Case Files 24: Women Who Lead Double Lives with Sarah Treleaven

True Story Media.

Hello, it's Andrea, and today I have a crossover moment that I am so excited about, which is my conversation with journalist Sarah Trelevin.

I have known Sarah for years, and she has done some truly excellent stories on Munchausen cases, including the one featured in her hit CBC podcast, Caitlin's Baby.

Today's conversation is really one chapter in a conversation that Sarah and I have been having for years, and I'm so excited to share it with you.

I am so appreciative of Sarah's insights.

I highly recommend that you check out Caitlin's Baby.

You can listen to the whole series wherever you get your podcast.

Genuinely, if you love my show, I feel like there is just a 0% chance that you will not like Sarah's work.

10 out of 10 recommend on this one.

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We are an independent podcast and all of that stuff really helps.

Thank you so much for listening.

And now, here's my episode with Sarah Trelevin.

Many of you know that I have a new book out this year called The Mother Next Door, Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy, which I co-authored with friend of the show, Detective Mike Weber.

Did you know that it's also an audiobook that I narrated?

All true.

You can find the Mother Next Door Ears Edition anywhere you find audiobooks.

Now, here's a sample.

Unlike with Hope, there was no carefully crafted facade of a loving mother doing her best.

Brittany's abuse was was in plain sight, observable by all who interacted with her.

But no one knew what to do.

It seemed impossible to prove that Alyssa didn't have these medical issues.

And after all, why weren't the doctors doing something?

But even if people in Brittany's life suspected she was mistreating Alyssa, they had no idea what she was truly capable of, and the darkness in Brittany would shock them all.

In 1988, a small New Jersey town is shaken by horror.

A devoted mother murdered, satanic symbols scattered throughout her home, and her teenage son vanished without a trace.

Was it demonic possession or something more sinister?

Let the Devil In series premiere August 31st with new episodes weekly, available exclusively on MGM Plus.

So, Sarah,

hello.

Hello.

I am so excited that you're here and that we're having this chat.

I feel like this has like been years in the making.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm thrilled to be here too.

It feels very long overdue.

We have shared, let's call them mutual interests for a very long time.

I mean, I can't remember when we first made contact, but it was years and years ago.

I do, in fact.

Dr.

Mark Feldman introduced us.

That I recall.

So at any rate, it's been a long time coming.

And yes, we met through the wonderful Dr.

Mark Feldman, who certainly my listeners will be familiar with as he has

been a guest on the show a couple of times.

And it's just sort of part of my whole origin story.

I mean, he's a key piece of my whole origin story because that is how I really got into all of this.

And he was the first sort of public figure that I met around the topic of Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy, which is, you know, really at the crux of a bunch of our shared interests, I would say.

And,

you know, at that time, Mark was really the most public-facing voice on the issue in terms of experts.

And

he,

you know, has been doing interviews for so long and done, and it was sort of really the public-facing, public face of that committee that both of us are on.

And he introduced us.

And I'm just, I have to say, both Mark and I are such big admirers of your work.

I think you are one of the best journalists in this space.

And it's just really a thrill to have you on and to get to have this.

We've had many very interesting conversations offline and it's really interesting to be able to finally share this online.

Agreed.

Yes, absolutely.

And the admiration runs

always.

Oh, well, I appreciate that.

And so you cover a bunch of Munchausen and Munchhausen adjacent themed stories, I would say.

And so can you tell us, can you just start by telling us a little bit about, you know, who are you?

How do you come to this work as a journalist?

Sure.

I mean,

so yeah, I'm a journalist who primarily writes magazine features and I also make podcasts.

And

I would say I do a lot of work broadly about women who lead double lives.

And a lot of that work has covered women with Munchausen or Factitious Disorder.

And how I came to this was actually fairly personal

because Several years ago, I think probably about close to 10 years ago now, actually,

an old friend from high school befriended me on Facebook.

And

I, you know, remember looking through her pictures and thinking, well, you know, I remember she had a really hard time in high school.

And I'm so glad that she kind of found a nice life for herself.

You know, she seemed to have a lot of social contact.

She was working as an early childhood educator.

And I was like, it made me feel great to know she'd landed on her feet because it was not, it was not an easy childhood and adolescence for her.

And that was a very open secret.

Within a few weeks of her befriending me on Facebook, there was this very somber third person announcement that she was dying.

She had been stricken with this incredibly rare syndrome.

And, you know, those messages gave way very quickly to

the only thing that's going to keep her alive is $2,000 a week for this experimental treatment.

And there was a moment at which I was like watching her all of this unfold.

And I was had this kind of like bad feeling that something wasn't right.

And then she had lost her vision as a result of this very rare syndrome and it happened very suddenly.

And

within days of her losing her vision, a picture was posted on her Facebook feed of

money that someone had dropped off to her in an envelope.

And in the caption, it said, thank you, so-and-so for dropping off this money.

Cindy was able to read the braille on the money and was overwhelmed when she she realized how much you had given her.

And I was like, oh no, you don't learn braille over to the fake.

Like you don't, you don't become blind and know how to read braille.

Like those things don't just go hand in hand.

And I was like, oh, this is a scam.

And so anyways, and then it ended up being this very long, protracted thing.

But this is a very long way to say.

that what intrigued me most about this scam, because there's so many GoFundMe scams out there, which is, you know, and this is essentially one version of that,

was it was always clear to me that there was another piece to this for her.

You know, she was constantly eliciting compassion and empathy from the community.

It wasn't, she just, she wasn't just interested in the cold, hard cash.

She was getting something out of the validation of people believing.

that she was sick and rallying around her.

And that's really the very first story that sort of piqued my interest in that idea, the idea of this sort of highly emotional, intimate con, that what in fact is transactional can be the compassion and the care and things like that.

And so I just sort of started really noticing these stories and really then actively kind of seeking them out in my work because I find them so fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, that's such an interesting story.

And it's so

notable to me that as you're telling it, and I'm sure that you now have the same experience as this has been in your life for a while.

Now, I will say, Cindy picked a particularly outlandish detail to get into pretty fast, at least pretty fast from when you got in.

So maybe you were more towards the end of this escalation than you realized, right?

Because I think one of the things that's notable about these stories is that often it is the frog in the pot of boiling water.

So a lot of times, by the time people are introduced to a completely insane detail, like she's reading Braille on the cash, which I don't even know that there is braille.

Like, I'm like, I have so many questions, but you know, that they're already cooked, right?

That they're, there's like, they're believing a crazy thing, but they've, they've been led down this garden path of believing an increasingly outlandish series of details.

And like, that is how the psychological manipulation works, right?

So it's interesting to me that you got this sort of like hard turn pretty much right away.

And that was what allowed you to clock it, that you weren't necessarily that emotionally invested in this person beyond just this passing acquaintance.

And I think it is often easier for people who are three, four, five, you know, degrees removed.

Like I'm thinking about the Hope Yubara case, which is the first case that we covered on the show and sort of that some of the people that sort of clocked what was going on earlier.

Like one of the people that was like the most angry right away was this random guy that the news interviewed who'd like donated some small amount of money.

And he was just furious and he was like, this is a scam.

And like the people who were much closer to Hope were just stuck in this horrible emotional morass of trying to make sense of it because they had this very strong existing picture of who Hope was that this random stranger didn't.

