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"It Changed My Life": Where Is Amber Frey, a Key Figure in the Scott Peterson Trial, Today?
Scott Peterson's former mistress revealed if she has any regrets about her damning testimony and if she'd testify against him again.
Scott Peterson was already under police suspicion in his pregnant wife’s Christmas Eve 2002 disappearance. Then officers uncovered he was having an affair with a woman named Amber Frey.
Not only did the revelation help lead to his arrest for murder, it thrust Frey into the spotlight as a crucial witness in the Laci Peterson murder case. Her role in his murder conviction will be examined in the new three-part Peacock docuseries, Face to Face with Scott Peterson, streaming August 20.
“I met Scott Peterson on Nov. 20, 2002. I was introduced to him. I was told he was unmarried,” Frey said during a news conference on Jan. 24, 2003.
Scott admitted he told the 27-year-old massage therapist and single mother that he was unmarried during an April 2003 ABC interview. He also claimed he wasn’t in love with Frey, and that this was his only liaison outside his marriage. But the affair set off a firestorm that still follows Frey around to this day.
Amber Frey's relationship with Scott Peterson
Amber Frey and Scott Peterson met through a mutual friend a little over one month before Laci Peterson went missing.
“He was good-looking, he was nice, he was funny and attentive to me,” Frey told ABC News. “All the things any woman would want.”
Frey claimed to ABC News that she didn’t realize Peterson was married or that his wife was missing until a friend showed her a news article on it. That’s when she called police.
“I was in shock,” Frey said. “I was crying. I have no idea how long. I was just trembling, and I was like, ‘It is him.’”
Wanting to help police, Frey agreed to tape her phone conversations with Peterson.
“You came to me earlier in December and told me you lost your wife. What was that about?” Frey asked him on a Jan. 6, 2003 call. “She … she’s alive,” Scott responded.
Although Frey asked him to clarify what he meant when he said he “lost his wife” before she went missing, Scott said he couldn’t give her an explanation.
“I can’t now,” he said on the call. “I mean, you don’t understand.”
Frey and Scott’s affair came to public light when police told Laci Peterson’s parents about the affair on Jan. 15, 2003. Frey said she felt unprepared for the media frenzy that followed her as she held a press conference to admit to the affair.
“On the way down the stairs, I couldn’t catch my breath,” she said to NBC. “I even asked for a bag to breathe into because I couldn’t catch my breath. It was scary.”
Frey said she felt betrayed when Scott Peterson dismissed his relationship with her on national television.
“He was just a piece of work,” she said to NBC. “You know, there isn’t any truth that comes out of this man’s mouth.”
What did Amber Frey say at the Scott Peterson trial?
Through Amber Frey’s testimony and taped phone recordings, Scott Peterson was revealed as a liar at his trial for the murder of his wife, Laci.
“Amber came across as one of the most credible people you could ever hear testify,” Frey’s attorney, Gloria Allred, said in the documentary The Murder of Laci Peterson on A&E. “And Scott Peterson on those recordings came across as one of the biggest liars one could ever hear.”
One of the taped conversations revealed to jurors that Scott called Frey on New Year’s Eve 2002, as a candlelight vigil was being held for his wife and he pretended to be in Paris traveling.
“Scott was still playing a game,” juror Mike Belmessieri said in the series. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, you know something’s not right here.’”
TV reporter Ted Rowlands said Frey changed the direction of the trial with her testimony.
“It was insanity,” he said in the series. “Everyone in the courtroom was just thinking, ‘Oh my God.’”
Where is Amber Frey now?
Amber Frey continued to live in Fresno, California after Scott Peterson was found guilty of his wife Laci’s death. She soon published a book about her experience titled Witness: For the Prosecution of Scott Peterson.
She married police officer Robert Hernandez in 2006, before divorcing him two years later, Yahoo reported, and now has two children. She also owned a spa in central California called Euphoria Day Spa and was also an ambassador for the workout and energy drink company Bucked Up.
Frey spoke on the TODAY show about her life a decade after Scott Peterson’s conviction.
“I’m still very recognizable, it’s not really ever gone away in that sense, a recognition,” Frey said. “Very proud mother of my two children — doing great…it’s been a road. It’s been a journey.”
Frey revealed that Scott Peterson had made no attempts to contact her since being convicted. She said she has no regrets about coming forward to police and testifying.
"It changed my life. My children’s, as far as normal, I guess you would say,” she said on TODAY. “I don’t regret anything. As crazy as it sounds … I would do it all over again. It wasn’t about me. There’s a missing woman carrying a child. If I had something to say that would help — yeah, without question.”
In 2022, Scott Peterson’s lawyers tried to get him a new murder trial, but a judge eventually denied the bid. At the time, Frey’s attorney, Gloria Allred, said Frey was ready to testify if needed.
“I would have been willing to testify again,” Frey said in a statement through her lawyer to Fox News. “However, I am relieved that my testimony will not be necessary. If I were called to testify, I would give truthful testimony again, for the truth doesn’t change over time.”
Scott Peterson and the Los Angeles Innocence Project began fighting for a new trial in January 2024, and a judge agreed one piece of evidence, duct tape found on Laci’s body, could be re-tested for DNA.
Watch the three-part docuseries Face to Face with Scott Peterson streaming on Peacock on August 20, to hear what Scott has to say about his relationship with Amber Frey today. The series will also air on Oxygen on Monday, November 25 at 8/7c.
