Beyond Betrayal: The Making of Season 4

43m

In this special bonus episode of Betrayal, go behind the scenes with the Betrayal team featuring host Andrea Gunning and the producers, editors, and story team who brought Season 4 to life. This conversation took place on Beyond Betrayal, the official Substack of the Betrayal Podcast and Host Andrea Gunning. If you want to hear more conversations like this, subscribe for FREE today at: https://substack.com/@beyondbetrayal1 

In this candid roundtable discussion, you'll hear how a single corrupted audio file nearly derailed the entire season—and how persistence led to one of the most shocking pieces of tape the team had ever encountered. The team explores why they made the crucial decision to expand beyond one officer's misconduct to examine the institutional culture that enables systemic betrayal. They also get personal about the emotional toll of spending months immersed in other people's pain—and the boundaries they've built to stay grounded while telling these difficult stories. 

From building trust with sources to navigating the complexities of reporting on law enforcement, this conversation offers an unprecedented look at how investigative podcasting really works and the lengths the team took to get to the heart of this story.  

And don’t forget, a new season of Betrayal Weekly premieres in TWO DAYS, Thursday August 7th. If you aren’t already, please be sure to subscribe to Betrayal for the latest from the Betrayal team. There are a lot of exciting announcements coming this Fall!   

If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and follow along

Transcript

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Hey everyone, Andrea here with something special for you today.

What you're about to hear is a conversation I had with my betrayal production team, producer Carrie Hartman, story editor Monique Laborde, audio editor Tana Robbins, and associate producer Caitlin Golden on how we went about making season four of Betrayal.

We sat down as a team and debriefed.

A post-mortem, if you will.

Only this time we recorded it and launched a video on our new community, Beyond Betrayal, exclusively on Substack.

In this conversation, we get into the nitty-gritty details about how we conducted our reporting, the relationships we've built with our sources, and how working on this season impacted each of us personally.

You'll hear about the moments that shocked us, the challenges we faced, and why we made some of the bigger storytelling decisions we did.

These are the kind of conversations we're having on Beyond Betrayal.

If you like this, please consider subscribing to Beyond Betrayal exclusively on Substack.

It is completely free and you'll have access to conversations like these and a lot more content from me, my team, and our subjects from the Betrayal podcast.

Here is my conversation about the making of Betrayal Season 4.

Okay, guys, we are here today.

with a special video to commemorate the end of season four of Betrayal.

And I wanted to have everyone, or mostly everyone, that made this season happen.

So

if you guys would all do me a favor to introduce yourselves, we'll go around starting with Carrie.

Hi, I'm Carrie Hartman, and I'm the producer of Betrayal Season 4.

I'm Monique Laborde, and I was the story editor on Betrayal Season 4.

Hi, I'm Caitlin Golden, and I'm the associate producer on season 4.

Hello, I'm Tana Robbins.

I was the audio editor for season four of Betrayal.

I'm really excited to sit and talk with you guys because we haven't really debriefed the season all together.

And I have questions for all of you, but I want to start with Tanner because I've been able to meet.

everybody like week to week with Carrie, Mo, and Caitlin and talk about episodes that we've produced, but I haven't sat or talked with you about the experience.

Tell me a little bit about what it's been like for you to work on this season as an editor and as a listener.

Working on this season has been really fun

just because there's been so much fascinating tape and things that

I would just get audio from Carrie and Caitlin and realize,

how did they get this?

This is this is absolutely wild.

So it's been pleasure to hear just such a fully well-rounded story told in in audio that I feel like it's so it's so hard to get it's so uncommon to have such a like deep access to a group of people and to an investigation within a police department to have access to those files too and then just the random sort of people involved in this story that you know nameless people who we we can't name because they, you know, had, were involved in the affairs that Joel committed.

Having audio from those people and their interactions with Joel gives you a lot to work with.

And I actually told Carrie, don't tell me anything in advance.

Every episode I get, I want it to be new.

I want to experience the show as I'm putting it together, you know, literally, you know, putting it together,

hearing the story for the first time.

I thought that would make it for, you know, a better experience for me.

Help me give better feedback, but also just I get to hear the story as if I'm a listener.

I was going to mention that that was one of your requests to not know anything about the story ahead of time.

And so you're really meeting the material fresh with really limited understanding of where we're going.