So I think it's like,

that seems so illustrative to me of that phenomenon that it's like, well, if it's the random Facebook friend of like, oh, I knew this girl in high school and I'm glad she's too, oh, this is really sad.

And then you're like, wait a minute, you know?

And I think the thing about this pattern, because I know that my listeners will be hearing that story and they're like, oh, random face, but oh, third person in, you know, oh, rare disorder.

It's like they're going to be like, check, check, check.

Whereas, you know, when you're in it, if you haven't seen a phenomenon like this before, I think people can't underestimate like the shock of just seeing like, oh, wow, just having a very like human and often kind and empathetic, like emotional response to what the person's telling you, not immediately going into investigative journalist mode, you know?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I was definitely observing it initially, despite knowing this person from a relatively detached place.

I was watching it, I would say, with a lot of curiosity.

And there were, I would say, some what I would describe as kind of red flags, even before the braille moment.

But I was not somebody who was close to Cindy.

I wasn't in her immediate orbit.

I hadn't seen her in over 20 years.

And

I think that, you know, a lot of people, and this happened with Caitlin's baby too, with these doulas who are trying to help Caitlin, who, you know, really wanted the best for her and really believed that they were kind of the only source of support she had.

I have from time to time heard from people who said, who've said, you know, well, how did they really believe that?

It's outrageous.

But the thing is, you know, like consider the alternative.

Like, I think we do fundamentally live

most for the most part in a society where when people tell us they need help, we can believe them.

And certainly when people who we know and love tell us they need help, we can believe them.

Because what is the alternative?

The alternative is the breakdown of this social compact that basically allows us to live in a society.

And so really, I think when people are exercising this belief, when they're choosing to trust someone,

when they say they need help, it's not just reasonable, it's necessary.

And so I think unfortunately, every once in a while, while, quite rarely, you get someone who completely exploits that.

But for the most part, these people are just going through the motions of what's required of us every day to live together.

Yeah, no, you're so right.

And I think that's why it's such, as you said, you know, really intimate exploitation.

And it's so unimaginable, I think, that someone would do that, that even if they are telling you what sounds like an outlandish story, actually, the idea of someone just sitting in their home narrating this in such gruesome and graphic detail, which we'll get into the story about from Caitlin's baby in a moment, but like that is also completely outlandish.

So you're choosing between two outlandish things, right?

And one of them is much more threatening to your sense of reality than the other, right?

Because if it's just that someone is experiencing a cascade of tragedies, that is a thing that happens to some people.

Some people do have terrible luck.

And so I think like that's a world that we can wrap our heads around.

Whereas the idea that someone would do this for reasons that I think probably you and I understand much better at this points in our, this point in our career than we did, you know, in setting out and that the average person does, but that does feel very confusing.

Again, like you said, that's so threatening to your daily life in the world, because I think it's not until you're really examining it that you realize how much we have to trust each other on a day-to-day basis.

And I mean, I know you are in Canada, where certainly you have your own, you know, issues in Canada, but

we are experiencing, I think, some deep and pervasive trust issues on every level right now in the United States.

And I think there are some interesting analogies to like that on a macro level as that on like a personal level of like losing trust, losing any idea of what reality is, losing any idea of what the truth is, of what facts are.

You know, we're sort of having this like macro experience of this right now that has been building over the last several years.

And interestingly, I think as people are talking more about conspiracy theories and how they take hold and how people lose their grip on reality, I think people have a better

framework for understanding Munchausen behaviors than they did.

when this first happened to me.

And I think people had sort of no framework for how people could believe something that was just not based in reality at all.

Whereas I think now people are like, well, yes, there's many people that believe things that are just have no grounding in reality.

Yeah, I think that's really, I think that's really interesting.

And I, I, you know, one of the other things that people

occasionally, again, I think it's really in the minority, but people respond to these stories, stories like Caitlin's, other stories I've covered of factitious disorder,

is kind of like, what's the big deal?

You know, so someone lied to you about being pregnant.

Like, what is the big deal?

So someone told you they had cancer.

Like, what did they actually do to you?

And I think the kind of that emotional betrayal is very deep for a lot of reasons.

But I think one of the key reasons is because it completely messes with people's sense of reality, that you no longer have a reliable gauge for what is real and what is fake.

And to sort of try to operate in the world with that gauge broken is really devastating for people.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, yeah, I think Caitlin's, the Caitlin's baby story, I love this, and the Sarah Delashman story, which is also another story that you've covered, which are, they are distinct in some ways from the cases that we cover on the show, because I think in our, you know, in the world of the show where we're talking about munchhausen by proxy cases, but of course there is a lot of other, you know, munchhausen behavior and just extraneous lies about a bunch of things.

It's sort of this just completely pervasive pattern is something I've come to appreciate over the years is that like they're not just lying about medical stuff.

They're lying about their work.

They're lying to their partners.

They're, you know, having again, like these double lives, triple lives, quadruple lives, so many lives going on at once, so many threads.

It's just this, you know, completely compulsive behavior.

But, you know, these stories are stories that I think, yeah, people can look at and say, okay, well, no actual children were harmed, right?

Whereas in my cases, nobody's asking what's the harm, you know, unless they just completely don't believe that Munchausen exists, which is an entire other, you know, sort of subset of people.

But,

you know, so I love that your story, your story zero in on that, because I think actually, as I look at people, even who are survivors of this abuse.

You know, there are all these devastating after effects for people, especially who are, you know, the children of these abusers, but even for people who are married to these abusers, people who are family members to these abusers, there's often these very long-lasting effects.

And sometimes they're physical, you know, especially if the abuse was severe.

Sometimes they have lifelong physical complications from them.

Certainly, there's a lot of financial consequences from them.

But actually, the emotional and psychological consequences are the worst.

I think that is where people get it the worst.

Those are the hardest to heal from.

They're the hardest to undo, especially obviously if you're a person who's raised by one of these people.

But I think even just someone who has been enmeshed with a person like this because they're a family member, because they got close to them for whatever reason, that is the thing that is the hardest to undo.

And so I think it's really helpful to sort of zero in on that part of it.

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Without obviously giving up any major spoilers, because I do want people to listen to Caitlin's Baby.

It is a phenomenal piece of work.

I suspect a fair amount of my listeners have probably already listened.

I certainly got a lot of messages about it and I was like, oh, I'm on it.

I know, Sarah.

So, and by the the way, congratulations to you and the team.

It's such an excellent show.

It was a hit, it deserved to be a hit.

I'm so happy that it's gotten such a great reception.

So, can you tell us about this story that you dive into in Caitlin's Baby?

Sure.

And I should say, first of all, thank you very much.

And I share the credit largely with Kathleen Goldhar, who was our story editor and producer, and who I know you've spoken with, and Veronica Simmons, who was our senior producer at the CBC, just amazing women.

And we really worked very closely to put this together.

So the story is

one that I came across in March 2023.

And as soon as I saw like a local news headline, my jaw hit the floor.

It was a woman who

had been serially fabricating pregnancies, contacting doulas, asking them for help.

And then once they agreed to help her, taking them through these escalating series of crises until they were completely emotionally enmeshed with her.

And then she would just devastate them.

And so I spent a lot of time researching this story.

I first wrote a story for Cosmo magazine and then we had adapted it to the podcast.

And, you know, I was, first of all, super interested in Caitlin herself because

I was really curious about what was motivating all of this, as I always am in all of these cases.

