The Ethical Problems with the Something Was Wrong Podcast

Responsible Reporting in a Thorny Field

Photo by Chase Chappell on Unsplash

This is an extended examination of the podcast Something Was Wrong, hosted by Tiffany Reese, and the complicated landscape of trauma-centered media. Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here.

In my final blog post on Something Was Wrong, I want to discuss the ethical issues I’m seeing on the podcast. I’m going to start this section by investigating the two ethical foundations I’m actually hearing in this show: that the show does not blame victims, and the show believes victims. I’m going to talk about the shortcomings in which the production crew seems to understand these dictums. I’m then going to conclude with the three ethical points I would add to the show (or, if they’re present in some way, extensively overhaul) if it were up to me. These are 1) screening survivors to ascertain fitness for the show, 2) vetting stories to ensure quality reporting, and 3) wearing one hat.

Ethic 1: Don’t blame victims 

In the last section, we touched on the subject of victim blaming, or holding a person accountable for the actions of someone who harmed them. So what does it mean to blame a victim, anyway? 

Let’s bring in the experts:

From Veronica E. Johnson, Kevin L. Nadal, and Rukiya King in Perspectives on Psychological Science: “Victim blaming refers to assigning fault to people who experience violence.”

Rebecca M. Hayes, Katherine Lorenz, and Kristin A. Bell in Feminist Criminology: “​​Victim blaming is where individuals find instances within the victims’ behavior, such as drinking alcohol, to hold the victim at least partially responsible for the incident.”

Robert Bolton, Claire Edwards, and Fiarchra Ó Súilleabháin in Sociological Research Online: ‘victim-blaming ideologies’ implicate women as responsible for their own victimisation (sic) where the focus is on what victims might have done to ‘provoke’ the offender. These discourses excuse men’s SVAW and enable perpetration, as they are the same vocabularies used by offenders.”

So what I’m hearing here is that victim blaming is about accountability for harm done. For instance, if a person is attacked walking back to their apartment at night, a victim blaming statement might be “Well, that’s why you should not walk alone at night,” or if a person is assaulted while drunk, “That’s why you shouldn’t drink.” But walking alone at night does not cause muggings, and being drunk does not cause rape. Muggers cause muggings, rapists cause rape.

This is not the same thing as inviting insight into one’s own behavior. Leaving out the setting of a podcast: this can be done in a way that is kind, helpful, sensitive, and – in the proper setting – therapeutic. For instance, if you consent to a sexual encounter freely that you did not look forward to and that made you feel bad after, you might find it helpful to ask yourself, “Why did I do that when I did not want to?” Did you feel like disappointing or hurting a person’s feelings would be less awkward than sex? Did you want to get something out of the experience – like a relationship – that didn’t pan out? Did you come from a virginity-centered community where the only reason to turn down sex was “purity,” and now that you’re not a virgin, you feel there is no reason to say no? 

You may have been coerced in a way you realize later. Or, you may not have. The point of thinking through these questions is not to feel bad about yourself. It’s not to accept responsibility for someone else’s behavior. The point is to empower yourself by understanding your actions and to change your behavior.

My frustration listening to Something Was Wrong is that, when faced with the question “Why did a group of women in their late twenties keep up an exclusive relationship with a man who had elaborate and exhausting emotional needs but wouldn’t talk to them on the phone (because “he” was a catfisher),” is that Reese’s response to this question (20.8) is that the question doesn’t need to be asked because “they already feel bad.” Reese seems to think that there is no reason to have insight into one’s actions except for cultivating shame. It’s not. Insight into your own behavior can empower you to make constructive decisions and lead others in the same way. 

So in light of this: the idea that it is unhelpful to victim blame – to hold someone accountable for another’s actions – is not the same as saying it is unhelpful to reflect on your own choices and your own behavior. Something Was Wrong conflates these phenomena into the same thing. They’re not the same thing. One blames, the other illuminates.

Now – in the context of a podcast, not a conversation between friends, the landscape is more complex because the questions are not longer raised to (only) help the speaker understand herself. They are raised to help the audience understand her. A good showrunner must be able to anticipate when these questions will arise among listeners. Most listeners do not need to be told why a woman stayed with a man who threatened to kill her if she left. However, they may need to be told why a person moved in with a guy who had an extensive criminal record who was a financial drain on her resources. These questions can build empathy for the speaker. Reese doesn’t ask these questions that would explain this to an audience. 

