The “Perfect Victim” Problem
Something Was Wrong Podcast, Part 2
Content warning: this article contains mentions of domestic violence, emotional abuse, and domestic violence leading to the death of a child. If that’s not material you’re ready to read right now, no pressure!
This blog post is a continuing discussion of the podcast Something Was Wrong. In Part 1, I discussed whether or not the podcast is a crime show, and why this matters.
In Part 2 of my investigation into Something Was Wrong, I want to look at the way in which abuse is defined (or not defined) and framed by the show. What I want to show is that the definition of abuse is couched in the persons of the victims themselves, who are framed as in a class apart from abusers and unable to act – only to be acted upon. This is a problem because the show (I think unwittingly) plays into a construction of “perfect victimhood,” which ultimately leads to backlash when a subject of the show does not live up to the model.
Abuse and Victims - What Are They?
There is no single operating definition of abuse that controls the show. While introductory readings may provide definitions of things like “narcissistic abuse” or “coercive control,” the thing that ultimately holds the show together is the fact that abuse is present in the story because the person who tells the story experienced the events as abuse.
Now, here is what I want to be clear about: my concern here is not with some kind of “stolen valor” idea around “real abuse.” If people on the show are traumatized by things like “getting catfished” or “thinking a person was going to marry them when he was dissembling about how seriously he took the relationship,” that is understandable. Those people deserve help, care, and support, just as much as a person who is beaten by their husband does – even if the form of care will look very different. People can do terrible things to each other in a relationship that cause tremendous damage, even if no bruises are left.
The problem is that if the show has no standard of what abuse is except the experience of the person who lived through it, this means that the stories depend on the identity and character of the victim in order to be abuse stories.
What I am not arguing here is that definitions of “abuse” and “victim” need to be kept strict and high in order to establish who is a “real victim” and be fair to the “real victims.” The reason why the definitions matter in this case is because they are relevant to the apparent purposes of the show – which is to inform people about abuse. But if the definition of abuse is couched in the person of the storyteller, this means that the abused person has to be narrated and presented in a way that the audience will accept as an Abused Person independent of any definitions of “abuse.”
So in practice, this means that the show needs to construct not stories of recognizable abuse, but archetypical Abused Persons, who are morally blameless and good in opposition to morally despicable Abuser Persons.
Here’s a pretty standard way the show works, if you listen to any single episode:
One or more victims of abuse are the subject of the show, sometimes with supporting voices from the victim’s or victims’ friends and family.
The victim tells the story of their abuse.
Supporting voices usually provide some kind of character witness to the victim.
The abuser’s actions are explained as part of a larger web of violence that impacts many people, usually because the abuser is framed as part of a class of humans who are psychologically dangerous (narcissist, psychopath, sociopath).
The abuser’s traits are identified as possible red flags and identifiers so that listeners at home can recognize other members of the abusing class.
The victim provides some wrap-up conclusion that is general for the audience – “trust your gut” is a popular choice.
The obvious, and I think most important thing, to point out in the above construction is that the show does lean quite heavily into the construction of “perfect victims.” Narrators have to be presented as morally good, of limited agency, and experiencing things that can be defined in terms of socially defined patterns of trauma and abuse – like “gaslighting” or “manipulated.” This structure seems designed to draw and reinforce social boundaries more than it illuminates the realities of abuse – what it is, and the fact that it is not a fate that only befalls good people.
So I want to return again to this question of “what is the show for?” If the goal of the show is to educate and inform people about abuse, is this actually happening?
An Example: Danielle, Kenji, Darcy
Season 9 goes through the story of “Ardie,” a man who pretended to be a British doctor with fabulous wealth and an elaborate estate. Ardie was, in fact, not British, not a doctor, and not wealthy. He was also allegedly a domestic abuser. Danielle lends Ardie money, has a child with him, and helps him with his frequent legal problems. Danielle eventually meets Kenji, who knows about Danielle because he is married to one of Ardie’s other girlfriends, Darcy.
Darcy is one of the primary villains of the series, covering for Ardie’s aggressive behavior, bringing her small kids around him, and needing repeated assistance from Ardie’s violence. I don’t doubt that trying to help someone who is in such a tumultuous relationship would be awful, but one does have to ask – why is Darcy presented as such an antagonist in the series?