Can you tell me a little bit about some of the moments that you found

shocking or that were really memorable to you, like hearing it for the first time?

I'm curious what those were for you.

The one that stands out in my mind is

when Joel is confronted at his front door by the husband of one of the women that he slept with, cheated on his wife with.

And finding that

this guy

recorded it on his phone or something, recorded this interaction.

And then we have that.

Hey, how are you you doing?

Is your wife home by chance?

What's it?

Do you know who I am?

Yeah.

See, that's my wife out there, the one that you fucked in your cruiser.

What are you talking about?

I'm not here to harass you.

What I'm saying, Joel, yeah, I'm talking about you.

Okay, my wife is there.

I just want to know if you know her.

I have no idea who you're talking about.

I was like, this is amazing.

We sort of talked about this moment, and now we're getting to hear it and

hear the lies coming from Joel directly hearing him being confronted with what he's done and trying to deflect it and I was just like this is this is incredible that was surprising um

the recording of the the renter also was surprising uh because i mean i just love any time we have in the field in the moment audio

that can really take you to the actual events because a lot of times in shows like this especially true crime shows you're looking back on what happened right you're asking people what did you do what did they do what did you say what did they say how did this go down and here we got audio where we're we get to hear it we get to hear exactly how it went down and

Because it's such natural tape, there's so much, I don't know, texture to it that you feel like you're there.

I could see it when I was hearing it.

Same.

And that stuff was exciting to me as an audio editor because it really helps me to, you know, paint the picture with the audio.

Those two moments are extremely intimate.

It is like you're kind of dropping in on a moment and thinking, should I be hearing this?

And you're right.

Like we're asking the audiences to imagine because it is a lot of it's past tense, or they're talking about something that has happened.

You're asking the audience to imagine something that has happened or create a person or an image of a person in their head.

But you're really giving examples through these, this intimate tape to really showcase exactly what the interaction with this person is and was.

It's really fascinating and incredible access.

So it's been a joy working with you on this season.

And I'm glad that you were hearing things as we were producing.

And I think that was a really great way to work together and get feedback.

So that was really cool.

Can I pop in with just one quick story about that audio, specifically about the...

Yeah, of course.

We actually almost didn't get that audio of

the husband of the person that Joel had an affair with coming to the front door.

So what happened when we initially got that huge dump of records is there was one corrupted file in it that I could not open.

And at first, we were like, oh, this is probably just, it had a really vague name of just an address.

So, we had no idea what that was.

But I just had a feeling that it would somehow matter.

And I went back and I poked the police department and said,

oh,

I think there's a mistake here.

Can we have this?

And then all of a a sudden, we get it back and it's this

insane in-the-moment tape.

And I just remember, you know, getting on the phone right after we got that tape with Andrea and Carrie and Mo.

And I really feel like that was a big moment for us of this could be a season-long story.

So yeah, it's cool to think about.

how that tape is really integral to how we are where we are now.

Since we're popping in here, I just want to mention Tanner responded in real time.

Yeah.

Okay.

So as soon as he listened to these things, we would get these wild texts like, oh my God, are you kidding?

He did what?

So he really was like a listener.

And

it was another way we kind of knew we were.

telling a good story was because editors are sort of notoriously

I don't want to generalize but I'm going to generalize like very steady, they have like a kind of a flat affect.

You know, they work with tape all day.

He was like

so emotive about these things.

So we kind of knew from his response that it was interesting and different.

I was angry.

I was like, this guy's a piece of shit, is what I was thinking.

And it's like every

new episode, I was like, wow,

this guy is plumbing the depths of

human depravity every single episode.

And I didn't mention, there's the tape of the two people who are, well, the guy who's accusing him, and then the woman who's sort of helping him cover it up, the renter who is being forced to lie.

Joel is making her lie.

Right.

And later on, we have the interviews, the internal affairs investigation interviews with Joel.

Can you describe that for us?

Just met her through there and then

we started talking and then

share common interests and became friends.

But I just know her as her first name.

I don't know her last name or anything like that.

But you recognize the pictures, right?

Yeah, now I do, yep.

Joel, you know how that's looking, right?

Is this the person making the allegations?

We'll get to that, but I mean, if we're trying to establish credibility and veracity, I'm showing you a picture, I'm giving you a chance to take a look at it.