When speakers have insight into this, as in the doula fraud episodes in season 18, the victims have already been on the stand and are able to provide the scaffolding and explanations necessary to reveal, say, why they stayed with a woman in “labor” for twelve hours who wasn’t even pregnant. These victims are amazing at explaining this, but they get no help from Reese. They’re already good at this. (A similar thing happens in Season 4 which concerns one of the few Jonestown survivors). These people have already been through conversations with people who help them explain their headspace and why they did what they did. People who are alone with Reese seem to not be nearly as able to do this. 

“Don’t blame victims” is culturally axiomatic, even though the phrase seems to be subject to concept creep. It is not in conflict with the idea of understanding one’s own behavior or how one can behave differently. Something Was Wrong conflates the two ideas in a way that hampers the show. 

But let’s expand the field of concept creep a little further. What about “believing victims?”

Ethic 2: Believing victims

Here’s the thing. The advice to believe someone who discloses a report of sexual abuse is advice that emerges from the context of care and support. A person who hears a report of abuse in a school must report the case to CPS. A therapist hears a story of abuse the same way he hears every other disclosure from a patient. A friend whose friend tells them their boyfriend assaulted them should proceed as though their friend is being truthful. Police should investigate assault allegations as though the complainant has as much right to be believed as a victim of a carjacking. An investigation happens later. The first step is to proceed as though the story is true, because it is better to start that way and support the survivor. 

But then we get to the investigation step, and from here people do not proceed as though the story must be true. For instance, in the case of child protective services, false allegations of child abuse do seem to happen at a not-statistically-insignificant rate – usually on behalf of a child. There are a thousand reasons why a person might make an allegation of child abuse on behalf of a child that turns out not to be true – the child’s teacher is appropriately cautious, the alleger is an abuser survivor and has a hair trigger that is not their fault, an alleger may be mentally incapacitated or ill, or a child’s harmless disclosure has been misheard by adults. In darker cases, the alleger may have ideological reasons to commit to a certain abuse narrative, may seek to build a platform as a victim “expert” for financial and social gain, or may be deliberately lying and abusing a child themselves – as in the case of the Hampstead Hoax. 

In this stage, allegations are taken seriously, but they are not inherently believed. In fact, false allegations to police are in themselves quite useful because they sharpen our senses of what real abuse allegations look like. For instance, false allegations are more common when an interrogator leads the defendant, or when children face pressure to conform to adult suspicions, as in the widely-documented case of the McMartin Preschool Trial.

It rarely happens that a person, on their own accord, falsifies an allegation to police and pursues the charge while being aware it is false, because there are so few motives for a person to do this. People do not generally benefit themselves from false allegations, and generally speaking, in well-known cases it’s easy to find motivations for why a person would do this. Probably the most famous false rape allegation of our era is the Duke Lacrosse scandal, in which Crystal Mangum originally made the accusation when she faced involuntary commitment after being picked up following an altercation with another sex worker, because she thought it would help her keep custody of her children. That is not to say that what Crystal Mangum did was good, of course – but it is to say that it was highly motivated. Mangum did not want to be committed and lose custody of her children. She didn’t make it up for no reason, she made it up to deflect attention from herself.

These are unusual circumstances, and the motivations to make a sexual assault allegation to the police that one knows are false are usually not this clear – if they exist at all. But we should note that these stories account for false reports in the context of reporting to police, where there are very few motives for making knowingly false reports on one’s own behalf and many significant disincentives – like going through a rape kit at the hospital, the small likelihood of success in prosecution, and the extreme unlikelihood of any kind of material gain – and the expenses leading to such a process, since such remuneration would be achieved through civil court in the United States. When people talk about the low numbers of false allegations regarding sexual assault, this is usually what they’re talking about. It’s rare for women to go to the police and say she was assaulted when she knows she wasn’t. 

By analogy, we might suppose that filing formal complaints in hierarchical structures like churches and companies have the same incentive and disincentive structure. Accusing a popular or powerful man of assault or harassment, even if you have excellent evidence he’s guilty, opens up few reliable paths to comfort, wealth, or popularity. It usually leads in the opposite direction. 