The obvious answer is that the two narrators are 1) Darcy’s now-ex-husband, who she was in a custody battle with when the story was recorded and 2) Ardie’s other girlfriend (two of four, I believe). And yet, it seems quite heartless to tell the story without apparently consulting Darcy at all, especially given that Darcy was in the process of trying to leave a violent abuser during the time in which the show was released and produced. The narrators recount repeatedly that Darcy is beaten and abused, that her pets are abused, that her loved ones are threatened with murder, and that her boyfriend apparently called her job and got her fired. The allegations of what Darcy suffered at the hands of Ardie are extreme, and it’s not particularly surprising that someone living under such a cloud of control and violence (Ardie allegedly broke all her devices to prevent her from calling for help) would not be a more effective advocate for herself. So why is she framed in such an ugly way?
It seems like, again, the problem is that the show has to draw clear lines between Abusers and Abused, and ne’er the twain shall meet, or overlap. Darcy is an Abuser because she brings her children around a violent conman. She cannot be Abused because that would make her morally complicated, even as the narrator tells us that Ardie was arrested for attacking Darcy.
So again, I have to ask: What is this show for?
If the goal is to build empathy with survivors:
There can be good in survivors simply finding their voice and telling their own stories, without any expectation of benefit for the audience. However, this still needs to be done carefully and with consideration. I talked with professional victim advocate Katie Fetzer, founder of Empower the Fight, at length while working on this article, and Katie wished to emphasize that there can still be consequences for telling a story even if the survivor wants to go public with their story. It’s just not always the case that people who tell their stories feel validated and are healed as a result of telling them – particularly if they lose control of the narrative by telling it on a public platform, not simply to close friends or family, or to a lawyer or in a deposition.
If a person tells their story in a context where they do not have control of it, or cannot achieve the ends they want to achieve by telling it (e.g., “I want to make sure this never happens again”) then the act of telling the story can be retraumatizing. This needs to be done carefully, and with support. Given the rate at which Something Was Wrong episodes are produced, and given how close they’re released to the events in question (Season 20 occurred while police reports were still being collected), it’s hard to imagine that they can provide much protection for the storytellers.
But what about the desired impact on the audience? Does the structure of this show build empathy? The framework here is one in which a person can be either a victim (protagonist) or an abuser (antagonist), and empathy must be reserved for the protagonist of the abuse story, It’s actually closer to say that what this narrative inspires us to do is to have feelings of in-group solidarity: listeners who identify with the Abused Class feel a renewed sense of empathy for other members of the Abused Class, and a renewed sense of caution for members of the Abuser Class.
But such a system not only requires Perfect Victims, but also Perfect Villains. This gives listeners precious few tools with which to engage the uncomfortable realities of abuse in real life. I can personally attest that I have known no small number of people who were abused, and who did need help – and were also unkind, difficult, dishonest, immature, and occasionally, abusive themselves. These people would not have family members attesting to their quality of character on any podcast. And, this in no way delegitimizes the need they had for advocacy and assistance to escape abusive situations. Abuse falls on the just and the unjust alike, and it does not do us any favors to create a sanctified understanding of abuse survivors and to set a standard to which many abused people will not relate to. By insisting on a formula where the Abused are perfectly distinguished from Abusers, then there is actually no empathy building happening here at all. Empathy is reserved for a class of people who are particularly deserving of it, and it is withheld from everyone else.
If the show is to help people at home do something to prevent abuse:
If the show is a cautionary tale, then it seems that the show is caught dramatically between two forces: the need to deny that victims are responsible for harm done to them (and that’s true, they aren’t) and the need to explain what people at home can do differently in light of these stories.
The horrible truth is that a lot of these stories actually just aren’t preventable, so telling the story seems to be more for its own sake than for any educational purpose. Season 2 covers the story of a community of women who gathered to support someone they were tricked into believing had cancer, for instance. There’s not much any of them could have done differently, except “be less of a good friend.”
