BetrayalProducer Monique LaBorde comes on mic to bring Andrea some of our most common listener questions. We go behind the scenes to talk about the production process and give you a sneak peek into what’s coming up next on Betrayal.
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod
Hey guys, it's Andrea Gunning and this is our first bonus episode after finishing our season of Weekly stories this year. Our team has been working hard behind the scenes to put every weekly episode together, and the we I'm referencing is my amazing production team, our producer Monique Leboard, our associate producer Kaitlin Golden, and our audio engineers Matt del Vecchio and Tanner Robbins. For the special bonus episode, I'm joined by my producer to answer some of your listener questions. Hey mo, Hi, dre.
So fun to come out from behind the scenes. My god, I am glad to be here, and I am excited to dive into some listener questions that we have been receiving all season on Portrayal Weekly.
I love it. I'm so excited to jump in. I actually want to start with a question for you.
Yeah, go for it.
You know, this has been an evolving journey just from the format and how we're approaching our interviews, So I just wanted to ask, what has it been like.
Yeah, you know, I've been a podcast producer for eight years and I've worked on all kinds of shows. I've produced chat shows, pop culture, news, narrative. But this show has been a complete standout in my work experience. I mean from the day that I came on to this team, y'all have built this framework of doing something really unconventional and trying to, i think, develop a trauma informed storytelling model, this collaborative kind of storytelling that we're doing, where we're working with these survivors, we're giving them a lot of autonomy in the storytelling process. So getting to join that in getting to connect with the people that tell their stories, these people who've been through something really traumatic and are wanting to share their experiences, has been incredibly rewarding for me. I think it's an uncommon experience in the audio industry to see a show work so closely with the storytellers and to collaborate with them in the way that we do. I want to ask you about what it has been like for you to work on the Weekly series, because you worked on three seasons, you were really a meshed in those stories. Yeah, and then this is a totally new format for you, So I want to talk a little bit about what your experience has been like in hosting the weekly series.
Yeah, so it's completely different workflow for seasons one through three. So Jen's story, Ashley story, Stacy and Tyler's story. I'm in these individuals' homes, I'm in their towns, I'm with them, Like I just came back from a few weeks ago from Colorado Springs preparing for season four, and I was with her and her kids and her family and her best friends over the course of two weeks. And you just create this bond and this connection and you really understand these individuals' lives. And I don't get that opportunity on the weekly series. We don't have the opportunity of like eight to ten episodes for us to really take our time. We are really boiling down hours and hours of interview into a linear timeline, and we want to get it right. This is one or two episodes where we have to like really do it in a concise and thoughtful way, and it's just been a really interesting experience, like making sure that we honor everything that's important to the individual.
Another thing that has been so special about Betrayal and working on Betrayal is the community that's developing. I mean, from the people who write into us into our Gmail, to the people who share their stories on the podcast. They're like a part of making this with us. And as you know, some of our storytellers choose to receive listener mail and connect with people directly who want to share their story and connect with them, you know, over the phone. So it feels like there is a real community around this show and.
We're actively seeing it, Like we're seeing individuals who have participated that are getting together in real time that live across the country from one another. Yeah, really only know one other person that may've experienced a betrayal like them, Like that is so special and cool, and we've only been able to really experience that because of the weekly series, which is diverse stories in a short amount of time, you know.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, let's get on to some listener questions. I want to start with like a rapid fire around of questions. We've gotten a lot of, Okay, So first off, the question is why do you mostly feature stories from women? Why are there so few men on Betrayal Weekly?
This is one we talk about a lot. It is we want to represent duals who experience betrayal, like all different walks of life, right, because it's not specific to any gender, race, religion. I don't think that men are being deceived or betrayed less. I just think that there's a stigma around that vulnerability and like sharing that may relate more to how men process that trauma and are willing to share that trauma. You know, we find a lot of the stories from our own listeners, like our audience who write in, and our primary demographic is women, and so a lot of that's coming from the people and our communities. So there's a little bit of that going on. I'm interested to hear what hypothesis you have.
You know, what's interesting is that sometimes we get women writing in being like I know a man who was betrayed, but it's not the man writing into us. Men do write into us, and we have featured a few stories from men on the weekly series, and some of those we had to go looking for, like Ramon and Sosa. We had to intentionally find him because we didn't want to create a lineup of exclusively women. Yeah, but at the same time, there is something going on that's bigger than just our podcast and the selection for our podcast, which is I think that maybe there's more shame.