And then I was also really curious about her specific, you know, modus operandi, like the way that she really skillfully deceived these people over and over and over again.

She was an exceed and or is an exceedingly prolific offender.

I mean, it's just overwhelming.

And then, of course, I was interested, as I always am, in sort of how we process these forms of harm and what it really means to be deceived in this way.

And then what the payoff is for the people who perpetrate in this way.

You know, why are they willing to defy so many of society's conventions and what are they able to kind of bring out of that experience that they feel they can't get anywhere else?

Yeah.

And it's so, you know, again, it's so well done.

And the story is so compelling.

And I really

found myself, you know, listening to the first episode where you're really walking with one of these doulas through this experience kind of beat for beat.

And it's so,

you know, to be honest, it was, I wouldn't actually describe it as triggering.

It was very evocative for me

of my own experience because, and this is sort of almost a piece that I've kind of put

way in the, you know, back shelf of my brain just because, you know, I've sort of moved away from talking.

I still do kind of connect the dots a lot.

And as I, you know, said, said explicitly in last season, you know, the reason that I, the reason that I keep mentioning my sister's case is partly because there are moments when I sort of do connect those dots in my mind and I feel like it's germane to share.

And also because I want to continue saying the name Megan Carter because I want to make sure that she stays on people's radar.

And so that is, you know, that sort of a twofold reason.

But I don't, you know, I have moved away from a place where, you know, the place where I started the show, which was really talking about and working through and having a catharsis about my own family experience.

And so I don't necessarily, it's not always top of mind for me anymore.

And these events, especially her fake pregnancy, happened a long time ago now.

You know, this happened way back when we were both in our 20s, you know, before either of us had kids.

And it is this sort of faraway experience.

But as I was listening to this doula,

you know, describe this sort of series of escalating crises and this, you know, having Caitlin describe what was happening beat for beat and sending photos and all of this, I was like, oh, God.

I mean, it really took me back there.

And I think people, again, to your point, it's like, people don't understand

what that feels like to be the person on the other end of that call and to be sort of, now, obviously, my sister was someone I knew and loved, but,

you know, to sort of how disturbing it is to think of someone just sitting in their apartment.

describing this to you and walking you through a you know a death because in in my sister's case that was what she did as well she was walking us through you know not only going into labor earlier while we were all out of town and couldn't get back there and, and then losing these babies who I totally thought were real.

And obviously the doulas on the other end, you know, they're highly empathetic, caring professionals who are very dedicated to their work and they were very invested.

And you do trauma bond, right?

Like that was a word they used a couple of times in the first episode.

I just found that was very well done in the way that I was like, oh, that just immediately sort of took me back to like answering some of those phone calls myself.

And

thinking about like, what, what is the person getting out of it?

Because in a lot of the cases that we cover, you know, there is usually some element of financial fraud, either with fraudulent fundraising and or just scammy, you know, nonsense going on right, left, and center, right?

They're getting, they're getting financial help for this, that, and the other thing.

But I think that is considered kind of a secondary motivation.

And this is something that Dr.

Mark Feldman talks about, that like malingering is a separate set of behaviors where there's some like pretty obvious tangible benefit, right?

You're lying so you can get out of going to work.

You're lying so that you can get a financial reward, but you're not really like trying to extract this level of emotional, you know,

of emotional payoff.

So I think like I have that over here, but I think what I've come to understand that actually, I think as much as it may be about getting emotional needs met, it's also about power.

It's also about having power over other people.

It's abuse, right?

So, Caitlin was abusing those people.

But if you're knowingly pulling someone into this and just extracting that need and care and trust from them and breaking their ability to trust other people, that's abuse.

And it's very clearly to me of psychological and emotional abuse.

And I think that why it shows up in these arenas is something I've spent no small time thinking about: is that we give women power via sympathy and via, like, you know, the one place that we give women power is over children.

That's the one place we give women authority.

And so, I think if you are an abusive person, you will take that authority where you can get it, right?

And there's a lot of places that we give men authority.

We give men authority in the church, we give men authority over sports teams, we give men authority in businesses and in politics.

And so, you see men abusing power in those arenas.

And you see women abusing power in this arena because this is the one place we give people authority.

Now, I think it's arguable whether we give women authority over their own bodies and over their own health.

That's something we could, that's probably debatable, but I think like the sort of archetype of a sick woman or a woman who needs or a woman who is vulnerable, a woman who needs to be taken care of, like that's a very strong archetype.

And so I think it's using that as a power play.

And I think it's it's as much about like, cause we used to, you know, used to sort of describe this as it's, oh, it's like you're trying to get sympathy and attention.

And I think that's true.

But I actually think there's as strong of a compulsion to just have.

power over people and to feel like you have like I think there is a thrill of deception and to feel like you are empowered by taking power away from someone else.

Sure.

I mean, that Mark Feldman, Dr.

Mark Feldman introduced me to the term duping delight, which is the pure thrill of manipulation.

And I think that's a big part of this.

I mean, you know, as you might imagine, I also have a lot of thoughts about this.

I think one of the things that has really, although I think you did a great job articulating a lot of the complexities of like kind of assigning blame, responsibility, and how we sort of feel about these perpetrators.

A question that is often in the back of my mind as I work on these stories is, do I feel sorry for this person?

And on some level, it's a complicated question and answer for me.

On some level, I do, because I think for the most part, at least the stories that I've worked on involving, again, almost exclusively women who have

lied about being sick or being in crisis, mostly for attention and for power.

It's an enormously pathetic thing to do.

It just is.

It's really desperate and pathetic, and it's a miserable existence.

um it monopolizes their whole lives

and

uh while i i haven't i haven't seen anything that's persuasive that they're not responsible for their behavior it is hard to imagine someone actively choosing to lead such a miserable existence on the other hand i think you know our baseline for

uh forgiveness as a society, you know,

is typically that someone takes responsibility for their actions and commits to not doing harm again.

And in so many of these cases, these women who do these things just can't meet that bar or refuse to meet that bar.

They are not genuinely contrite.

They do not recognize the harm that they have done and they will do it again.

100%.

I mean, we talk about, you know, my psychologist and psychiatrist colleagues like Mark, you know, talk a lot about like, if there's any hope for treatment and or rehabilitation of any kind, that like step one is taking a full accounting of their behaviors.

And though I have heard tell from a couple of colleagues of working with people who did that, I have never seen it.

And I think that even my, the most optimistic of my colleagues in APSAC recognize that it is vanishingly rare for someone who engages in these behaviors to take responsibility.

And I think that's because most of the people who engage, and especially the extreme behaviors, you know, there is a spectrum of these behaviors, right?

But certainly anybody who ends up on my podcast, probably anybody that you're following for a long time time is going to be on the extreme end.

I don't know how capable they are of feeling remorse or really recognizing harm because I don't know that they really feel that or care or feel empathy for the people that they've harmed.

When I've had conversations with perpetrators, which I have a handful of times, you know, even including this past season,

it's very clear that what they regret, what they are focused on, what they are sorry for is the effect that it has had on them, on any minimal consequences that they've experienced or significant consequences.

I think in the case of Hopiabara, she did go to prison for 10 years.

She lost everyone in her life.

And when she was crying in that cafe in Idaho, you know, in the moment I was sort of with her, I was having a human experience because I'm a human person who feels, you know, a lot of empathy.

But the moment I kind of left, I was like, she feels sad about where her life has ended up.