But if we are supposed to be learning lessons from this, it seems that the show seems to struggle to name exactly what the lessons are. There is an allergy in almost all cases to addressing what a person in these situations could have done differently, even when these seem like they could very fairly be part of the discussion. Reese argues in 20.8 that there is no point to such a discourse – the victim already feels shame and does not need to be reminded of what they could have done differently. But there is a massive difference between saying that a person did not deserve what happened to them, and should not have felt shame, and also refraining to name any specific thing a person could do to protect themselves.
This is particularly clear in the long story of “Brody” the catfisher in 2024, which I discussed in Part 1. This documents a long saga in which many women were catfished, frequently for years at a time, by an “online boyfriend” they never met and never spoke to. “Brody” was not a pleasant texter, either. Brody was a verbally abusive, cruel, controlling, hostilely jealous, brow-beating monster who was able to keep tabs on his “girlfriends” through his real-life counterpart, the alleged catfisher Jessica Polly.
Largely absent from these stories is any acknowledgement of anything these women did or anything anyone else could do to avoid being in a similar situation. To talk about these things is not to blame the women. It’s to investigate (in a way that can be trauma informed, and can be sympathetic) the ways in which these women convinced themselves, or became convinced, that they owed bottomless service to a cruel man they had never met.
When you listen to the story you can actually hear the many ways in which the women worked against their own interests, in ways that surely could be examined in ways that are illustrative to listeners. Some of the women lied to their friends and said that they had met Brody in person, in order to avoid feeling embarrassed that they had never met their boyfriends. Some of them drove for hours or got on planes to go see Brody, who of course never showed up – situations that, even if Brody was real, could have been dangerous for the women involved. Virtually all of them dropped what they were doing, canceled plans, and skipped vacations to attend to Brody’s many crises – pouring hours of emotional support into a man they had never met. Again, even if Brody was real, this is not a wise thing to do, and it’s okay to talk about boundaries in this context and why they matter.
It is perfectly appropriate to prompt women, in an interview setting, to explore why they did these things. It is not shaming or blaming to prompt an interview subject to investigate why she felt so responsible for someone she hadn’t met, or why she was so determined to hang on to a relationship with someone that wasn’t going anywhere. We get some canned answers that are weirdly frequent across multiple series (there’s an article to be written on the role of nurses in this podcast – narrators regularly point to their nursing background to explain why they are victims of catfishers, con men, alcoholics, and so on. This may be a stereotype I don’t know) but these actually seem like questions an interview subject should be invited to consider.
And of course, it is perfectly appropriate to tell women that they should not be a primary emotional caretaker for a boyfriend in a relationship that does not progress, and when the support is not returned. Remember, of course, that because Brody is (allegedly) really a woman, he can’t even Facetime or talk on the phone, let alone visit. It would be more than appropriate to say that if an online boyfriend stands you up even once, or asks for elaborate forms of help that aren’t returned, that the relationship is not healthy and needs to be terminated.
Victim blaming, or holding a victim accountable for the actions of the person who victimized them (“what were you wearing? Why did you drink so much?”) is a problem for two reasons. First, it plays into a false narrative where victimizers are not responsible for their own actions, but inevitably act in destructive ways because of the behavior of people around them. This is false. Second, it contributes to false narratives of the origins of violence – that violence is an inevitable state of being in the world, and that violence stops when people stop making themselves vulnerable to it. This ignores the ways in which violence is the responsibility of those who carry it out and is enabled by social systems and hierarchies. It also ignores the ways in which people would like to be able to leave a violent situation but cannot because of financial, cultural, social, or practical limitations (for example, if a woman is unable to find a shelter that will take her dog, but her boyfriend says if she leaves he will kill the dog, she has an understandable motive to stay).
However, avoidance of victim blaming does not need to give way completely to the denial that people can do anything to protect themselves. It also does not need to give way to the narrative that abuse is inevitable. In fact, if it does, then the entire project of abuse prevention, studying its patterns, and telling abuse stories is itself inherently meaningless.
To give advice for how to be safe online is not at all the same thing as blaming a person who was the victim of an online scam. Likewise, it is perfectly appropriate – in safe contexts – for people who have survived traumatic situations to ask themselves questions like “why did I ignore this red flag?” or “Why did I pretend I believed my husband’s lies when I really didn’t?” This is how people learn and grow from past experiences, and if a person can’t answer these questions without damaging their mental health, they don’t need to be on a podcast.