Men have more shame.
About saying I was deceived, that might not be as common or as practiced for men.
This is just like my armchair perspective. But shame is a huge deal when it comes to betrayal, like how did I not know? How did I not see it coming? I should have known better, I should have this, I should have that, and I didn't, and I put myself into harm's way. And there's a lot of shame and the reckoning that comes with that. And so I think you're dead, aunt.
Not.
Everyone comes forward, and we'll always have a safe space for men to share their story here.
Yeah.
Our next question is do we vet people? Or similar question, how do we fact check these stories?
Oh my gosh. We go through such a rigorous legal process because there's a lot of legal vetting in terms of pulling legal support, what's in the public domain, divorce paperwork, personal records. It gets filtered through our attorney a few times. But before we get to that, you have initial conversations at the very beginning. Do you want to talk about that?
Yeah, So when we get a story that comes in through the inbox and we reach out to the person to talk for what we call a pre interview, which is just you know, not recorded hearing a little bit about their story. One of the first things we ask is for documentation, and it's not that we don't believe them. In fact, a trauma informed approach to this work is that we're approaching everyone with belief. However, we do put all these stories through a rigorous legal process in order for them to air. We ask our guests for documentation like divorce records, criminal records, and throughout the process we're checking those things against the story that they're telling us. Another part of the vetting process, which is just as big that we talk about internally, is is this person ready to tell this story at this time?
Yeah, that's huge, And.
Generally we like to work with people who are a few years out from their betrayal experience, so they've had a little bit more time to process it. And so when I'm first reaching out to someone who's written us an email and they want to share their story, you know, in that initial cull, we ask them about their support system, if they've told this story to other people. And I don't mean in a formal sense like writing a book, but I mean like do people in your life, your kids, your friends, do they know this has happened to you? Which is not necessarily, you know, mutually exclusive of telling your story on this show. But I think it's a sign that this person is comfortable in this story and having the story associated with who they are.
Right. Also, when we're working on an episode, we are running initial, like broadstroke background information to the extent that we can, just to make sure that we can kind of corroborate certain things in people's story, just like time and place, just make sure things are matching.
Yeah, we have a pretty conservative in house legal team that wants to bet everything and make sure that anything that's potentially defammatory claim has documentation behind it, and so that is a burden on us to make sure we get that documentation in order to run the episodes. Yep. And something else that this brings up is we hear from a lot of people who want to write books or want to tell their story publicly and they don't have the documentation, or let's say they were so mad they burned it all, something like that, they threw it away. You know, if someone's listening right now, and if you're in a situation where you're feeling taken advantage of or you're feeling like something's going really wrong, definitely. From where I am right now producing these stories and getting them legally vetted, I can say it's super important to keep those receipts and keep those pieces of paper, those emails, those interactions, those financial statements. That kind of stuff can allow you to be able to legally tell your story in the future. It can't be overstated how important it is or.
As Heather Gay once said, receipts, proof, timeline, screenshots, everything.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, maybe this is a good opportunity to talk more about our production process.
Yeah. I mean a lot of times, in working with people who've experienced any kind of trauma, there is a way, a trauma informed way you're supposed to approach what they've experienced. The sort of three principles are I believe you, it's not your fault what happened, and you're not alone in this feeling. So anytime we're interacting with the storytellers, we're basically trying to take those three principles and adapt them into a media framework, so setting like an interview or in the finished product of the podcast. That's all because we want to give the storytellers, who are the lifeblood of this show, autonomy and respect throughout the whole process. A little bit about what this looks like in practice is that in the pre interview, we explain what the process is going to look like. We talk to them about the options of keeping it anonymous or using their name, which is every storyteller's choice. Of course, if you use your name, your burden of documentation to provide is hire. When we're on the pre interview, I encourage everyone to talk with their family and friends as they're deciding if they want to tell this story, and we let them know in that first call that we're going to request documentation as part of the legal review. And then once they consider all of that, if they want to participate and we think that their story is the right for the show, then we move on with an interview. I tell everyone basically, you're in control of what you say starting from here. If I ever ask you anything that you don't want to answer, you don't have to answer it. In fact, what I want most is for them to close their laptop that day feeling like they are proud of how they represented themselves, and not feeling like they disclose anything that they're going to stay awake good night worrying about sometimes we do the interview in two sittings, especially if someone is feeling really emotional. We might break and come back another day. In terms of if someone's ready to tell their story, I don't think of crying as something that is a bad sign. I'm a crier. I cry almost every day I am to.