There’s a level of specificity and accountability in, say, the Episcopal Accountability project or ACNAToo’s website that allows for corroboration (such as relevant emails and documents) and increases the reliability of the material. And we know that these kinds of reports are often difficult to make: see the below statement from Megan Nichols Lively, a survivor of abuse in the Southern Baptist Church:

See?

However. None of these motivations translate to the setting of media and public-facing activism. And these reports are not accounted for in statistics about false abuse reports made to police or CPS. This is particularly true in the context of media where a person can be reasonably sure that their story will not be fact-checked, or that media makers will not even ask for identifying information that could prove the story true, false, or defamatory. Suddenly, the incentives and disincentives that exist to create low false reporting in the world of law enforcement and disciplinary systems look very different. 

Unfortunately: there are analogues that suggest that there may be extreme incentives to make false reports in contexts in which there is no reason to think that one’s story will be further investigated, and no one will directly bear the consequences of your allegations.

One clear example of this is the predatory use of rape crisis hotlines. Every person I have ever known who volunteered or trained to volunteer at a rape crisis line (myself included!) was trained to deal with predators calling the line and using the line for fetish reasons. Every volunteer I have known who worked for such a line got such a call. Katie Fetzer from Empowering the Fight, when I interviewed her for this blog, said that it’s not uncommon for people to use the call to tell false stories that cast victims in unfavorable lights, make victim-blaming statements, tell graphic stories, or victimize the call line volunteer through lewd language or behavior. These aren’t allegations that ever reach the police, and the job of the call center volunteer is to listen and provide resources – which means these calls have nothing to do with false reports made to law enforcement or CPS.

Reese may have a way to screen for these kinds of stories, but I bring this up as an example to note this: given the fact that predatory crank calls to rape crisis lines are widely reported, this puts a serious crimp in the claim that it is inherently good to believe claims of victimization, full stop. There are absolutely twisted reasons why people under the veil of anonymity say they are rape survivors when they clearly are not.

When we proceed to the question of journalism, we’re once again faced with the fact that people may make claims to journalism they would never make to law enforcement, and as such it is erroneous to appeal to the low level of false allegations to law enforcement to explain why they should be believed. Some obvious examples here might include Laurel Rose Wilson, aka Lauren Stratford, who posed as both a Satanic Ritual Abuse survivor and later as a Holocaust survivor for public acclaim and financial benefits. It would also include alleged German scammer Coco Berthman, who seems to have had similar motivations. 

And, of course, it includes the allegations of Jackie Coakley in Sabrina Erdely’s now-infamous and retracted Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus.” In the article, Coakley alleged that she was beaten and raped on Sept 28, 2012 by seven men in a coordinated attack at the Phi Kappa Psi house at the University of Virginia. Erdely had attempted to show deference to her source Coakley by declining to interview any of her alleged assailants, which more than came back to haunt her when it quickly surfaced that there was no party at Phi Kappa Psi on the night in question, that Coakley’s friends had heard a different story, and that only one of them had even been contacted by Rolling Stone but did not wish to sit for an interview. Ultimately, it seemed that the ringleader “Drew” (the pseudonym in the article) did not seem to exist, and was an amalgamation of people Coakley had interacted with. 

Why did Coakley tell this story to Erdely? I have absolutely no idea. What is clear is that Rolling Stone was in no way prepared to go forward with the story and Coakley’s own willingness to speak was insufficient for the reporting necessary for this story. What’s also clear is that the legacy of “A Rape on Campus” is profoundly negative for the experience of sexual assault survivors. There are uncountable true stories that Rolling Stone could have printed to draw attention to the problem of sexual violence on campus. And yet, by printing the false one, any activism around this issue is tarnished. As Caitlin Flanagan from The Atlantic put it before the story was debunked:

“...if this turns out to be a hoax, it is going to turn the clock back on (university leadership’s) thinking 30 years.”

Boy, that sucks!

Coakley’s friends and volunteers at UVA did not ask her for details or names because that was not appropriate for their role. Alexandria Pinkleton, a volunteer on campus with the One Less anti-assault coalition, put it this way: 

“A lot of the reason why we aren’t questioning Jackie urgently about who the names are or anything like that is because our role as advocates and friends is really just to support the survivor.”