It's possible that my feeling, I think likely that my feelings will continue to evolve on this as I'm engaged in this work, but I am coming off obviously a very difficult case

where

a child died.

And,

you know, having spent so much time with that perpetrator's writing, the extent to which other people were objects to her was so clear.

And I think when you're talking about someone like Caitlin, especially when it's just like, oh, it's dozens of people.

You know, it's like, oh, these people aren't real to them.

I was just like, they're not, they're not thinking, oh, wow, I would be really hurt if someone did this to me because they're just not thinking of them as other people, you know?

I think that's really, I think that's an interesting point.

And I think it's for the doulas that I interviewed,

I know that part of what they struggled to move past was just this sort of recognition that.

they had been used in this way as if they were not fully human, that they were just kind of these disposable entities to be used for someone else's pleasure.

And that's a really hard thing to grapple with, you know, and I think that that sort of, I think that is what happened.

I think that there wasn't a full recognition that other people are entitled to decency and truthfulness and consent and basic things like that.

I mean, it is such a strong violation of the social contract, right?

Of just like a basic sort of agreement that we have with each other to recognize that.

your fellow human is a fellow human who lives, breathes, hurts, bleeds like you do.

Without that, we are, it is anarchy, we are lost, you know, and I think like that is part of the reason that it's so hard for people to accept, you know, something that

detractors of Munchausen, we have, we have a whole sort of community, unfortunately, of people that just deny that Munchausen exists.

And they, they, they couch it enough usually when they say it, where they just say, oh, this is so rare that, you know, most practitioners are never going to see a case.

That's not based on real data, but what, you know, it's a lot of that going on these days.

But, you know, I think part of what that argument is, is, oh, this is just pathologizing women's behavior.

And you're being, you know, you, Andrea, are being anti-feminist by pushing this narrative that women are crazy.

And in fact,

these women are not, crazy, obviously it's not a clinical term, but these women are not that, right?

And I think I've moved much more away from describing these behaviors as a...

discrete mental illness that someone could sort of be diagnosed with and treated with because I think it doesn't fit into that framework, you know, for all of the reasons that we're talking about, right?

The inability to recognize the harm, the compulsiveness of it.

Now, is someone like this, you know, are they, are they mentally ill?

Are they mentally not like the rest of us?

Yes, but they're not crazy.

I sort of had this brainstorm the other day as I was thinking back on, you know, Lisa McDaniel, who's the perpetrator that we cover in season six.

She has this conviction 25 years ago for abusing her daughter.

And it is one of the most straightforward cases I have ever seen because there was video evidence of her from the hospital covered on, you know, captured on covert video surveillance that captured, you know, 50 instances of her poisoning by tampering with her daughter's IV line and suffocating her child on camera.

Like absolutely no question

what she did, if she did it, you know, how much she did it.

And her daughter almost died numerous times from sepsis, from polymicrobial sepsis

and yet she brings in this psychiatrist to evaluate her that says this is the picture of a recovering mother she's contrite for her behavior she understands the harm she's caused and also by the way this is not munchausen by proxy abuse and i was like what planet i mean this is there is no question she was convicted she was given a very light sentence and then was allowed to get her kids back so obviously the system worked a tiny bit and then completely fell to pieces with disastrous consequences.

But I thought, you know, as I was, as I was thinking about this, this, you know, male psychiatrist that evaluated her and Lisa at the time was in her 20s and just the adjectives he used to describe her, just the picture of a young mother in recovery.

And I'm just like, oh boy, this guy is just so.

snowed by Lisa.

And how could she like, does this person know what evidence was collected?

Like, did he actually, is he just taking Lisa's word for what she did?

Cause she tells this other completely different, oh, I was just trying to clear her train.

And it was just ridiculous, completely divorced from, from a very, you know, black and white reality.

And I just thought, you know, there's a reality here that we're up against where if you have to sit with what's on that videotape, I know we had this incredibly emotional, you know, recounting from

Lisa's younger sister, Sabrina, who has seen the videotape.

And obviously it just completely haunted her for the rest of her life.

And,

you know, if you have to grapple with that, you're grappling with someone committing a heinous evil act that's sort of beyond maybe anything else we could possibly contemplate.

I don't think there's anything worse than the idea of a mother intentionally harming their own child.

And so I think to avoid grappling with that very uncomfortable thing, we go this whole other route of like, we would much prefer to think of women as crazy or emotionally needy and desperate

than we would as them having the same agency to commit evil acts as men do.

So I think there's a lot of truth to that.

I think that

the world you primarily work in is more black and white, you know, the world of it where there's more explicit child abuse involved.

You know, I think with stories like Caitlin's and other stories that I've covered that involve adults

deceiving other adults,

there's a much more gray area in terms of culpability and in terms of sort of what we do with these people and how the system responds to them.

I do think, you know, people often forget, they're fascinated by the fact that most of the perpetrators who do these things tend to be women.

They often forget that the most proximate victims are also primarily women.

Women do this to other women because women typically turn to other women when they're looking for compassion and support and empathy and things like that.

You're right.

I mean, you don't see as many men getting pulled into the sort of extreme emotional piece of it.

They might be supporting them in other ways.

They certainly are being harmed by them still, right?

They might be getting, you know, a lot of money extracted from them or, you know, time, but it's not quite the emotional piece.

I mean, you're right.

I think that you do see a lot more female victims.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that that, you know, in Caitlin's case, I think that complicated the narrative of harm.

Like my sense was that this was just perceived as some sort of cat fight between women, you know, like that they, this was like nonsense and the judicial system didn't really need to be involved.

But

There were a lot of questions about what to do with someone like Caitlin.

And,

you know, those questions have come up in a lot of these cases where you have a serial perpetrator who seems pretty committed to doing harm.

But, you know, in many ways,

we don't really have an appropriate framework to deal with someone who's who's not really taking your money and not harming you physically.

You know, I mean, that's what the criminal justice system does.

It deals with property and like physical harm for the most part.

Sometimes, right?

I mean, like,

I mean, to be honest, it doesn't even function with people harming children.

So, I mean, like, I, sure, you know, the clearance rates are, are terrible even for things like murder and child abuse and rape.

So, I mean, it certainly, like, as, yes, as non-functional as it is in those areas, I think actually property and money is where it's the most functional.

And actually, a lot of these people, if they get them on anything, including the child abusers, if they get them on anything, it's actually the financial fraud.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, I think, I think that the system cobbles things together, you know, harassment and they always look for some sort of, you know, like you said, there's very often some sort of secondary gain, like a financial fraud, because, you know, surprise, surprise, these people often also do not have great boundaries in other areas of their life.

But it's really tough.

You know, like I read the other day that a serial romance scammer in Canada had been declared a dangerous offender, which there's an incredibly high bar to be declared a dangerous offender in Canada.

You

have to basically be someone the system has deemed at this point incapable of

reform.

And he's a nonviolent offender, and they're holding him kind of indefinitely.

And that was really interesting because

even though he has stolen money from people, his primary crime is that he has betrayed people over and over and over again.

And that was really Caitlin's primary crime.

You know, she was charged with harassment at one point.

She was charged with sexual assault.

Those were pled down to indecent acts.

She was charged with fraud because she wasted duelist time mostly.

But her primary crime was emotional.

It was

this deception and the emotional intimacy that she built

and things that she, the activities she engaged in without obtaining consent.