So it's fine, you are I cried earlier today.
Great. So it doesn't mean that the person isn't ready to tell their story. I really trust them when they tell me I want to do this. And of course most of our stories come from people who wrote in to us, and we are never pushing anyone into telling a story, or are not in the business of convincing people to tell these stories. After I do the interviews, then Dre you come in and we work together with our associate producer Kaitlin Golden to shape the stories. So do you want to you want to take it from here and talk a little bit about what happens once we start shaping the stories.
Yeah, So you do the hours long interviews and then you have a really good understanding from meeting with the storytellers and having the pre interview of like what's important to them to share and the journey that you want to go on. And so you present me and our associate producer Caitlin like a ton of material for us to work with, and we talk about each bite that you've taken out of the interview and how do we introduce it, like how do we write into it, how do we write out of it? And we put it in a linear fashion, and then we just write around it and.
Then once we have the finished product. This is something I really love about Betrayal Weekly that many mini shows do not do. We send the episode to the guest before it's released. Yeah, and we want them to do a fact checking path, but we also want them to do a red flag pass if something came out in the interview that would really make them feel extremely uncomfortable, would make a material impact in their daily life if it were to go out and they don't want it to run. We respect people's feedback on that and we work with them to change it before it goes out. Like I'm thinking of the example of stephaniepsode one right, who was the storyteller in our first two episodes. She had read out loud some of the captions her husband or ex husband wrote online under photos of her and when she heard it back out loud in her own voice, she said, I don't want that out there. Yeah, and so we revised it so that you read it in your narration and she was okay with that. It wasn't that she she didn't want it to be known. It's that hearing her own voice say it was so uncomfortable for her, and that was a small fix that was easy for us to do.
Yeah, you never can really anticipate how certain things occur to the storyteller when they hear it back. We're operating from a place of these are individuals that have gone through a traumatic event and their foundation of trust and reality have been either distorted or destroyed, and they're rebuilding, and so it's really important for us to operate in a safe place of trust and transparency and sharing. That is a huge part of it.
Yeah, and this is something that I don't see in other podcasts. I've never worked on a show that has allowed the storyteller to hear the episode before it goes out. I think there's this idea that if you do that, then the person's not going to like it. They're going to have a bunch of changes. And I have to say in the thirty two episodes we made that maybe only happened once or twice, and then we worked through it right, and so it actually was more rewarding than it was difficult, because at the end of the day, I can know the day that it goes out that the person who's story worry this is is happy with the story.
Right.
It's actually pretty easy to give people a chance to review the content and just at the very least to familiarize themselves with it before it goes out and other people start reaching out to them on strangers on the internet. Hear it because it sounds so different when it's the episodes all produced than what the raw interviews sounded like. Yeah, let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, I have a few more of our most commonly asked listener questions. All Right, we're back, and I have a few more of the most commonly asked questions we get. And then a little later on we are going to get to questions about specific episodes.
Okay, all right, Dray.
Another frequently asked question we have is how do you decide which episodes are two parts and which are only one part?
This is such a good question for the two parters. A lot of them were like, oh wow, this has a lot of twists and turns. There's a lot going on that we don't feel like we could pack in in under fifty minutes, So let's just approach it like two parts and gives us more freedom.
Yeah. A lot of times it's dictated by how much good tape we have, Like with a Hannah, a lot of good tape, and it's hard to pair that down.
But let's talk about Hannah. Sure, Yeah, because sometimes I think it's just as much as like the twists and the turns of the story of like, you know, understanding someone's background, how they met the person that ultimately betrayed them, the betrayal, and then it's ending and it's aftermath. Sometimes there's like these incredible, beautiful scenes, like she talks about being on the train from DC to Philly, and I particularly love the fact that this guy was getting off in Philadelphia and she was like crying and she was hysterical, and this person was like, I'm sure there's somebody that loves you and cares about you, like and she goes, people are just the best, And it is this moment of like, you know, sometimes if we're cutting a lot of stuff, you're missing moments where you get to just sit with the human experience. I just love that. Yeah, and sometimes you just don't want to sacrifice it. And that's why.
