“Hal is one of the sweetest, most caring people I’ve ever met,” Ms. Root said, “and I really knew how much he loved her, and that he never stopped, despite what he had done to her.”
A year later, Mr. Karp wanted to propose. Given the podcast’s role in reuniting them, Mr. Karp felt it should be involved as well. The hosts invited the couple to be guests at a live appearance they were doing in Cincinnati. “While we loved Hal’s story of suffering and redemption, the last thing we expected was that broadcasting it would help him refind love,” said Mark Oppenheimer, the host of “Unorthodox.” The proposal came without a live audience, though.
A day after their engagement, in November 2019, Ms. Sibaja told the live audience, “Forgiveness is a gift, and it’s a choice. In the years in between, we’ve done so much work on ourselves and were in a place that this could happen. And not only that, but my mother who I was petrified of all people to tell, they now have the sweetest relationship, too.”
In February 2020, Mr. Karp moved to Rogers, Ark., where the couple now live and Ms. Sibaja is a vice president of client service for Nielsen, the marketing research company. Mr. Karp, 57, has his own business helping teens prepare for college entrance exams and essay writing.
Plans for a May 2020 wedding were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. They then chose Ms. Sibaja’s 54th birthday, Dec. 6.
They married 27 years after they met, in a small, socially distanced ceremony at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, by its senior rabbi, David Stern, with the senior rabbi of Temple Shalom Dallas, Andrew Paley, participating. Each rabbi stood masked on either side of the huppah, while their 30 or so guests sat spaced apart and masked.
