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In McMillions Episode 2, streaming now on HBO Go and HBO Now, viewers got more information about the backstory of Jerry Jacobson, a.k.a. "Uncle Jerry," the man convicted in the McDonald's Monopoly fraud case at the heart of the HBO documentary.
In the episode, we met Marsha Derbyshire, Jacobson's ex-wife, who told viewers about his life as a cop.
However, as McMillions revealed, Jacobson had to leave the force due to health problems. As former FBI squad supervisor Chris Graham said in the HBO doc: "There's always a question why someone leaves a law enforcement career early. Sometimes there's a good reason but there's always a question—it's not typical. In his case, we learned that he had a health condition or an accident that had him go out on a disability."
Derbyshire revealed more about the condition that caused Jacobson to hand in his badge. She said: "One day he started to shave and he couldn't reach all the way up... it was difficult and it was getting more difficult every time he tried to move. By noon he couldn't lift his arms. So I took him to the hospital and they ran the test for multiple sclerosis and Guillain-Barré and a couple of other things. He had the Guillain-Barré ... he says he'd got MS, but technically it was Guillain-Barré."
McMillions briefly gave viewers the Merriam-Webster definition of the condition, named after two of the neurologists who discovered the condition in 1916. That definition reads: "An uncommon autoimmune disorder of sudden onset that is an inflammatory neuropathy affecting the peripheral nervous system, that is initially marked by tingling, numbness, weakness, or loss of sensation in the feet and legs usually spreading to the arms, upper body, and face, that often causes severe nerve pain and breathing difficulties and sometimes progresses to paralysis and in rare instances death."
Per the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the disease affects 1 in 100,000 people, and 70 percent of sufferers make a full recovery.
Per Derbyshire, Jacobson made at least a partial recovery. In McMillions, she said, "After six or eight months, he finally turned around before it got to his respiratory system. It was getting there but it didn't quite take over. So after the next couple of days it stabilized and then turned around a bit."
As a result of his condition, however, Jacobson moved to Atlanta, where he got the job at Simon Marketing, becoming director of security during the events of the McDonald's Monopoly fraud.
As Jacobson's stepbrother Marvin Braun said in the documentary: "He moved to Atlanta because there was a doctor or a hospital that dealt with nothing but MS. I think the MS really threw his life completely, because I think he always wanted to be in law enforcement and having the MS completely changed his life."
McMillions airs on Mondays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO.