And I think that's a big part of what our audience likes about this show is that we're not just focusing on the true crime and then this happened, and that happened in the body buried in the basement and the you know. But I think a big part of the Betrayal listenership, they're here because they're getting something out of these real people's stories. All Right. The last question that we have gotten a lot of, in fact, probably the most common question we get in our inbox in our reviews. Do you know what it's going to be?
Uh? Ads?
Yes?
Why are there so many ads on your podcast?
I don't know what to saying, guys. I mean, this is how we fund the show. And there's like a formula that we have with iHeart in terms of like ad markers of when you know, if your episode's X amount of time long, like forty minutes long, there's ad breaks and they sell the ad space and we're forever grateful because it keeps us in business. So that's why we have ADS funds the show.
Yes, and the show is free. That's the trade off with ads. The show is free. But if you love the show and you don't want to hear ads, you can subscribe to iHeart True Crime Plus. Sorry I have to do a plug.
Good job, mo, you do my job for me.
Thank you. I love podcasts. I listen constantly to podcasts, and like with iHeart True Crime Plus, you also get dozens of other great true crime shows.
It's three ninety nine a month, and so if you want an ad free experience, it's not just betrayal. It's a ton of shows. You know. If that means something to you, to help support creators, support producers, that's the way to go.
Yeah.
If you're already a subscriber, thank you. It really makes a difference.
So much gratitude for that.
Okay. I want to move on to questions about specific episodes.
Okay, and I'm going to do a little.
Recap of each episode because I know it's been a few months since listeners have heard some of these stories. So our first question is about the Torah episode. Torah was episode number eight. She was a history professor. She met a student named Aaron in her class, an adult student. He was a veteran. He told her that he had had his foot blown off in an explosion while he was serving in Afghanistan, and that he wore a prosthetic, but his death began the process of her learning that the amputation was a lie, that he actually had both of his feet. So a listener wrote into us and said, how could anyone live with a person and have a sexual relationship with them for three years and never see their foot.
I have a lot of opinions on this great I mean, I don't judge Dora, but it's fair to just understand like the mechanics of it. But one of the things that Tora shared in her episode is she had very specific boundaries around her intimacy and her physical intimacy. And she also shared that he was really embarrassed by this part of his body. He always wore a sock and he covered it up. And I think just you know, we talked about this a lot. Like perpetrators, they'll find the right person, the people that are understanding and trusting. You know, it works because she honored his boundaries physically. You know, when you trust someone, when you're coming from a place of believing someone, it starts there. And he was embarrassed by it, and he wanted to cover it up. And she's already coming from a place of respecting intimate boundaries and physical boundaries because she has her own I can see it. It didn't seem crazy to me. It didn't.
Yeah, I mean, there are the practical elements, like he not only wore a sock, but he also wore a hard plastic brace underneath the sock, so when he walked it sounded like a prosthetic. And I mean he always used a different shower that he said was easier for him to get into. So there are logistics of how he actually pulled off the deception. But then there's I think a deeper level too that it's more important to understand than the logistics of how he covered this up, is that he said it was an injury from a traumatic experience, an explosion that killed one of his friends in the war, which didn't happen. And there is a larger pattern about how these people who are manipulating others often work. There's this research psychologist doctor Jennifer Fried who we talk a lot about yeah, and her work is foundational to understanding betrayal trauma. She coined the term betrayal trauma. She also coined this acronym DARVO DARVO, which is a manipulation technique and it stands for deny, attack and reverse victim and offender. It's super powerful and effective. We see this tactic all the time in the world, but in a case like Torah, Aaron was claiming that he had this very sympathetic and very traumatic victim narrative of how he lost his foot, And so oftentimes people who are doing darvo are basically flipping the script of who the victim is, and their victim narrative is compelling and is powerful and emotional, right, and it's the kind of thing that no sympathetic, reasonable person would say, I don't believe you that you had a injury in the war, like you don't want to push someone on that. And the victim narratives can be so effective. I mean, we saw it also with Tammy McCrary in that episode where her husband was a fake doctor. He had said that he had two children, and the reason that Timmy could never talk to his parents is that his children and his parents all died in a car accident. Right, That's not the kind of story you are going to force someone you love to go into details about. You know, it's a very effective manipulation tool. Yeah, okay. Our next question about a specific episode is about John Yelle's story. John Yelle, just as a reminder for listeners, she was married to a man named Chad. They had a