There actually are useful psychological insights we could gather from talking to someone who was the victim of a longtime catfisher, or someone who put themselves out to extreme difficulty to help someone they had never seen. These insights could absolutely help people at home who might be vulnerable to the same forms of thinking. But Reese seems to avoid anything but the most generic advice, like “trust your gut” or “pay attention to your instincts.”
But this becomes a huge problem when we arrive at Season 17, the story of Leslie.
The Center Does Not Hold: Leslie
Season 17 goes through the story of Leslie, whose story I am going to try to tell as quickly and non-exploitatively as I can. My concern here is that Leslie’s story (and more importantly, her son Jace’s story) has already been broadcast at length for media consumption, and this in itself does not give me permission to re-exploit this story. However, my hope is that by re-examining it here, I can give more credence to Leslie’s complex humanity than the show itself does.
Leslie was the adoptive mother of a medically fragile infant named Jace. Leslie met Jace while caring for him as a nurse in the NICU. Some years later when Jace was about two and a half, Leslie met a man named Cody, who Leslie’s family quickly discovered had a criminal history of domestic violence and harassment – as well as more quotidian dishonesties. Leslie believed Cody’s version of his harassment charges. She moved in with Cody, and after her father was diagnosed with cancer and her mother’s attention turned to caring for him, Leslie allowed Cody to babysit her son. Jace started to have unexplained bruises after Cody babysat him, alarming Leslie’s sister and mother. Jace had significant speech delays, but he did tell his mother that Cody hit him and shook him. Four months after Leslie met Cody, Cody hit Jace and caused a catastrophic brain bleed that ultimately killed Jace. Leslie was at work. Cody is now serving a life sentence.
There is a lot we could say here: about adoption, about the foster system, about Leslie’s choices, etc. And they have been said, on the many social media groups that have discussed this story. Above all, this story is about a horrible crime committed against Jace, and in trying to understand Leslie, we must not lose sight of this.
But here’s something I want to flag. At no point in the show does Leslie suggest she was a victim of violence or coercive control – for instance, Cody was dependent on her financially, not the other way around. On its face, Leslie’s behavior looks incredibly irresponsible – and on the whole, it seems it has been absorbed that way by the listening public. Her parents and sister provided her with evidence that her boyfriend of a few weeks had a history of violence (particularly with children), but she proceeded to leave her son alone with her boyfriend anyway, finally moving him in after a brisk few months of dating. This man eventually killed her child.
I get the impression listening to Leslie talk (she reads from a written statement for the entirety of Season 17) that Leslie was a naive, sheltered person – well beyond what we might expect for the average woman from a conservative family. There are a lot of hints that even though she was twenty-eight and working as a NICU nurse, Leslie’s family didn’t quite trust her to live on her own. Until Cody came along, she lived with her older sister, who (in her own testimony) co-parented Jace. According to Leslie, she was a virgin well into her late twenties. Also according to Leslie, her parents encouraged her to adopt to give her some purpose and structure to her life – which is not usually the language one hears around adoption. It’s hard to not think that Leslie was seen as immature, childish, and needing extensive support and supervision by her family. And, it’s also hard to not think, based on Leslie’s series of tragic and catastrophic choices, that she did struggle apart from the advice of more worldly adults.
Overwhelmingly, the public reaction I have seen to this story is negative: why on earth does Leslie think she’s the victim here when she did something so reckless that caused the death of her son? But I think there may be a missing piece of the puzzle here.
I am not a doctor and I don’t know Leslie, but I wonder if Leslie may have some kind of neurodivergence or disability that would make all this make more sense. The pieces on the board (living with family, difficulty starting relationships, a heavy lean towards stereotyped language, her family pushing her to adopt to “get some structure in her life,” and her extreme and sudden trust for a man she had just met) all look a little to me like the symptoms of a woman with autism – either undiagnosed, or that she didn’t disclose on the podcast.