Pinkleton actually did the right thing in her role. Her job was to be a friend and support to Coakley, not to make allegations, investigate the incident, or punish the perpetrators. But Pinkleton’s role was completely different from journalist Erdely’s role. Erdely’s job was to make allegations, which meant it was her job to investigate. Erdely wasn’t at hand to be an emotional support or friend to Coakley. If she was, she would have been well within her rights to just treat Coakley gently and help her navigate treatment and care. But her job was to report on the incident, and she didn’t do it.

Erdely’s failure to distinguish between the role of support and the role of journalism was ultimately catastrophic. Erdely deferred to Coakley’s wish that no one contact the assailant backfired spectacularly when further evidence revealed that the supposed ringleader of the incident likely did not exist at all.

The same gap between advice given to support and advice given to journalism – that friends should believe and support, but journalists should verify – is shot through Something Was Wrong. Reese is not wrong to believe these stories as she is told them. They all deserve to be taken seriously insofar as they are interpersonal communication. But that deference should come to a grinding halt once the microphone turns on. At that point, your job as a journalist is to thoroughly verify the story and speak to as many parties as you can. We’ve already seen that Reese doesn’t do this in the context of the story of Darcy, Kenji, and Danielle, but I think it’s more or less a given that Reese doesn’t even attempt to do this with most of the alleged perpetrators on the show.

There are two episodes in Season 18 (11 and 12) in which a narrator encourages us to “believe survivors more,” in the context of the speaker Tyler having collated a series of stories from people who were allegedly assaulted by his former business associate, Archie. We only hear from one of these people on the show itself (Shane). I don’t think this setup: Shane tells us about an allegation of abuse, and Tyler tells us there are dozens more – is a useful model for what it means to believe survivors. I don’t expect the first and last names of the people making the allegations – it’s standard to not report those. But I am absorbing this story as journalism, not in a situation where I am providing care for these people. I don’t know anyone involved in this story. I haven’t read the allegations. I have secondhand knowledge that they exist, and I have thirdhand information that the alleged events happen. In the context of a normal newspaper, the journalist in question would contact these people and get statements, and corroborating statements from people around them. But why is it good moral practice for me to believe non-specific reports when I know those corroborating steps did not take place?

For example, a disclaimer at the beginning of most episodes in Season 21 goes like this:

Testimony shared by guests of the show is their own and does not necessarily reflect the views of myself, Broken, Cycle, Media or Wondery.

And this is a disclaimer at the beginning of Season 20:

All persons are considered innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law. 

This may be legaleese but I don’t think it’s common for journalists to announce that whoever they quote in an article is responsible for their own quote. You’re still reporting the story. It’s hard to not think that part of the approach here is that whatever people say on the show is their own business, and Something Was Wrong just owns the microphone. (And the ad revenue).

I’m sure the defense here is that this is a storytelling podcast, not a news broadcast, but this may be a distinction without difference. This American Life still had huge problems when it turned out its 2012 show “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” was highly fictitious. Just because a person is telling their own story doesn’t mean the people who give them a platform have no responsibility for what’s being said.

All this is to say: if the truth-telling mechanisms behind Something Was Wrong are as they appear (record the story with some possible supporting voices, change the names), then this is not enough from the perspective of broadcast journalism. It’s really only a matter of time until someone tells a whopper on Something Was Wrong, if it hasn’t happened already. In the long run, this does not give people a good reason to believe victims, if their stories are assumed to be exempt from scrutiny up to and including at the broadcast level. The reason to believe it is simply that it is being told. In a world where people can and do lie towards ugly ends, this is not enough.

Taking one’s hand off the wheel and simply encouraging us to believe a story on the grounds that it is being told absolves Something Was Wrong of doing the hard investigative work that really is appropriate. It also absolves the show of practicing journalistic ethics. It’s pretty basic journalism ethics that sources should be fact-checked and made available to the public. It’s standard practice that the names of alleged assault victims themselves are not disclosed, but one can still provide redacted court documents, corroborating texts or emails, witness statements or near witnesses statements, etc.

All stories about abuse should be taken seriously in a matter fit for the hearer. Among supporters and friends, this means belief and care for the person who has been harmed. Within an organization, it means following high-quality procedures to make sure the allegation is treated seriously and further harm is prevented. Among law enforcement, it means collecting the necessary evidence to move forward with a trial. Among journalists, it means verifying the story with as many witnesses as one can find. 