I said when I sort of started researching this that she, in some ways, is like, you know, the worst boyfriend any of these duelists have ever had because she just, you know, they gave her everything they possibly could, you know, because they really believed that they were helping her or that she needed them.

And she,

she just devastated them.

And I'm sure any one of those doulas, you know, there's a, there's, there's fraud under 5,000 and fraud over 5,000.

There's sort of two categories of fraud in Canada.

I'm sure any of these doulas would have preferred that Caitlin had like taken $1,000 out of their purses rather than put them through this ordeal.

you know and yet because money is much more replaceable than trust that's right and yet the system would know exactly what to do with someone if she

put her hand in their purse.

So it's a complicated question.

You know, whether these people, these people, whether people who perpetrate these kinds of things are reformable is a complicated question.

How the system responds to them is really, is really

questionable.

And then, you know, that has an enormous impact on victims' ability to move on.

You know, I think.

One of the things that these duelists I interviewed shared in common is that they were really determined to not allow this to happen to anyone else.

They were way more determined to not allow this to happen to anyone else than I would say, you know, the judicial system.

But the doulas were really responsible for getting the word out, for advocating for themselves and others.

It's not an easy thing.

And, you know, they're really fighting an uphill battle to stop someone who's determined to do harm from doing it again.

Yeah.

And I mean, you know, what did you get a sense from talking to some of Caitlin's victims?

What was your sense of what they wanted as sort of or what they wanted to happen to her?

So it's a complicated question.

I mean, I think they had different responses.

I'd say a lot of them, on one hand, want her to get help.

On the other hand, are not terribly optimistic about her prospects.

I don't think any of them really believed that she was ready to get help.

I mean, and the whole thing is predicated by this bizarre fallacy where it's like, how do you convince, how can you be convinced that somebody who gets off on being sick is meaningfully trying to get well?

Like her whole thing is that, you know, she loves being sick.

So it's like, she's like, yeah, more therapy, more treatment, you know.

And many of the doulas, I think, when they became convinced that she was likely going to repeat this behavior again,

did want to see her serve some kind of jail time.

So, which is also a complicated thing, I would say, and I've seen this happen with other victims of violent or non-violent crimes, where, you know, who maybe were not big fans of the carceral system, but you look at this person and you kind of process what they've done to you and how hard that was.

And you really just want them somewhere where they can't do that.

You know, it's sort of containment, you know, the protection of society mandate.

So yeah, they had a lot of different feelings.

You know, I spoke to one of the doulas and she said she hoped that Caitlin would be locked up until she was in her 50s and could at least no longer fake being pregnant.

But,

but I think, I think for many of them, ultimately,

it's an unsatisfying question.

You know, what are the options?

I think, I think in an ideal world, Caitlin would be sent for very intensive treatment and she'd get well and wouldn't have the inclination to do this again.

Unfortunately, I don't think anyone was terribly optimistic that that was actually something that was going to happen.

Right.

And I mean, I think that's, you know, that's where we land a lot of the time.

And I think, you know, as you, as you kind of gestured to, I, I, I also have very complicated feelings about the carceral system.

It is, you know, one of the, we really talk about the most complicated institutions on in our work, right?

You talk about like medical system, carceral system, child protection system.

really can't get much more complicated and problematic.

But

yeah, I mean, I sort of, the reason I would wish for prison time, I think it's sort of, you know, our basic understanding of what prison is for,

other than unfortunately, for profit in this country a lot of the time, but leaving that aside, you know, our basic understanding as a society of what prison is for is for punishment and the idea that that punishment would deter other people from doing it.

And then also keeping society safe, right?

Having these people.

segmented from the rest of the society so that they cannot continue to harm people.

And I think in terms of punishment and that being a lesson that would deter to other people, I don't think there's much utility in that for this kind of behavior because I think it's so compulsive.

And I don't know that it's very deterrable.

Like I don't think that women who engage in these behaviors are any, I mean, there are, there are male offenders.

They tend to be more like in the medical field, which is also something you've kind of touched on on deception of, you know, of male doctors, which is, you know, a really interesting piece of your work.

But,

you know, like, I don't think another woman going to prison for the same crimes is going to be like, well, I better lay off this.

You know, it's just sort of not how it works.

The reason I hope for long prison sentences in these cases is actually for partly for the reason that the doula is mentioned, right?

Where you're just like, let's get them out of their childbearing years so they can't bring any additional children into this mess.

And also so that, you know, they just are, those children can grow up, right?

And the children can come of age as they did, you know, in Hop Youbara's case, that they really were able to have, you know, the bulk of their childhoods while she was in behind bars and they did not, you know, know reunite after she was out and so i think that that is an ideal situation right it worked i mean i think in that that's an argue that's an argument for like it worked um there was another you know offender that we talked about on the show jessica jones who you know was arrested and then as she was awaiting trial offended twice more found new boyfriends, abused their children, was kept getting sort of slap on the wrist, no monitoring.

They did not keep her in jail.

And then she just kept offending.

And then she ended up getting, I think, 60 years, right?

And so you're like, well, yes, that person is just, they're so determined to offend.

But I think that's the majority of these abusers.

So I think in, in that sense of like, let's just keep them away from everybody else.

I think that makes sense, but it's, but it's quite complicated.

It is.

And I, you know, I think it's hard for me to accept that somebody is irretrievably broken, you know, and I think we don't have

and there's no question in my mind that people who engage in this kind of behavior are broken.

That That's separate from a question of whether they're responsible for what they do.

It's very frustrating for me to think that we would kind of just identify anyone as

a write-off, I guess.

But at the same time, I think we have to understand the limitations of the treatments we have available.

And there is a public protection component to this.

So it gets very tricky.

You know, I think there are lots of people sitting in jail who have been rehabilitated and who would do no harm and they're still sitting in jail.

I don't think for the most part, our carcassal systems are focused on rehabilitation.

No, I think they often make things worse.

Yeah.

They compound whatever issues that person came in with.

Yeah.

Yeah, but

that is sort of separate from the question of what you do with people when you're not confident they are capable of ceasing harm.

And we don't know how to stop them.

We don't know what treatment to give them.

We don't know what they would respond to.

We don't know how to make them better.

And unfortunately, there's just still a lot of people we don't know how to make better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think at least at this moment, I think this is why the work that you're doing is important.

And I feel, you know, this way about my work as well.

Like, I think the best thing we can do right now is sort of put them on blast, right?

Like hope that someone.

you know, is alerted if this person comes into their life or if someone who has these exact same patterns because the patterns of behavior are so strong, you know, that if a doula who presumably this podcast and this story made its way through a lot of doula communities, that like, if they get a call like that and they find that they're in this escalating series with these red flags, that they go, you know, maybe I'm going to like hang up the phone for five minutes, do a little bit of due diligence.

And that's not to victim blame the doulas in this case.

Obviously, they did not have the,

you know, they did not have the luxury of listening to this story before they got involved in that.

But I think like, you know, educating people about this pattern so that they can at least, you know, raise alarms when they see it, disengage from that person if it's a, if it's, you know, this munchausen behavior or sort of adult on adult crime, report it if it's happening to a child in their midst, you know, at least sort of have that awareness.

And then if someone is a serial offender, just making that person's name really public.