I don’t think this is implausible, and it would frankly explain a lot. Autism is generally underdiagnosed in women, given the extent to which girls and women often mask symptoms. Leslie was able to get through nursing school, so she’s clearly sharp, technically skilled, and able to mask well enough to get through school and hold a job without anyone noticing – which is not uncommon for adult women with autism. But her dependence on her family, flat affect, her mention in 17.1 that she doesn’t like looking people in the eye, and her tendency to not notice Cody’s odd behavior (for instance, Leslie says she was unbothered by Cody making sexually explicit jokes around her family in 17.2, even though her sister was alarmed) – all this seems that it could suggest that Leslie is neurodivergent.
If you’d like to read more about women and girls with autism, my neurodivergent BFF and friend of the blog Heather recommends this book and this resource hub. It was actually Heather who suggested to me that the odd presentation of Season 17 might be explicable if Leslie is neurodivergent. We obviously don’t know this and neither of us is a clinician, but it seems like a possibility.
Now, here’s the thing. I don’t expect Leslie to provide that information. But I do expect someone who wants to tell her story for profit to handle this story with the care it deserves. The problem is that the only tools Leslie has to describe her experience, though, are the ones she brings with her. She reads from a sheet with apparently no intervention from an interviewer.
For instance, Leslie recalls attending a court hearing with Cody who was facing charges for harassing an ex. Leslie says that Cody’s story that his brother was sending violent texts to Cody’s exes, and that he was innocent. Leslie calls this “gaslighting at its finest,” but it’s not. Cody has no brothers. Leslie had never met his parents. Cody’s lawyer didn’t argue that Cody’s brother sent the texts. Cody himself never said anything about it in the hearing. If Cody went through any trouble at all to provide evidence for his lie, we don’t hear about it. If someone tells you an easily falsifiable lie and you believe it quickly, you have not been “gaslit.” Cody blamed his crime on an invisible person, and Leslie believed him – after meeting him a few weeks ago. And, as she tells us, because of her father’s terminal cancer at the time, she “couldn’t spend any more energy” on finding out if her boyfriend was violent.
The thing is, this is actually where a trauma-informed interviewer could help. Leslie wasn’t gaslit, but something happened. For one reason or another, Leslie was extremely easy to trick. She seemed to believe Cody at every turn, and didn’t believe her son that Cody had hurt him, because “she saw how much Cody loved him.” But I don’t hear evidence in the show that any of this was the product of coercive control, or extensive gaslighting.
The problem is that by simply allowing Leslie to take the microphone and talk, Leslie comes across very, very badly. She is using the language she knows about abuse, gaslighting, and coercion, but she doesn’t seem to know what those words really mean or provide evidence for them in her testimony. Because of this, Leslie’s appeal to these categories comes across as evasive and disingenuous – it wasn’t that she was gullible, it’s that she was gaslit, even though we hear no actual gaslighting in the story.
But when you read between the lines, you can actually hear a much more sympathetic version of the story, one that a better interviewer would have brought out. For instance, Leslie talks about things like being embarrassed around her family that she’d lost her virginity and was sexually active (at age twenty-eight, this is not weird), that she felt like her sister was overbearing, and that she was excited for Jace to have a “new daddy.” She talks about having crushes on guys and immediately having her whole life planned out. She talks about fostering (and eventually adopting) a medically fragile baby and raising him with a sibling, and her family was excited for her to have some purpose in her life. There are some very easy questions one could ask here that could provide some depth and humanity to Leslie’s story, like:
Did Leslie grow up in a purity culture where losing your virginity was a big deal? It sounds like she did. Was it hard for Leslie to break up with someone she’d had sex with? Did she feel like she had to make the relationship work?
Leslie says that when she started dating online, she would give money to men she just met, or sex, or both very quickly after meeting. Is Leslie excessively suggestible? Eager to please? Overly trusting? It sounds like all of the above. Are there cultural reasons for this? Psychological? It doesn’t sound like her sister struggles the same way. Why is that?
Did Leslie feel out-of-place in a conservative Christian community for being a single mom, or that this might make her less dateable? Did she absorb a lot of media about the dangers of fatherlessness? This might explain why she was so eager to have Cody as Jace’s “new daddy” only a few weeks after they met.