Only at the closest, most private level is belief and an abstention from investigation important. This is advised for people who are close to the victim, who help them report the case to qualified investigators, etc. It is not the appropriate posture for a journalist. 

The Ethics That Are Missing

If I was the showrunner of Something Was Wrong, there’s some basic journalistic and trauma care ethics I’d want to introduce into the process. These are the following:

1. Screening victims and ascertaining their fitness to be on the show.

After 21 seasons the hosts of Something Was Wrong should have a sense by now of which shows are heard favorably and which aren’t. It’s past time to stop cranking these out. The Bodies Behind the Bus podcast extensively screens people before they go on the show to make sure that the goals of the storytellers and the show are aligned, and make sure they’re handling the show with care. There may be some intake process at Something Was Wrong I don’t know about, but it definitely wasn’t in place when they whiffed Season 17 into the sun and it can’t be very robust at the speed in which these episodes are produced. BBB does produce a show per week but not every week is a survivor story – a lot are author interviews. Slowing down production and mixing up the show style might make more space for Something Was Wrong to make sure they’re handling survivors with care.

2. Vetting the stories to ensure quality reporting

I already went over this extensively above in the section “Believe victims,” but there are a few subguidelines I want to include here on the subject of framing stories:

2.A. Challenging behavior that normalizes causing harm to others

Encouraging people to tell their stories, framing them as sympathetic/morally worthy, and then refraining from commenting on the material has the unintended effect of normalizing that person’s actions. If we’re told that a person is a good person, that they are a victim of something, and then we hear their actions recounted, it’s normal to hear this detail as excusing or normalizing the things they did – even if those things are very bad. This observation is not the lame moralizing about, say, movies and books that is often complained about in popular discourse – that, for instance, if an author depicts some awful behavior that she must be in favor of it. That’s ridiculous. This is about how we frame reports of true events and the people who did them.

Alexis’s episode in 18.1 contains a crime story, but Alexis isn’t the victim of it – she walks in on her serially-cheating boyfriend and a girl who is passed out drunk. Alexis storms out angry when she thinks her boyfriend is cheating on her, but reading between the lines it sounds like she walked in on a sexual assault and left alone. She even says later it didn’t even occur to her that he might have assaulted the unconscious woman in his bed – she just thought he was cheating. And yet, Alexis found out later that her boyfriend had allegedly assaulted more than twenty women. Including the one Alexis found in his room. 

By failing to comment on this at all, the episode normalizes a pretty common but incredibly destructive action: being a passive bystander when a crime has been committed. I understand that Alexis was not in a great headspace at the moment and I am not blaming her for failing to act when being overwhelmed by betrayal – but Alexis also did walk in on what sounds like a crime. When faced with an unconscious woman in a man’s bed, Alexis absolutely should have done something to help. I wouldn’t blame Alexis if she said she felt unsure of calling the police because the woman was on drugs or the like – but the reason Alexis gives is that it just didn’t occur to her that an unconscious person wasn’t consenting to sex.

2.B. In stories where more than one person is victimized, hearing from that person, too.

The (additional) problematic episode here is Episode 15.5 in which Diana discusses being married to a former cop and soldier who trafficked one of her nieces and abused several of her children. There’s no indication in the podcast that these kids gave permission to have their stories told even anonymously. I sincerely hope that happened but listening to the podcast, I have no reason to think it did. “Tessa” and “Grace’s” stories are not the property of their aunt and mother, respectively, and if Diana did not extensively vet this with them she should not have told them, even anonymously.

I’m almost positive I’ve been able to find the name of the accused man with only the information on the show (I’m not linking it for obvious reasons), which means the survivors can’t be that anonymous either. Seeing as this episode was recorded less than a year and a half after the arrest, I can’t imagine that the minor victims were in a state to consent to this.

3. Wearing one hat

By this I mean that a person can be a supportive friend, an investigative journalist, and a legal advocate, but usually can’t be all of the above. 

I again touched on this quite a bit in the section “Believing Victims” where the desire to provide support for a victim gets in the way of reporting and how that sunk Rolling Stone, but it comes up again in Season 20, the Brody catfish season. Because Season 20 on the “multiple hats” front is a complete trainwreck. 