You're telling me to my face that you don't recognize him.

Well,

I was mistaken.

I apologize for that.

I recognize her because I just met her at Brew Functions,

but

that's it.

Where you get to hear him lie through his teeth to his colleagues about what's going on all the while we already know that he's lying and we get to hear him waffle back and forth they know he's lying also which was so exciting to hear the the just the tension and i had a lot of fun building that moment in audio with with sound design this this these questions that are like leading questions and it's very obvious that the police know what's going on and joel's just not picking up on it and it was so satisfying after all the what the fuck moments before that to get to the,

I mean, it's hard to call it comeuppance, but it's the closest to comeuppance that

we were getting at that moment.

So that was really exciting too.

I've gotten a lot of messages from, you know, friends and family members and listeners saying,

you know,

Joel is one of the most complicated characters out of the all four seasons for a lot of people.

And I'm not saying his crimes are the most egregious because we know that they aren't, but I think a lot of people are struggling with Joel because

you could know this guy and not know.

Meaning, it feels so close.

Yeah.

And I really appreciate that messaging because that's actually the point of the show, which is like these

everyday betrayals

that really root the, you know, the pervasiveness of what's happening, I think often is overlooked.

It's like we, we can't always have these massive, extreme betrayals for people to lean in and listen.

It's these really everyday things that make people question, okay, actually, there's something that's going on and this is actually close to home.

Moan, my next question is for you.

You story edited the season, but you also had the privilege of interviewing Dr.

Jennifer Freid, who was featured in the last episode.

And you were a huge advocate for getting Dr.

Freyd on the show.

Can you tell me a little bit about why you felt like that was important

and walk me through,

you know, the importance of why we had her on the show?

Yeah, so with Dr.

Freid,

I hadn't heard of her before I started on this show, but after I started working on Betrayal, I was interested interested in the psychological experience of betrayal trauma and what it does to a person's brain and nervous system,

mostly just so I could better understand the subjects we were working with and better tell their stories.

And so when

I was doing that research, Dr.

Fry

is the godparent.

The godmother of betrayal.

The godmother of betrayal trauma.

I mean, she

pioneered the field, coined the term betrayal trauma.

And the more I was watching interviews with her, listening to interviews with her and reading about her work, I realized especially

betrayal blindness as a concept was pretty mind-blowing to me.

And I think really clicked, made a lot of sense in what we see in the subjects we work with.

We get so many comments from listeners saying,

how could this person not have known?

And I think there is a lack of understanding about how betrayal blindness really functions and

that psychological phenomena.

So I thought having her explain it would be incredible for the show and really educational for our audience because I had learned so much researching her.

She is

really the academic foremost expert on this topic.

Without her,

a lot of the concepts we talk about, you know, we wouldn't have this cultural understanding about betrayal trauma.

We wouldn't have these words without her work.

So I was really honored and grateful that she agreed to do the interview with us.

You had a really interesting job this season.

While Carrie, Caitlin, and the editors were in the weeds of the everyday, you were that larger perspective of keeping the train on the tracks.

And it's like, are we making it to our destination?

Tell me a little bit about what episode you found the most challenging, at the same time rewarding.

So for me, I couldn't come in blind.

Yeah.

We've talked about before on the sub stack.

I

had worked with Caroline, potentially making her story for the weekly series, and I had done the first interview with her.

That was a pretty long interview, like five hours.

And so

I knew already a lot of the details of the story, but seeing it all come together with the tape we were able to access from the the police department and from the Kern family's life that they gave us, the people around Caroline and her family, that was really incredible.

And I think one of the challenges that we hit was when we decided to expand the story out to be about

more

officers in the Colorado Springs Police Department that were also

breaking the code of conduct.

And so we talked a lot internally about, is this the right thing to do to zoom out?

We're shifting focus from Caroline's story, but

there is a larger pattern here.

And Joel is not a one-off case.

And I think a lot of what we do, the work we do on betrayal, is taking a story and then expanding out to a larger pattern.

of behavior, of wrongdoing, and looking into how that plays out in society and how people are able to get justice or able to try to repair those wrongs.

So I think that was one of the biggest challenges, but I'm really happy that we did that.

So we have a larger perspective and scope on the Colorado Springs Police Department outside of just Joel's employment there.

Yeah.

I want to turn my attention to Caitlin.