big family. Chad was a financial advisor. She did all the homeschooling and all the labor in the house, and he did basically the money making. But over time he's behaving strangely. Weird things are happening, and one night when she wakes up in the middle of the night, he's not there and the car is gone, but you know, when she tries to press him on it, he just gets mad at her. Then years pass and nothing big happens. You know, things are a little weird, and he's pulling away from her and sleeping oftentimes in his office in the basement. And then one night she wakes up to the FBI and the state police having raided her house because it turns out Chad has kidnapped two of their family friends, an elderly couple that they actually went to church with and he had put them in a dungeon that he had built. He's not actually a financial advisor. He was planning on having them go into a bank and wire him a check for multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, and thankfully the FBI was called in very quickly, and then they found the couple alive. So a listener wrote to us and said, Chad leaves his home regularly at night, even on vacation. But why to go, where to do? What? Is there no other info on this disturbing habit other than that it happened.
I wish we had these answers. I mean, Danielle's a mom of six that's homeschooling and managing all of those children every day and is just focused on keeping the family afloat and is like just trying to keep her head above water. I don't think she even knows the extent of what he was doing. I genuinely I don't get the sense that she knows the full extent.
No, she doesn't, Like, she doesn't know where he actually was that night, And even if she were to ask him after the fact, you know, call him in jail, which she does not communicate with him. But like, even if she were to ask him, I don't think she believes she would get an honest answer, right. But you know, I think this question of how did someone not know comes up a lot in our inbox and in our reviews, and we often hear about these scenarios where something happens like I wake up in the night and my partner's out here, m h and it's off, but they don't know how off it really is. And it's important to remember that in these episodes, we're hearing the whole story told at once. We're hearing all the red flags strunk together in a row.
It's true, but of course this was happening.
You know, there were years, years exactly yours that were totally fine, and they took family vacations and nothing went wrong.
I mean, before we even started producing season one, my producer for the Narrative limited run seris Carrie Hartman, and I were reading Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell and we went to go see him speak at the University of Pennsylvania and we were both really interested in this whole concept of default truth, which is a concept that you're more likely to believe someone is telling you the truth than assuming that they're lying to you. And then, especially when it comes to strangers, people are generally bad at detecting when someone's lying to you, and I think sometimes we often worry about how did you not know than the reality of this person did a bad thing. There are bad people, people like Donielle's husband that are doing bad things, and I think your assumption is my husband isn't capable of kidnapping to elderly people from our church and putting them in a dungeon, Like we're not necessarily wired to do that line of thinking. Even if your husband is out late, it's like maybe worst case scenario, he's blowing off seam in the car and driving around, and you're not going to my husband's kidnapping somebody, Like, let's really talk about the reality here that's is not just more often than not, you're rationalizing, and you're bringing in your historical information of the person that you think that they are based on a lifetime of experience and just evidence, and then you're making assumptions. And so it was important for us when we did this show, especially when we started Jen's season, to really explore this because these stories are born out of the scenarios where people didn't see it, people didn't see red flags.
Yeah. I think default truth is really important, and I think people want to believe that they are good at detecting liars.
Because it makes makes you feel safe, Yes, makes you feel safe.
That feeling of I would have known is a self soothing feeling of it couldn't happen to me because I can tell, and I can tell when I hear this story. But we're producing this story, and if you're living it, it's a different experience, right. Scary, it's really scary. Yeah, all right, moving on to another question. We got about a specific episode, and it's the episode with doctor Carrie. Carrie macvoy. She is a clinical psychologist. Her husband of twenty five years, Brad, dies of cancer and she's devastated. She's experiencing this grief trying to find a way to move on. She decides she wants to throw herself back into dating. She meets a guy online who we in the episode call Caesar, and he is a Mexican American dual citizen. He brings her into this world essentially of like Mexican real estate development, and she puts a lot of Brad's life insurance money into developing a real estate company with Caesar, they get married, all of these things happen. There are so many deceptions. You have to go listen to both the parts to really get the full picture. But we got quite a lot of comments on this episode that there was one specific thing listeners were seeing that we did not say explicitly, but they wanted to point out. And I think you know what I am referring to.