The episode I want to look at here is 20.10, when Reese calls alleged catfisher Jessica Polly with apparently no plan whatsoever. I’m going to break this one down in bits so we can see what a disaster it is:

Reese calls Jessica Polly and tells her she is a journalist. She does not tell her that the call is being recorded, she does not ask if the call is on the record, she does not tell Polly that there are other people on the line (mostly friends and family) and that the raw audio will be used in media production. Polly equivocates for a second, saying she knows what Reese is calling about, and Reese jumps to ask Polly if her comment is “no comment.” Polly agrees, and Reese hangs up.

So let’s start here. Call 1 is already terrible journalism and worse advocacy. It seems like Reese is overexcited and eager to trash-talk a lady who has apparently harmed people she now thinks of as friends, and she does not seem to be thinking about how to use this call well. The obvious thing to have done here is to be the only person on the call (to reduce Reese’s nerves), ask for an interview, indicate sympathy, and draw Polly out on the record. Instead Reese basically tells Polly that her statement should be “no comment,” which is baffling to me and seems like something you would advise Polly to do, not her alleged victims. Reese probably could have expressed sympathy for Polly and asked for her side of the story. This would have been advantageous both for the podcast and any legal cases if Polly had in fact confessed to everything. Instead Reese feeds Polly the most useful line Polly could have and hangs up. (It’s so dumb).

But then Reese gets a second chance and blows it even harder. Polly calls back and asks where Reese got her number, accurately realizing that someone close to her must have given it out because she has recently changed her number and it is unlisted. Reese just straight up lies and says it’s posted online, when it’s not. They then get in a short argument, Reese bawls her out, and then takes the opportunity to basically just tell Polly she’s gonna get her with all the evidence. Then she ends the call.

I have to imagine that if there was ever a chance of a federal investigation into Polly that Reese’s call compromised the investigation beyond all hope of recovery. By telling Polly she’s a podcaster looking into Polly’s activity, Reese has created a massive incentive for Polly to start destroying evidence. This is a problem because in this case, the clincher evidence that would attach Polly to the fake phone numbers and the camera would all be in Polly’s possession. Polly did her alleged catfishing by using an anonymous texting app (think Text Vault). These systems are usually encrypted to hell and back, and a good forensic investigator might be able to subpoena Polly’s phone and laptop and find evidence that she sent the incriminating texts. But the phones of the alleged victims themselves likely cannot be used to show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they were texting with Polly, since the phones go to a texting app and not to burner phones that are registered to Polly.

I realize that without this, there’s still a great deal of circumstantial evidence that Polly is Brody and the other cast of characters – for example, the only person who has ever claimed to lay eyes on Brody is Polly, and Brody demonstrably doesn’t exist. But the real digital data that could prove that Polly was the catfisher still lies with Polly herself. What I’m hearing is that, with these calls, Reese may as well have called Polly and warned her to throw all her devices into the ocean. Polly could, at this stage, probably do this without concern for legal reprisal, since there is no litigation pending and no investigation was underway. Polly seems to have already gotten rid of her phone, since Reese has to reach her at a new number – so I am clearly not the first person to think of this.

So, with that, I wouldn’t hold my breath for Polly to face federal charges. Unless Polly’s an idiot, those devices are long gone. It was nice of Reese to warn her, I suppose.

It’s also totally possible that this has also compromised any civil cases that the women might be able to bring against Polly. By giving Reese Polly’s personal number, having Reese call Polly, and allowing Reese to broadcast the calls, Polly may have decent grounds for a countersuit here. By virtue of having her name and photo broadcast across the internet, at the very least Polly has a stronger case for damages than any of the women she allegedly catfished – especially without the hard evidence that Polly herself would still have. I cannot imagine that a lawyer advocating for the alleged victims would have suggested that Reese make this call. It sounds like, at the time Reese made the call, none of the women had legal advocates.

Likewise, the problem of wearing multiple hats is also closely tied to the problem of thorough investigation. A journalist must be able to set aside her own biases and pursue the truth. As much as I empathize with the alleged victims of “Brody the catfisher” in Season 20, it’s alarming to hear Reese interview a source  Episode 20.9 who says that his goal for the alleged catfisher is to have her go to prison, have her child taken by the state, and “ruin her life” (stated repeatedly). To which Reese says, “hell fucking yeah we are.”