I mean, I think one of the things that I would like to see us eventually get to

with Munchausen offenders, you know, with medical child abuse, and we don't, again, that's not, that's not a specific criminal charge, neither, you know, munchhausen by proxy or medical child abuse is a specific criminal charge.

State by state, it varies.

So you have these charges such as cruelty to a child or injury to a child in the first degree or, you know,

depending on the state.

But like.

if we had a registry, right?

Of like we have a registry for child sex offender, for all sex offenders, right?

And I think maybe like that, to me, that would be like a step in the right direction.

Like if you've done this, if you've been criminally prosecuted, it certainly wouldn't, you know, solve the problem of how infrequently we criminally prosecute it to begin with.

But at least if someone, at least for someone like Lisa, right?

Like, if you could look them up, if you are hiring someone in a sensitive position, for instance, to be the director of patient advocacy for a large foundation, like if you are a doula and you're like, let me just see if this person is on the

list of people who has committed these kind of offenses.

And then you go like some kind of red flag list, right?

That they should be red-flagged in some accessible database, especially if they have gone through the criminal justice system.

That seems like a step in the right direction so that at least people could know to protect themselves.

We're, I think, unfortunately a long way from that kind of reform.

But yeah, I mean, do you have any ideas on what we can, on what a better society would look like around people who cause this kind of harm?

You know, I mean, I think In terms of how the criminal justice system should treat this, I think it's really perplexing.

Like I really, you know, as you sort of said, adults are and should be permitted to lie to each other.

You know, that should not be something that's criminalized.

So where you draw these boundaries is very complicated.

I think what I'd like to see, I'd like to see the acknowledgement of the complexity of these things.

I would like to see

more support for victims who, you know, are often blamed for their, for being complicit in their own deception, which I think is completely unreasonable and frankly unkind.

But I think, again, one of the things that keeps me so engaged with these stories is it's not something where I just, you know, clap my hands at the end of the story and I'm like, well, solved.

You know, we just need to do

problem solved.

We just need to do this and we won't have this problem anymore.

It's it's a really complicated, twisty, thorny thing.

The deception is so intimate, as we discussed, and the prospects for reform are slim.

And, you know, I'm not a fan of throwing anyone in a jail cell and throwing away the key.

So that leaves a lot of open questions.

And I think ultimately,

other than sharing these stories and, you know, I mean, I do believe that more mental health resources in general are imperative.

I wish I was more confident that that.

that was actually going to be successful in these cases.

So

I really don't know.

Again, I think that's part of what drives my fascination with these stories is I actually, I think so many of these of these aspects of it are just question marks.

How do we prevent people from perpetrating in this way?

How do we treat this behavior in a way that's actually going to be successful and will help people move on and develop healthier coping mechanisms?

You know, I do think one of the things that would help is if people didn't minimize it.

You know, you said there are some people who don't even acknowledge it exists.

There's a lot of other people who say, what's the big deal or you were kind of stupid to believe that i think that that really doesn't help you know one of the things that that mark speaks about quite often is that part of the reason we know so little about this and part of the reason that people believe it happens so rarely um is because there are very few resources allocated to understanding it you know it really flies under the radar even though there have been so many sensational cases but i think that there's also something there's really something at the the root of a lot of these stories that, as you said,

it resonates on a macro level.

You know, I think that there's a lot about these stories that tell us a lot more about the way we live and the way we treat each other and

trust in society and that exchange of compassion between women.

And

yeah, I just think that they're stories worth paying attention to.

I have thought about a lot about why women are perpetrators.

I haven't thought specifically about why women are often also the victims of this abuse.

And I will say anecdotally, this is something that we've noticed within the Munch Housing by Proxy Committee, certainly not every time,

but it does seem like there are, it does seem like female victims and female survivors are a bit overrepresented.

And you wonder if that is part of it, or if that's part of like, that's the child the parent sort of more identifies with.

It's kind of a, you know, it's a complicated question or if those people, if women are first, you know, know because of all the sort of shame around abuse survivorship if women if we're just seeing more female survivors come forward and so there's actually which you know was the case i think i think is widely believed to be the case with child sexual assault um is that you know they're recognizing that there are are far more male victims than we initially realized because there were sort of layers there are many barriers for female victims coming forward and there's additional barriers for male victims coming forward.

So it could be a variety of things.

But I do think that that has to do with, you know, as we're talking about sort of like who is believed, whose experiences are validated.

I think with this story in the Caitlin, Caitlin story, it's so, there's so many layers of female, of gendered things going on here, right?

So you have the woman as the perpetrator and the woman as a victim.

And you have this happening within a set of extremely gendered experiences in that it is pregnancy and also that there are these stories of sexual assault, right?

And so Caitlin is co-opting very female heavy narratives.

And it's interesting to me that she chose this very specific target of not doctors, like our perpetrators choose, you know, because doctors are also victimized by perpetrators.

And just as often there's male doctors that get pulled into this.

So I don't, I don't quite see like that same exact dynamic, but what's interesting to me about is like doula, like having, being a person who's been through two pregnancies, in especially in a part of the country where um there there has been a movement towards you know this

sort of looking at pregnancy more holistically and um can you explain like for people that don't know like what is a doula and and i think it's so interesting that this is just sort of like it feels to me so layered because it's like a female story involving women about the most female things and then you sort of get into this layer of like

like doulas are not necessarily a job that people respect or take seriously wrongly, I think, but it's sort of in this space that is very like, I mean, all of the, I could go on for hours about how you come up against sort of every gendered expectation when you're going through a pregnancy, and you're just like, you know, even the fact that it's not as well studied as you would think something that's been around since the dawn of time might be.

You know, and then sort of when you're talking about all these like ways that women deal with pregnancy, that can be very stigmatized, looked down on, dismissed.

And so I wonder how you think like, you know, the element of like her choosing doulas as her victims and sort of what that was about.

Oh, I mean, that's super interesting.

Yeah.

So, I mean, a doula is, they're not medical professionals.

They are

birth workers who provide support throughout pregnancy, labor, and after delivery.

They provide educational resources and

all kinds of support, really.

And they are very focused on the well-being of the pregnant person they're sort of less focused on the baby that's mostly to the medical professional but they're really focused on helping um people who are pregnant just get through all aspects of that experience so uh

i don't know exactly why caitlin landed on pregnancy as her con I don't know like why she sort of fetishized that.

I've never gotten a satisfying answer about that.

I do know that the doulas themselves, I mean, it's a highly giving profession, right?

You orient yourself around someone else's needs for the duration of that relationship.

And they work often very tirelessly, like they, or I should say sleeplessly.

I mean, one of the doulas I spoke to, she had written in her contracts that she gets a, she's entitled to a break after 24 hours.

So she is up helping someone labor for 24 hours before she's entitled to a break.

You know, it's exhausting work.

It's, it's, you have to to be really committed to helping other people to do this work.

And, you know, and I think these doulas also had seen it all.

You know, a lot of the narratives that Caitlin came to them with,

you know, narratives of sexual assault, of stillbirth, of family alienation because Caitlin was queer,

you know, of not wanting to go into the hospital because she had been mistreated there by doctors.

There was nothing that Caitlin told them that they hadn't seen before, you know, that didn't seem like it was entirely plausible.

Now, you know, it was a lot and Caitlin was always going through multiple waves of crises, but it was little by little, you know?

And

so none of these things were at all unreasonable from Doula's perspective when Caitlin told them that this is her experience and this is what she needs.

