejo for $2.5 million, since the lawsuit was civil and settled out of court, Mustard did not receive any disciplinary action from the police department. According to the Vallejo Sun, Mustard was promoted to sergeant and placed in charge of the VPD’s Investigations Division and Property and Evidence Unit in 2018, and this remains his current rank to date.
Other Accusations
Apart from this incident, Mustard has faced numerous controversies since he has been in the police force. The Vallejo Sun reported in March 2023 that after the Huskins case, Mustard was accused of using racial slurs against a fellow Black detective. Whistleblower and former Vallejo Police Captain John Whitney stated that Andrew Bidou, Vallejo Police Chief, “refused to investigate that incident”. In a copy of the transcript obtained by the outlet, Whitney also alleged that Vallejo Police” promoted their most violent officers rather than punished them“, and that they never investigated misconduct by officers involved in the Huskins kidnapping case.
Mustard was president of the Vallejo Police Officers Association from 2009 to 2019. During that time, he worked, the Vallejo Sun reports, to “significantly” lower the exam standards for the position of Sergeant to give himself easier access. In 2017, Detective Mat Mustard failed his written sergeant exam and was no longer considered for promotion. With the changes that he introduced in the assessment of the exam, which was approved by the then police chief Andrew Bidou, he managed to pass it. His current salary from that position is more than $100,000 annually, according to reports.