You've been on a few sub stacks, so people kind of already know you as our associate producer.

I want to talk to you specifically about tracking down the archival and certain people of access for this season.

What were some of your roadblocks?

What were some of your breakthroughs?

What was it like?

Because you were kind of a dog on a bone this season.

One of the biggest challenges was like Mo was talking about figuring out how do we zoom this out without getting too far away from that initial story and these issues that we're really asking people to think about of you know, police officers who are betraying the badge.

And

Claudia Aldrich, the whistleblower, was really at the core of all of that.

And I think gaining her trust and getting her to see that we are people who would honor her story and the story of so many other former cops and employees at CSPD

was really difficult.

But,

you know, one of the things that doesn't get featured on the show is that we build real relationships with these people.

And, you know, it's been really nice to, yeah, feel like we now have a relationship with Claudia and that we've been able to,

you know, she's connected us to so many different sources that we had on the show, like a former cop named John, who really helped us to understand the story of Glenn Thomas and that was a really big get for us.

Yeah, I think the biggest challenge of this season was trying to get former officers, current officers, current employees, former employees of CSPD to participate.

And when we were out in Colorado Springs, we had people lined up.

They fell through.

But while we were on the ground, we had already known about this whistleblower network, but

It wasn't something that we had really dug into yet to get access to.

And I remember Carrie and I just like looking through all of the posts, sitting down with our attorney at lunch and being like, look at what's out here, look at what's online and being reported and figuring out a way to make contact.

And that was something that you took on and really ran with and create a relationship with Claudia, which was incredible.

It went from...

this thing that felt far away online to an interview in a matter of months, which was amazing.

And I think had impact.

And I think one of the biggest struggles, and I think you guys can all probably

like understand, is that there was this balance of leaning into misconduct and culture.

Because I do think the culture at CSPG is like the larger discussion, right?

Because it breeds opportunity for misconduct.

You know,

we kept saying this isn't an example of the most egregious misconduct out there.

But we were really examining what does a culture do and how does culture affect the behavior of people that are trying to protect your community?

And I think that was the larger point of episode six and seven.

I don't know how that occurs for any of you guys or how you feel about that.

Yeah, I think it was important for us because in our previous seasons, especially two and three, we've been able to zoom out and talk about

child sexual abuse materials and how they're prosecuted or those crimes are not prosecuted often.

Yeah.

And then with child sexual abuse, in particular of boys in season three,

we were able to zoom out and talk to one in six.

With this one,

you know, we don't have the same kind of statistics and we can't universalize it in the same way, but there are people like Joel in a lot of police departments.

And for me, it just comes down to the fact that if I would call 911 in a crisis,

I don't want someone like that showing up.

It's a position of power.

It really is.

And I think it's important to be able to talk about those people.

So I do think that zooming out for episode six and seven, even though it was a departure,

added something to the larger story.

Yeah.

I also think it's in a lot of true crime media, there's a really deep focus on the psychology of perpetrators.

And I think that's super interesting to find out, you know, how does a

person become a serial killer, for instance.

But I think the trap that a lot of true crime media gets into with that is if it's just about individual psychology, then it's just about these bad apples.

And I think what we've been able to do with this season is explore how is

that psychology coupled with this broader culture of misconduct, creating these perfect storms and, you know, making it so that these people who maybe did have histories of abuse or, you know, maybe naturally were more inclined towards lying were then pushed even further.

Right.

I just wanted to add, you know, we were talking about institutional betrayal in episode 10.

And I feel like

these these episodes, like episodes 6 and 7, where we're broadening out and talking about police misconduct, I feel like that's also in the cultural context that we live in right now.

I think people are very aware, maybe more aware than ever, that

there are bad apples, but they also spoil the whole bunch, as the expression goes, and that it is

a culture

that we all experience and does have an impact on our lives.

And so, hearing this, it's kind of like we're telling the audience what they already, in some ways, know, but we're giving them

this view of this very specific department and how the sausage of this institutional betrayal is made, which I thought was really valuable and also,

if not shocking, at least validating to the way that a lot of people feel and think about their own police department.

Yeah, that's another reason I was so glad we were able to interview Dr.

Freid because Caroline, having put 20 years of her life into supporting her husband and believing in the police department and his career in the police department, bringing him food and making food for the other officers and just opening her home up to be a place where they felt welcome.