For many of them, it was actually the reason that they got into this job is to help women who were going through crisis, crisis, women like Caitlin who were alone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think the pregnancy, again, it sort of, to me, actually, that makes perfect sense.

And, you know, as Mark Feldman always says, like, all of this, it's a crime of opportunity.

Right.

And so, like, I will say, like, as an adult woman, having gone through, again, two pregnancies, I mean, it is such a strange time because you are simultaneously more visible than you've ever been.

And you're in this.

I hated it.

I hated being pregnant.

I actually, I had a, I was so lucky, I had a wonderful experience with childbirth itself, but like the actual like pregnancy walking around in a pregnant body dealing with other people was horrible.

And I think it's gotten better.

I think people are more knowledgeable about like, hey, don't go up and touch a print, a pregnant stranger's stomach without asking, but like still happens, still happened to me.

So like, it's this bizarre experience where you are both like totally objectified and like seen as a vessel.

And even the way like everything is sort of organized around pregnancy.

And I think like this is where like, and I didn't work with a doula.

I think I felt, you know, really supported by my doctor and family and just didn't, but I absolutely see, and I've had friends who've had great experiences with doulas, where that's such a like necessary thing because pregnancy is so intense.

It does bring up every, you know,

trauma you've ever had with your body, every weird feeling you've had about your body, every family dynamic you could possibly imagine, you know, all kinds kind of comes up to the fore.

So I can, I can really see how, how doulas would not be, would be sort of this, this unshockable person.

And I don't think people who haven't been through it recognize like how little attention there is often paid to the actual pregnant person in the equation,

you know, during, before, during, and after, right?

We will check on you once, six weeks after, and tell you whether or not it's okay to have sex.

And like, that's.

it, you know, and that's not fortunately the experience I had with my doctors, but that's the protocol, you know, and I think think like,

so it seems so sort of like ripe for exploitation in that way.

And also that people would dismiss it.

Right.

It seems like an easy group to prey on for a lot of reasons.

And I think it's interesting with this like victim blaming piece that happens so much in these cases.

I think especially again, when there isn't that element of child abuse or that isn't that element of like dramatic financial fraud,

where I think we just have like some catching up to do, you know, because this is something that obviously like still happens, but happens less than it used to in terms of like people being blamed for their own sexual assaults.

And I think we continue to victim blame in these situations.

And so it makes sense, I think, in that context that there are more female victims.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think also, you know, the pregnancy piece, I mean, and as you know, of course, this is often, this is a common narrative with people who have actitious disorder, you know, fabricating pregnancies.

And Caitlin tried out a lot of different cons, you know, I mean, in terms of her story, right?

Like the story she was trying to sell to extract these emotional needs from other people.

You know, she tried out cancer,

tried out any number of things.

She really, really, from quite an early age, got fixated on pregnancy and childbirth.

And I think part of that is like, there's this beatification of as much as we're,

we have a very mixed record on respecting women's bodies, but you know, we see pregnant women very often as some sort of, you know, elevated being.

Oh, yes, it's like pregnancy and motherhood are simultaneously the most exalted states and the most disregarded human.

Yes, like that we have.

You know, it's like, it's such a, we could not have a more messed up relationship with motherhood,

I think.

You know, I mean, it's really, yeah, it's really something.

Yeah.

But I think it's also, you know, Caitlin told so many lies.

And I think part of it was just she

really got good at like ratcheting up the narrative, you know, to maximize empathy, to hook people emotionally.

These, and, and she often tailored the story she was telling to different doulas based on who they were.

You know, if they were queer, she was queer.

If they were Christian, she was Christian.

One of the doulas had a sister who had fallen into a coma and then died.

And Caitlin, in going through and dragging this doula through this horrific multi-day,

you know, fantasy, at the culmination of it, she fell into a coma.

It went into multi-stage organ failure.

And this doula thought that Caitlin was dead.

And this doula did not find that caitlyn was alive and that this had been a con until until much much later and she had gotten a tattoo to honor caitlin on her body

it's it's really you know i think about that story all the time because this is really a person who this doula was really just doing her best to keep this woman alive I mean, you know, and that's it, that's it.

That's another part of it.

Like with so many of these doulas and the experiences vary quite a bit.

And some of them met Caitlin in person and many of them just tended to her over the phone.

But they, in many of these circumstances, believed Caitlin was going to die and that they were helping her through a grave her and her, very often her stillborn baby through a grave medical emergency.

I mean, just the most tragic circumstances you can possibly imagine.

And

I mean, it's just hard to imagine like the mind fuck of that for these people who are just doing their best to help.

Yeah.

And I think that the thing that people who have not been through an experience like this don't grasp is that learning that it wasn't real doesn't erase the pain that you felt when you thought it was real.

100%.

It just complicates it.

It just complicates it.

It just adds these additional layers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's right.

And you end up in this hellish attempt to reframe your own experiences and

you know yeah again that's something i can really speak to

and when someone has convinced you that a death or a tragedy has happened and in the moment you really felt it

it's a it's a very difficult experience to shake and and your mind just cannot reconcile.

And then, you know, when someone has exploited and again, that's such a a piece of the behavior of looking for,

you know, commonalities, right?

Of like, oh, that happened to me too.

Or, you know, something that we've seen, you know, I've seen a number of times in these cases where someone will directly co-opt, you know, someone else's story of tragedy once they've told them that.

And when someone violates that,

then the next time someone tells you, oh, that happened to me too, you go did it.

Yeah.

And that's horrible.

So it impacts in a very real way your ability not just to trust and to like know that you are experiencing reality correctly,

but just to like form bonds with other people.

And fortunately, you know, like, fortunately, I had a great therapist and a good support structure and all the things that helped me, you know, move past that, but it really took a long time.

And I think people just don't, I think that is something that people should really,

these people deserve our respect and our empathy.

And people, and they're not, they're not wrong.

They're not idiots for getting, they're compassionate.

And it's like the minute that we start making, you know, I mean, unfortunately, you know, we have a very influential person, Elon Musk, running around saying that empathy is the great weakness of Western civilization.

I'm sorry if we start believing that we are cooked.

That's apocalyptic.

You know, if we start, if we start thinking that the ability to empathize with other human beings is a weakness, then what are we all doing here?

So, you know, unfortunately, there are people who believe that, but I think the vast majority of us understand that empathy is, empathy is a powerful thing that makes life worth living and makes us, you know, that we have the ability to survive because we're able to empathize with each other.

So I think that's not something that should be stigmatized.

Absolutely.

I mean, just to bring it back to the Cindy story that I introduced at the beginning when we started talking about

how I sort of discovered this world.

You know, when people found out that Cindy had been lying,

and the con went on for months and months.

And of course, I didn't say anything because I was like, well, what if I'm wrong?

You know?

So this went on for months and months.

And when it was finally revealed that she was never sick, people were furious, absolutely furious.

And the police investigated.

But I remember speaking to this woman that I went to high school with and was quite friendly with in high school when I was back in my hometown.

We met up.

And I said, like, you know, she had been exceedingly generous.

She had given her own money.

She had, her church had like hosted some sort of like

yard sale, bake sale.

They did a raffle for Cindy.

You know, she really got her own community involved.

And I said to her, do you regret any of that now that you know that it was all a lie?

And she said, no, no, I don't regret it.

And not only do I not regret it, I would do it all over again.