Did Leslie have a fantastical idea of “meeting the one” that didn’t comport with her lived reality once it was clear that Cody wasn’t as amazing as she first thought he was? Did Leslie commit to a “happily ever after” narrative and struggle to face the reality of her situation, which was no fairy tale? (Her story of meeting her current husband is remarkably similar to her story of meeting the murderer of her son. There’s absolutely no indication in the show that Leslie’s current husband is anything other than lovely, but Leslie’s preference for stereotyped language suggests she may be dependent on a limited range of tropes to explain her experiences.)
Did Leslie’s upbringing in a conservative Christian community make her somewhat gullible? She makes much of her sister surviving a shooting in Episode 17.1, repeatedly insisting that “things like this don’t happen” where she grew up. They clearly did, though, because her sister was, in fact, shot. Did Leslie feel like she was part of an inherently safe community where actual violence was unlikely? Did she think that people on “her team,” like Cody, from within her community were inherently low-risk to be around? How did her sister’s victimization shape this understanding? Did she process it by assuming lightning couldn’t strike twice? To this day, it seems Leslie remains extremely trusting – her relationship with her now-husband seems like it was also quite fast. Six months after her boyfriend murdered her son, she had already introduced a new boyfriend to her family. (I’m not saying this to suggest Leslie didn’t care about Jace, just to note there’s a pattern emerging. Leslie had mutual friends with her now-husband, so it’s not ridiculous that she believed he was a good person, but it does seem that trust is a characteristic of Leslie’s in contexts where people generally would be more suspicious.)
Did Leslie feel like she was unable to “grow up” because she lived and co-parented with her sister, and felt like she would be a real adult once she got married? Was this what made her so eager to overcommit to Cody?
For instance, here’s Leslie’s sister on why Leslie’s family encouraged her to adopt:
“He was really filling a void in her life and I think she was ready for something more…I remember she mentioned it to me and I was like, Leslie, I think that would be a really good thing for you. You've gotten to know him, been through so many critical things with him, and I think this will give you a purpose. She was living with her sister, she was making money, she was a nurse, she was single. And instead of sleeping all afternoon, which she didn't wanna do anymore on her days off, it would give her a purpose.”
The thing is, Leslie probably was a good choice of foster mom for a medically fragile infant from the perspective of any social worker. She had extensive nursing experience, she knew the baby already, and she had people around her to help. Also, at the time she fostered and adopted Jace, Leslie was not in the habit of making dubious romantic choices. She didn’t date at all. That came later, when Leslie had legally adopted Jace and as his mother had significantly less oversight from social services. I don’t blame Leslie for taking Jace in – she saw a need and filled it. But it’s clear when you hear from Leslie’s family that at the time she adopted, they didn’t really see her as an adult. Did this weigh on Leslie? It must have.
These questions go unexplored because Leslie doesn’t seem to have the words for them. But the words she does have don’t serve her, and don’t describe the reality of what happened. Leslie has to explain her actions somehow, but the language of the podcast – gaslighting, narcissism, isolation, abuse – is all she has. The problem is, they just don’t work.
Leslie tries to explain her story through the lens of coercive control, when the hallmarks of coercive control are not present. Leslie was financially independent of Cody and in contact with her family. The contact was strained because her father was ill and because her family was horrified by her actions, but she was able to reach them and hear their thoughts about her relationship (they didn’t like it).
Leslie tries to explain her story through the lens of gaslighting, and insists that if her family just listens to Cody in his own words, they will understand he is a victim of his past girlfriends. They don’t. Cody is not a master manipulator; Leslie is incredibly vulnerable to deception.
While acknowledging that Cody ultimately is the murderer, Leslie understands herself as Cody’s victim when the reality is much more complex. Jace is Cody’s victim. Jace was murdered at age three by his mother’s boyfriend. Leslie is a secondary victim of the murder of her son, but Leslie also extensively enabled her son’s abuse, ignoring his bruises, disbelieving his words, discounting the evidence his family provided that he had been abusive to children in the past, and leaving her son alone with Cody. I think Leslie was tricked, and I think she was probably vulnerable to being tricked for reasons that weren’t her fault, but this is still what happened.