Like the experience of having the officers who stayed employed there turn their backs on her and not believe her was something that it's hard to understand the magnitude of that betrayal.

So having Dr.

Freyde be able to talk about institutional betrayal,

the metaphor she used about the second concussion in like a brain injury, the first hit on the head being the betrayal, and then the second hit of the head being the lack of being supported or lack of being believed by an institution when you report or when you try to say this is what happened

and i think dr frey being able to contextualize institutional betrayal with real research was like really helpful to illustrating the point of the loss caroline experienced totally and It didn't dawn on me until this season.

The one main thing that will get you fired as a police officer is not telling the truth, is lying.

And we all understand like misconduct and excessive force and things like that.

But the

standard, like that's there is no,

you get caught lying, you're done.

That was something that was a new concept for me.

And I really think that it was an important exploration this season of why

truth is important,

why

truth is important in our justice system, and how that works.

Because I don't think as a society, as just citizens, your community, you think about the importance of

truthfulness when it comes to law enforcement is so important.

Something you just kind of take for granted.

You see someone in a uniform, you assume that they're a respectful person, a truthful person.

But when you really pressure test and second guess, is that person capable of lying to me?

And what does that mean for my basic civil liberties?

I think that it just makes you sit with those questions that I think are really important for our society today.

I think it's worth noting that Joel got in trouble for lying to his own department, to other police officers, not for lying to anybody else.

He didn't, I mean, he can lie to people out in public.

He can, police officers notoriously are able to lie to the suspects and the people they're interrogating.

Yeah.

That's a really good good point, Tanner.

I want to say with that, too,

the internal affairs tape, like we've said before, this is, we know this is not the most egregious example of, Joel's case is not the most egregious example of police misconduct, but having an internal affairs proceeding with all this tape,

one of the reasons it's so valuable is because these things are often happening extraditiously, even if someone could be charged with a crime.

Instead, what happens is the internal affairs process.

And so it's kind of, it's almost like the military court system, you know, like a military trial.

Like what is happening inside when something goes wrong?

And that is not something we see because it's not often brought to court unless it's the most egregious examples.

Carrie, we've unpacked a lot of this season, but I'm curious, I don't know if we've talked about this yet.

What was it like for you to build a relationship with Caroline, especially since she had gotten so comfortable with Mo.

It was something that this season we had we had never encountered before in pre in previous seasons.

So I'm just curious, what was that like for you?

A challenge.

Yeah.

I think one of the things that helped was I kind of acknowledged it from the gate.

So when we were out in Colorado, and she's like, I love you, but you're not Mo.

I was like,

and I said, no, no.

And, you know, she brings a set to the table, but you'll,

I'm like, I'm like a fungus.

I will grow on you.

And

that's what I think happened, honestly.

Because,

you know, when you pour your guts out to somebody, and sometimes I think it really is easier with a total stranger.

When somebody doesn't know all the players, they don't know your family.

You can tell them everything.

But she had just done that.

So me walking into the picture after that was like, you know,

having said that,

she said it like in a cheeky way.

And

I think we over time established trust.

And I would get funny little tidbits or she'd have a thought and text me.

And that's when I know we've kind of rounded that corner.

One thing that we do as a team, we go out to wherever they live, Utah, Colorado, wherever,

and we spend real time.

We have meals together, we meet family and friends.

And I think that has a lot to do with how we're able to build rapport.

Because, you know, we're not in, you know, a 30-minute Zoom call.

We're together for hours and people can get a better idea.

who you are, what your goals are, how you work.

So I think that

helped.

But she did set a high bar for me to jump over, I have to say.

Well,

you know, when we first did that, when I first did the interview with Caroline, we didn't know that it would become season four.

We thought it would be for the weekly series.

And so once we got this tape from the police department and decided this is a bigger story and got season four green lit.

as Caroline's story, it was also important for me to really take a step back and hand do an official pass off and say, Carrie is going to be your producer now, knowing that you were going to be there in person with Andrea, meeting her in her home, and that that relationship would grow over time and deepen in a way that I would never had access to because you're there in person in her life.

And like, it was important for me to officially kind of transition it off so that there weren't two, I wasn't a shadow producer where she's calling me also and telling me about something.

And then I have to tell you, she she told me something.