Because

the next time somebody asked me, they might really need my help.

And I think about that pretty often because it seems, you know, I understand when people can't respond like that with that kind of generosity.

But I also think, and I don't think everyone should be expected, people who've been personally victimized to respond with that kind of generosity.

But I also thought that, you know, this was her way of kind of retaining her own sense of humanity in a situation which she had been exploited.

And I think if you're in a position to do that, it's

a luxury to be able to hold on to that kind of basic empathy, which is important.

Yeah,

that's really beautiful.

And I think, you're right.

I mean, I think people are entitled to have their own reactions.

I mean, certainly for me, you know, I

have trouble engaging with stories about when people sort of start to talk about an illness, especially if it's not someone I know really well and I know I can trust them.

You know, but even when, honestly, even when people that I do know well and I know they're not lying,

you know, when things come up with pregnancy complications and,

you know, if it gets sort of detailed,

it's very difficult for me.

And

I think,

you know, not to the point that I can't engage with it at all.

And certainly I don't think it's lessened my empathy for people really going through that.

It's just that, of course, that's going to be triggering.

I think in a lot of ways, though, making the show has sort of been my way of dealing with the emotional baggage that that left me.

I guess that's just decided to lean all the way into it.

But, you know, I think in some ways, like, actually, that has been my way of like, just as that woman was sort of enacting,

saying, like, no, I'm going to sort of stake my claim about who I am and I'm going to continue to be the person that I am because this was never about the person that she was, right?

She wasn't, she wasn't victimized because she had a flaw that made her a good victim, right?

And that's a really important thing to do,

to really sort of, you know, stake out.

And

I think that's inspiring.

And I, so, I mean, yeah, in my own way, I guess I have sort of, I've leaned into the,

you know, I've leaned all the way in, but I noticed in my personal life that sometimes those stories do get difficult for me, but I just, it's something I can certainly manage.

But I think it's really important to help people find whatever way they can to reclaim their sense of agency because I think that that's that's the best understanding of it right that this is a huge violation and you know just as people who've experienced a sexual assault and and that can be very complicated to have you know intimate partnerships after that like I think it has some of those you know it has some of those same complications emotionally of like you know how do you find a way to still be in the world and sort of participate in relationships in all human relationships after you've been violated in that way.

And it's certainly really complicated.

But I think,

yeah, and I know I've seen a lot of those stories as well.

And the one that I've seen, which, you know, really inspires me and is something I sort of hold on to on the daily is, you know, a different element of it, but nonetheless, I think analogous is that I've, you know, I've spoken to a lot of doctors who, you know, and in one case in a very, very public way, Dr.

Sally Smith, who was absolutely crucified for her role in the Maya Kowalski case.

And I strong belief, backed up by a lot of, you know, thorough reporting, that her, that her interventions in that case saved that child's life.

And boy, when I talked to her, you know, I went down to Florida to talk to her.

I was just like, oh, wow, she'd do it.

She'd do it again tomorrow.

Like, she knows she did the right thing.

And her concern for Maya Kowalski and her brother, even given the situation she was in with, you know, them testifying about about her and saying, you know, all this, this, which again, not Mayan Kyle's fault by any stretch of the imagination, but even after everything she'd been put through, she'd been made the villain of a Netflix film.

She dealt with death threats and fire threats and threats to her, you know, coworkers and her family and just had been through hell.

And I was like, she knows she did the right thing and she would do it again.

And there's so many doctors that I've talked to who've been

put in some just horrible position because they did the right thing and they would do it again and they don't regret it.

And that's like, that's the kind of examples we need, I think.

Yeah.

I mean, people willing to do the right thing.

That's, it's feeling increasingly rare, but that's what we need.

Yeah.

I really subscribe to the idea that courage is contagious.

And I think when we see other people being courageous, it, it reminds us that we can be courageous too.

So I, um, but no, I, I, I love that story.

Um, I really, I love that story that the next person might really need it.

Because actually that that is that person, as much as they may sound, uh, you know, you might think like, well, how could you think that if you've been through this ordeal?

Well, actually, that person's pretty grounded in reality because the reality that you have to reorient yourself after being through a situation like this is that most people would never lie about cancer.

Most people would never fake an illness in their child.

And that was a reality that took me a while to reintegrate back into, right?

Because I remember like, for a while after everything with my sister, particularly the, if I saw a child with a visible feeding tube, which like, you know, NG feeding tubes, like there's, they're not, they're not terribly uncommon.

And obviously the vast majority of them are for legitimate reasons.

But it took me a little while to just be like, yes, most children who are struggling with an illness, most, you know, kids that have some visible sign of that, it's just a real thing.

And that person is not, most people would never.

It's not like, you know, you can't sort of start imagining it everywhere.

So yeah, I think that's like, that's important, right?

I think it's like, it's important to take these seriously.

It's It's important to recognize that these happen, these happen way more than what we currently recognize.

And most people wouldn't do it.

We can still walk through the world trusting most people.

And we have to.

And it's always a risk to trust people, I guess.

Yeah, that's right.

And I guess, you know, after you've sort of pushed off your access with something like this, it's, it's hard to scramble back on.

But I think, yeah, you're right.

I think obviously most people we can trust.

And that really is the only way forward.

Yeah.

Well, Sarah, thank you so much for being with us.

I've loved, I could talk to you for another three hours, but I don't want to exhaust us.

We'll have to have you on another time because you have, you have other cases that I think would be fascinating.

You know, you've got, you've got some identity theft, you've got some, you know,

sneaky fertility doctors.

You've got, you know, the Sarah Delashman story.

You've got all kinds of things, culty stuff.

So I feel like you have just a repository of stuff that we could bring you back on.

And I would love to have you back on the show to talk about some of the other ones because I had so many questions I didn't even get to because we got really in,

we really got the philosophical thick of it with all of this.

But thank you so much for coming on.

And what are, what are you working on next?

And where can people find your work?

Well, Caitlin's Baby is available wherever you get your podcasts, joint production of the CBC and BBC.

And

I am working on a few interesting features.

I am working on a new podcast.

This one's a bit of a departure.

It's about the only woman on death row in Tennessee.

And

she murdered a fellow teenager when she was 18 years old.

And so

she's been mostly in solitary confinement for the last 30 years.

She's now in her late 40s.

And so she is nearing the end of her appeals process.

She's really down to clemency, and her lawyers are hoping to commute her death sentence into a life sentence.

So

it's a really fascinating case.

She's a really fascinating person,

a surprisingly resilient person given that she's been mostly alone for 30 years.

You know, she committed an absolutely horrific crime against somebody who died at 19,

which is very sad.

But the question is sort of 30 years later, what does her possible execution have to do with our perception of justice?

You know, how does this serve the memory of the victim?

How does it serve the victim's family members?

And how does it serve all of us as a society?

So it's pretty heavy,

but really, really fascinating.

And so we're hoping that'll launch in mid-September.

Fantastic.

Well,

that is also, I feel like, thematically on point, Press.

So we'd love to have you back on to talk about that case when that show comes out.

and we'll certainly we'll certainly share it with listeners here.

Thank you so much, Sarah.

Nobody Should Believe Me is produced and hosted by me, Andrea Dunlop.

Our editor is Greta Stromquist and our senior producer is Mariah Gossett.

Administrative support from NOLA Carmouche.

This is Bethany Frankl from Just Be with Bethany Frankl.

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