I think we can acknowledge all this without blaming Leslie for Cody’s actions. Leslie did not kill her son. But the utility of a podcast like this could have been to humanize Leslie and provide context for newsworthy events where it is easy to villainize Leslie alongside Cody. The bare facts of the case (woman moves in with violent boyfriend of four months, he kills child) are easy to turn against Leslie. A high quality show could have delved more into where Leslie was at the time and tried to understand the reality from her perspective, rather than allow Leslie to depend on her tendencies to bypass, suppress, and appeal to tropes to explain her experience. Leslie articulates her culpability, which is difficult and important. But she doesn’t seem to have really wrestled with it apart from bypassing language or appeals to sociopathy. Cody killed Jace because he was just that good of a manipulator, in her telling. The reality is that Cody was demonstrably dangerous, that their relationship was moving much too fast, that everyone around Leslie knew it, but Leslie couldn’t bring herself to accept it.
The version of the story that actually happened, and accounts for this reality, is not the version that got told. As such, Leslie’s self-presentation was actually so unsympathetic that Something Was Wrong shut down their Facebook page over the backlash and hasn’t reopened it since.
Leslie was not served by this, and I think the anxiety of asking her any questions for fear of victim-blaming ultimately backfired because Leslie seems to have so little insight into her own behavior. This material was not responsibly handled, and probably did more damage to Leslie in the long run than not having the podcast at all.
So again, to discuss “what is this podcast for.” If the goal is to build empathy, this season did not do it. Leslie does not seem to be able to tell her story without help in a way that gives us insight into her behavior, which would cause us to empathize with her. She favors stereotyped, sentimental language that falls flat and makes her sound foolish, irresponsible, and self-centered. I don’t think it had to be this way. I think a better interviewer could have helped Leslie think more about her actions and why she thought the way she did, in a way that Leslie writing her own story and reading it out loud did not.
Even some post-production could have helped her. Leslie describes her giddy whirlwind romance with her now-husband in the same episode as the murder of her son. She also recounts Cody (allegedly) stealing her TV in bizarre proximity to the murder. It’s hard to not hear these strange juxtapositions in a way that’s unflattering to Leslie, and these are things an editor should have caught. In context, it sounds like Leslie breezes by unplugging her son from life support and donating his organs to talk about her stolen television and her new boyfriend. But there could be a sympathetic reason for this. Leslie might be used to using spiritual bypassing to suppress painful things that happened to her – yes, my son died, but then I met a nice Christian man! Or, in her mind, Cody stealing her TV after killing her son might seem like mounting evidence of how unconcerned he was about her son, and she doesn’t explain herself well. An editor could have fixed this, or an interviewer could have prompted her to spell out the connections between these events more clearly.
If Leslie was not emotionally able to dive into these questions and sit for an interview, then she should not have been on the podcast at all, for her own sake. Leslie’s shallow exploration into her actions that enabled the murder of her son is much worse than no show at all.
But if the goal is to teach lessons to those at home: To name the lessons of Leslie’s story is impossible because they directly challenge the narrative that Leslie is a Pure Victim. Leslie struggles to name exactly what she did wrong, for reasons that I think are quite obvious from Leslie’s perspective. Leslie made bad choices and if she didn’t make them, her son would probably still be alive. This is difficult for Leslie to say on a podcast, because of course it is, so instead she opts for this:
What I hope listeners gain from this is listen to your gut. Even if you've only been dating someone for a short amount of time or a long time and things aren't adding up or you're always left wondering, listen to your gut and don't be afraid to talk to someone you trust because I think sometimes you could be feeling a certain way and you can overthink or over question yourself, but bring those loved ones in, let them near. A lot of the times in an unhealthy relationship, you're getting isolated and that can really brainwash you. Don't be afraid to find a loved one. Just speak to them and educate ourselves. I really would love to see something from this come to where we can educate young women before maybe they get into these relationships, you know, as they're starting to want to date, as they're starting to want to be involved with somebody.