I know exactly what you're talking about. During Doctor carry McAvoy's episode, there's a part in her story where she's getting really sick. She's really ill, and the listeners heard it, picked up on it and noted something very specif. I don't even know if I can mention it here, just for legal reasons, right, So.
Let me just play the section from the episode that we're referring to.
And then she began noticing other symptoms.
I have really severe diarrhea, real strange diarrhea that I'd never seen before. It's water, it's clear water. It frightens me because I've never seen this before. And I had white lines like you hit your fingernails as a hammer. I was searching for what causes white lines across all the fingernails. They're called niche lines.
And it only got worse.
My toenails were falling off, and my year and was now dark like tea and frothing.
And like we said earlier in the episode, we go through a rigorous legal process and all we could report on was what she was experiencing, what her symptoms were, But we couldn't necessarily name what the audience is basically flirting with because we didn't have any evidence to show. We didn't have medical records, Like to say that that happened is defamatory, and there are certain things like that like we just cannot do. I mean, he was never arrested. And so for doctor Carrie McAvoy's episode, you know, she thought that something was happening to her. Our audience thought that, but we couldn't specifically name it for legal reasons.
Yeah, exactly. That comes up in many of our episodes, almost a half of them. We have a situation where there's something we want to include, but for legal reasons, we can't. Okay, Dre, I have one more question that is about a specific episode, and this one is something that we heard from quite a few listeners, and I think there's a few things we need to say. So this comes from the Chelsea episode. The Chelsea episode that was one of our.
Most intense ones, really intense m M.
She had been dating a guy named James.
And James was having issues with who she was talking to, even at work, and so it was seeming like the walls were kind of closing in, like he was really controlling every aspect of her communication with people, and there was this moment where things really escalated. She took his phone. She saw things in a hidden folder, very similar to Ashley from season two, and she saw what she would assume is illegal material on the phone that she felt like was see Sam child sexual abuse material. She found a photo. I don't really want to go into too much detail, but it was disturbing to her and she couldn't get the picture out of her head and she felt like there was something familiar to this photo and she like woke up in the middle of the night, so like, I know who these children are. James had friends who had children and it could be their daughters.
Yeah, she did a Facebook deep dive. She was never one hundred percent sure, but she was feeling like it probably was, and that's ultimately what led her to go to the police and report it. So let me share one of the questions that we got after the Chelsea episode. This is from a listener who said in episode sixteen about Chelsea, she mentions discovering that she thought she knew who the girl in the picture was. Was the girl found and taken out of the home. So this is just one that's representative of I want to say ten questions we got to the same effect, which is what happened to this little girl?
Is she safe? Is she okay?
I wish we had the answer to that, and I wish that it was yes, she's safe.
There's so much we don't know about the photo. First and foremost, Yeah, this could a photo he found on social media and cropped, you know, because they were wearing bathing suits. So we don't really know. What we do know, and what we discussed with Chelsea is that when she ultimately went to law enforcement, she reported the photo and let them know this is who I think could be the family who has children, and she left it in their hands. And that was something that we didn't include in the show, which.
Looking back on it, we should have You're definitely right that we should have included that information that she did tell the police who she thought the child was. I mean, the day the episode came out, we were starting to get these questions in from listeners, and we frantically went back to the script and we realized immediately, like, oh my god, this one piece of tape didn't make the cut, and that would have clarified so much. And we had been so focused on Chelsea's experience and Chelsea's story that when we ended up recounting that moment when she finally goes to the police, here's the piece of tape that we did include in the episode.
I met with the detective and we had a three hour recorded interview. I showed him everything, told them the same story that I'm telling you now. He was so validating, and he said he told me, he's like, this isn't contraband, but it is absolutely wrong, and you were doing absolutely the right thing by reporting it. But I want to manage your expectations. There are things I can try to do, but this by itself isn't enough. And I was like, I know, that's why it's taken me so long to get here.
But then there was this one critical piece of information and tape that we should have put in the episode. It's in that same scene where she's reporting to the police officer, finally reporting James, and this is the piece of tape we should have include in this episode.