But is it absolutely impossible that a man whose stated goal is to ruin someone’s life may have bad motives or may not be explaining the whole story? Is agreeing to help ruin someone’s life really the appropriate posture for a journalist to take, without (by the time 20.9 was released) ever speaking to Polly herself? Do we know there isn’t more to the story? What if Polly had evidence that one of the victims was aware that Polly herself was behind the texts and continued the relationship anyway? What if Polly had evidence that “Brody” or another man she was photographing actually was involved? Are we absolutely certain Polly has no accomplice? The sheer volume of time she invested in this at least suggests that she may have.

I cannot overstate this: at the time the “hell fucking yeah we are” episode was released, Polly had never been convicted of any crimes. She still has not. That’s not to say that Polly did not do it – the evidence is pretty decent. But it is to say that this case was not a done deal. There was more investigating to do. The full picture was not on the board. Given the text logs in question I think it’s reasonable to think Polly did catfish these women, but as we’ve said – there could be more to the story, and clincher evidence is still with Polly. Or, post-Reese call, it’s more likely somewhere in the Atlantic. 

Reese was apparently very convinced by the testimony she was hearing, but I have to ask if this is really enough when you have decided that you, too, want to dedicate your podcast to the work of ruining someone’s life. Objectivity of process does not seem to have been attempted much at all in Season 20 in the case of “Brody the catfisher.” It’s entirely possible evidence could have come out, through an objective interaction with Polly or sources that were sympathetic to her, that relevant information could have come out that colored the testimony therein, or explained why Polly had limited judgment. Or, it could have provided evidence that was even more damning and could have set up a civil or criminal suit! I don’t know what this evidence could have been, but in Reese’s place, I would have attempted to get it. 

But we see here again another problem with wearing multiple hats. The problem isn’t just excessive credulity, it’s acting in contexts where your behaviors aren’t useful. I think Reese wanted to act like a normal buddy here and trash someone who hurt her friends – which isn’t an insane desire. But it’s a very bad one in the context of a show where you’re supposed to be building the case to make for the FBI. Reese ended up staging the phone call more like a prank and divested herself of all opportunities to get useful information from her mark. So that was stupid.

Conclusion: The Things That Are Wrong With Something Was Wrong

Something Was Wrong is a show that seems to have been flawed from the outset by struggling to find a lane and stick to it. The show has never been as centered on law and crime as it purports to be, which creates issues when the production team clearly seems to not understand the legal system. This is not educational for an audience and creates false expectations of what can be prosecuted – and what can’t. 

The next issue is the way in which the show constructs victims and victimization, insisting on a narrative in which victims are framed as inherently moral and lacking agency. This model is also reflecting in the interviewing style, providing little insight into why people did what they did even in situations where the audience sorely needs more context for their behavior. This is especially problematic in the case of Leslie, who reads from her own statement and bypasses her high-risk decisions that led to the murder of her son. The framing does not build empathy for Leslie and does not explain her actions, in a way that (I suspect) was highly detrimental to Leslie.

The third issues, as we’ve discussed above, are the ethics in broadcasting. The show declines to do the hard work of inviting show guests to examine their actions under the cover of not “victim blaming,” even when this insight could be beneficial or even essential to the storytelling. The show also divests itself of the responsibility to investigate the stories on the grounds that they “believe victims.” But to say we should “believe victims” without providing relevant evidence and investigation into their stories fundamentally belies the premise of the show – that we should believe victims. The lack of evidence challenges this notion, and there are multiple public examples that show that this kind of thinking in the investigative stage can have catastrophic outcomes. Finally, Reese does a poor job determining what her role is in the story. She seems to identify most with the support role in victim advocacy (believing and affirming them) but is in actuality carrying out the role of a journalist – a role she does not maintain completely or ethically.

I don’t really think Something Was Wrong has the financial motivations to take criticism on board (they’re doing pretty well) and I don’t get the impression Reese likes to be criticized in any way. But a girl can hope. The show could be improved. It could do something useful. Right now, as near as I can tell, it doesn’t. But a girl can dream.