I was like, I've had that happen.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It could be, I mean, this is like really behind the curtains, like inside baseball, but this is what happens.

I mean, you have a whole team working on a story and you develop like real feelings for people.

I still hear from some of the women we worked with.

These are continuing relationships, which I, which is why, one of the reasons I like being here, because we're more, we're a a little bit more invested.

And speaking to that investment, when you're dealing with working on something so intense and heavy that has real impact,

that can be hard to deal with day in and day out for six months, eight months, nine months a year.

I'm curious for all of you, what boundaries or emotional scaffolding do you guys have to help get through some of the hard days when you're hearing stuff that are intense.

I know for me, I

work out.

I do weightlifting and that's a huge way of me like kind of processing the day before.

So I'm curious for you guys, like, how do you manage?

Because you feel the stress, you can feel that sadness and it can stay with you.

I'm really good at compartmentalizing that stuff.

There have been a few occasions where

I leave work.

I mean, when I leave work, it means I like, I leave this room and go to another room.

But I leave work and it's still,

you know, I'm thinking about it and thinking about it.

I'm dreaming about it.

But those

instances are few and far between.

So I'm able to kind of like

keep things

in a place.

And when I can't, you know,

I break out the Chianti.

Not as healthy as your solution, obviously.

Tanner, how about you?

For me,

luckily, I have some distance from all of this.

I'm getting, you know,

the pieces of the interview that have already been

looked through by the producers.

They'd already picked the best parts.

And

so I don't have to hear maybe the worst elements as well.

For shows where you're talking about CSAM or you're talking about

gruesome crimes,

I would say I don't think think I handle it very well in the sense that I'm like, everything's fine.

But, you know, I worked on a true crime show where I had to start some anxiety medication because I was just like getting too paranoid

about, you know, like my own safety.

You hear stories sometimes and

things happen to people and you can't help but extrapolate that to like, well, could somebody do that to me?

Yeah, I had that on there and gone.

Yeah.

It's terrifying, especially when there's so much mystery around like what happened to a person.

It really, it really opens up the floodgates of your mind

to, you know, catastrophize.

I do bring some of my betrayal stuff home with me.

I mean, Caroline was asking this about when we were out in Colorado Springs,

when we were meeting with her and Suzanne, they, because I had recently gotten engaged and they were like, does any of this affect how you feel about marriage and relationships?

And I, I'm not going to lie, like there are moments where I'm,

I'm really tough.

And even it's any, how I approach finances and like really big decisions about bringing fully together are, is impacted by these stories that I've worked on because I focus on people who are dealing with the aftermath of relationship falling apart.

And so I give a lot of credit to my fiancé.

It's hard.

So that stuff I think I definitely, I'm not necessarily conscious of, but I'm definitely,

it comes out.

It's also so interesting, you know, because we're always kind of dealing with the big story on the limited run and then dealing with many stories at once on Betrayal Weekly.

And

you never really know what is going to

really hit for you.

I mean, you know, we were working on a Betrayal Weekly episode just a few weeks ago where, you know, I think all of us had this moment of, wow, this is something that's really physically violent and is hitting us in really different ways.

I feel like I often get the question from friends of mine:

are you depressed all the time from all this material?

And I think one thing that's been really helpful for me is just centering a deep sense of gratitude.

It is

so remarkable that every single day each of us are talking to people who have been through some of the hardest things that people can ever go through.

And they're not only coming out on the other side of it for themselves, but they are making the choice to help other people.

And to be a part of helping those people help other people is

a huge honor.

And I think makes our work feel a lot less heavy to me.

Yeah.

Well, for me, there's really two different emotional experiences.

And the one that's the most difficult is the interview.

When I'm in an interview with someone, I really am feeling their emotions with them.

And sometimes I'm crying with them.

And, you know, that that's a really emotional experience that I like have to recover from and like take care of myself afterwards.

But after that happens, you know, when we say goodbye, almost always they're thanking me for listening and they're saying how it feels good to be able to be heard and believed and to tell their story in one sitting.

And so that I leave ultimately feeling positively about the interaction that we've had, even though they've told me about some of the worst things they've ever experienced.

And then it's that gratitude that comes with the continued interaction with them as they're with the storytellers, as they're screening the episodes, as we're following up, that they're so proud to have shared their story and happy to have shared their story.