But I told him, I'm like, this is who I think this child is. And he took all that down and he said he would look into it.
Yeah, that would have been that would have helped a lot of people. Yes, when hearing the episode, definitely lesson learned column, Lesson learned column.
And I know a lot of people who wrote in about this episode are just concerned and they want something more to be done. They want to make sure the girl is okay. And so did Chelsea, you know, and some idea of her, like going directly to James or going directly to those friends' house, like that is not a safe option, That is physically not a safe option for her.
And I know that, you know, Chelsea was fearful of retaliation from James. He threatened her with legal action.
He also threatened that he would release nude photos of her that she had consentually sent him and that he said he had deleted, but he had kept he threatened to send those to her colleagues. So she was feeling pretty scared of this person.
Right, and so I think she felt safest letting law enforcement do what they needed to do, and she did the right thing by reporting it.
She did everything she could have while also keeping herself safe. Yeah, all right, those are all of the questions I have.
Great. It's always so good to see and hear feedback from the listeners, no matter what it looks like, good, bad, the ugly, like, we really do want to know, you know, especially if they are like gaps in history where people were asking we either have an answer or you just taught us something that we didn't think about. So we really appreciate it.
Yeah, we love engaging with listeners. We love it when people send in questions and they send in commentary. One of my favorite emails we got this year with someone who wrote in with feedback. And then I'm just going to read from I think one of the most salient points quote one pain point from you and listening is when you focus on survivors who quote bound Love Again. Donielle's story is case in point. Then she goes on to say it frustrates me when others tell me I'll find love again or I should date again. I want to heal and build my self esteem, and I want to hear more stories about people who come back from this and build a business, or go find an incredible and satisfying hobby, start traveling, or anything other than jump into another relationship and hope for the best with a new person. I hope you'll keep this in mind when making future episodes.
I've thought about that feedback from that listener every episode since me too, And we can't necessarily editorialize people's life path or where they are when we meet them. Yeah, but what I really thought was fascinating is being careful about the language.
Yes, and I think she was writing into us to bring our attention to language, like, you know, so and so found love again, and it's like, well, what do you call that first relationship?
Love?
Using the right language is really important. So I'm very grateful for that person to write in.
Yeah. All this to say in bringing up this email we got is that you know, we're real people making this show, and we are grappling with these big questions every day, and we love hearing from listeners who have you know, thoughtful and constructive commentary about the way we present these stories. I think it makes the show better. So we're finished with these weekly episodes for the next few months. We are going to be back in August with new weekly episodes. What is coming up next on the Feed? Do you want to talk about it?
Drey, I can't believe we've wrapped the weekly series. I think it's been really successful and I absolutely love this show. We air season five of Betrayal the limited run on May twenty second. It's about a woman and her family of Colorado Springs. You know, we're gonna hear that story over eight to ten weeks, and then shortly after that we'll go back into the weekly series, where it's a different story every week or every other week, but in between, So from now through May twenty second, we have a ton of really exciting bonus material that we've been working on. You've been working really hard on mo. We have a great bonus episode with a woman named doctor Kate Truett, and she explains the neuroscience of storytelling and how storytelling can be healing after experiencing trauma. We have listener essays that people have submitted based on our prompt, which is resilience in the face of devastating betrayal, and we have a woman named Andrea dunlop her story. It's kind of like a regular weekly episode, but a little bit shorter to kind of satiate our listeners. So I'm really excited to see what people think of the content that I'll be coming out in the next few weeks.
Well, Dre, I'm gonna scurry back behind the curtain.
I'm so glad everyone got to meet you though. You're the nuts and bolts of this and so it's really great for the listeners to hear the people that make the show work, and you do great work. Mo, so thank you.
Thanks stray. I feel honored to get to work with a team that is this thoughtful and mission driven and talented, and also to get to work with individuals who are trusting us with some of the worst experiences of their life and trusting us to tell those with respect and care. It's really an honor.
Oh all right, bye bye.
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at Betrayal Pod at gmailed that's Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com We're grateful for your support. One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners. 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 Fason, hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin Mercury and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krincheck. Audio editing and mixing by Matt Delvechio, Additional editing.
Support from Tanner Robbins.
Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Bains. Music library provided by Mob Music and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