Leslie’s advice for how you should respond to her story is, astonishingly, almost exactly what she did in real life. Leslie did listen to her gut. Leslie did not overthink her relationship with Cody. She just didn’t believe this wonderful man could be abusive. What Leslie did not do was listen to the extensive evidence that her boyfriend was abusive. She did talk to friends and loved ones about Cody. She just didn’t think they were telling the truth.
We are not supposed to name what it is that Leslie did wrong, because to name it would be to challenge the structure of the show, which requires Leslie to be a perfect victim. As such, Leslie’s problem, and the bad decision she made, must be in some way re-narrating Leslie as morally perfect. Leslie did not listen to her gut; Leslie’s gut, like Leslie, is morally pure, and she should have lived up to her identity as a morally pure person instead of giving into the influence of a morally bad person. But this is not what actually happened. Leslie made a series of bad choices against standard therapeutic advice and against the advice of people she knew. She trusted her own instincts, and her instincts were bad.
By trying to sell Leslie as a morally perfect victim, though, the show fails Leslie more than it would have if instead it had delved into Leslie’s psyche and explored her as a morally complex person: a high-functioning, capable nurse who seems to have also been tragically naive and childish, and whose vulnerability to even the laziest liars would have simply been sad for her had she also not enabled someone else’s murder. This would be a believable story. The one that Something Was Wrong told is not. And as a result, Leslie was so thoroughly trashed on social media that Something Was Wrong had to close their whole Facebook page over it.
As angry as Season 17 made me, I have to admit that I truly do feel bad for Leslie. I accept that responsibility for her son’s murder ultimately lies with his murderer. I am angry that Leslie did not protect him. I do not know why she was so slow to act in her son’s defense – though I have some guesses. But above all, I am sorry that saner heads did not prevail in the production of the podcast about her. Leslie does not seem capable of telling her story with the insight and vulnerability it requires to make herself a sympathetic narrator. She may never be capable of this. And that is why she should not have been on a podcast – even if this is what she wanted.
I can’t imagine that the public response to her podcast helped her at all. It doesn’t seem that the producers had any understanding of how this story would land, and no plan for how to engage the public besides incessantly reminding people to not “blame the victim.” But with a general audience, this was never going to work, because no one in the audience was blaming Jace, who is the victim of the story. They blamed Cody, who killed him. And they blamed Leslie, who enabled Cody.
Listeners could not be prevailed upon to refrain from blaming Leslie as victim, because in actuality and in the world of the story, she is not only a victim. But in the world of Something Was Wrong, where protagonists have to be morally pure victims, she has to be.
This is a problem because:
The sharp lines drawn between “abuser” and “abused” erase the ways in which a person can both see themselves as a victim and also harm other people.
The assignation of a victim label depends on the construction of an abuser, who is held completely apart from the abused and seen as psychologically unlike the abused. This ignores the ways in which people who otherwise have good intentions participate in abusive or harmful behavior.
The identification of victimhood with blamelessness eliminates any possibility of educating the audience on how they can protect themselves. The construction of blameless victimhood goes beyond denying that a victim is in some way responsible for harm done to them (which is true) to insisting that there is nothing a person could have done differently except to be truer to their morally good selves. This is anti-educational about abuse because this is not the way abuse works in real life. The disjunction between the show’s narrative setup and the reality of what it narrates ultimately falls apart with Leslie, who cannot be slotted into the category of “pure victim” and whose actions could have prevented the tragedy of her son’s murder.
The strong public reaction against framing Leslie in this setup is ultimately a severe disservice to Leslie, and shows the shortcomings of such a narrative and interviewing style. If Leslie was not emotionally able to sit for an interview and frankly investigate her motives – which would have actually built empathy for her – then for the sake of her own mental health she should not have been on the show at all.
Finally, in the unlikely event that Leslie is reading this: Leslie, above all, I want to say that I am sorry for the loss of your father and son. I am also sorry that the reaction you received from the show was, I am sure, not what you intended or wanted. I think the producers of the show could have done more to prevent the fallout from this show, and I am sorry that they didn’t do it. You deserved to have your story handled with care. I don’t want to suggest I have more insight into your story than you do, but if anything I said above sounds like it perhaps rings true, I hope you check out some of the resources I linked.