I'm able to focus on that feeling and not the feeling or the experience of the worst part of their story.

But yeah, the larger point is that like the interview, I feel one way.

And then once I'm seeing it in a script, I feel a little more clinical about it.

It's a little bit, it's removed.

It's like, okay, this is an episode now.

And I'm able to separate, compartmentalize those two experiences out and think about it from the listener's experience when making the episode, as opposed to the interpersonal experience I'm having in the interview.

I have a question for you.

Oh, you do?

I was going to ask you, Dre,

about how this, because this season is different in a few ways from the other seasons we've worked on, one of the biggest differences is that the person who was doing the betraying was never convicted of a crime.

So I'm wondering about your experience reporting this as well, and how do you think about this one differently from previous seasons you've worked on?

Yeah, I mean,

because he wasn't convicted of a crime, we needed to see what was in the public domain and what was out there.

And so that's really what started the hunt for the IA files.

And so once we got all of that reporting and understood, we have all of these files and this is really what's underneath.

It was kind of like any other season because there was so much documentation, so much reporting.

Like the investigation files were

there.

And

this story, I feel like, kind of met me at the right time

because I think we all kind of are in a place and time where, like, what is truth and what does the truth mean to you?

And

I think that this season really, really explores that.

Well, before we wrap up, we have this is not the end of betrayal.

We have a lot of news.

So, Mo, obviously, you produce the always-on.

That show's coming back.

You want to tell the audience when to expect to hear the first episode?

Yes.

Our first episode of season two of Betrayal Weekly comes out Thursday, August 7th.

So mark your calendars, subscribe, and we are going to be starting.

with some episodes, some incredible episodes, some stories unlike anything I've ever heard.

Yeah.

We really found some

storytellers who are able to reflect on what they've been through and have overcome things unimaginable.

So it's been a really rewarding season to start working on.

We're about six episodes in to our production.

So we're really excited to start sharing these episodes with y'all in August.

And

season five is right around the corner.

Caitlin, you are producing this season.

You want to give a little bit of a teaser and

when we should expect that to launch?

Yeah, for sure.

So season five is coming out mid-January.

And it's a story about what happens when the person who is caring for you turns out to be the one.

causing you to be suffering.

And it's also a story about what happens when the law isn't on your side.

And I think it's very relevant to a lot of global stories that are going on right now.

And it's coming directly from many stories that we've been hearing from listeners in our inbox.

So I think it'll be a very special season.

Well, I have to say I'm really proud of everyone and their work this season.

And thanks for all of your hard work.

It's been kind of a race to the finish line.

So congrats to everyone.

And congrats to Matt, who is another editor on the show who is not here today.

But thank you so much.

And I've loved every second of working on this season with you guys.

Thank you for listening to Betrayal Season 4.

If you would like to reach out to the betrayal team, email us at betrayalpod at gmail.com.

That's betrayalpod at gmail.com.

Also, please be sure to follow us at Glass Podcasts on Instagram for all betrayal content, news, and updates.

One way to support the series is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts.

Please rate and review Betrayal.

Five-star reviews help us know you appreciate what we do.

Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.

The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison.

Betrayal is hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning.

Written and produced by Carrie Hartman.

Also produced by Ben Fetterman.

Our associate producers are Caitlin Golden and Kristen Malkuri.

Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreinchek.

Story editing by Monique Laborde.

Audio editing by Matt Alvecchio and Tanna Robbins and mixed by Matt Alvecchio.

And special thanks to Caroline and her family.

Betrayal's theme is composed by Oliver Baines.

Music library provided by MyMusic.

And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, True Crime fans, this is not a drill.

This October 10th through 15th, I'll be sailing with Virgin Voyages on the first ever True Crime podcast cruise.

We'll be bringing betrayal to life in person with a live taping at sea with some very special guests, and I'd love for you to be there.

It's five nights of connection, true crime, and community, all on a luxurious adults-only ship.

This show means so much to me, and getting to share it with you in real time means even more.

It's also a chance to grow our betrayal community together in one unforgettable place.

Book your spot now and come sleuth at sea with me at virginvoyages.com/slash true crime.

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband said, your dad's been killed.

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I was just completely in shock.

Liz's father murdered, and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.

I didn't feel real at all.

More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.

We're still fighting.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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This is an iHeart podcast.