These days, fraud is almost as popular a crime as murder — at least when it comes to the media we consume. Our fascination with people who aren’t who they say they are seems endless, and as a result, the scam podcast genre has become saturated. For something to stand out, it needs one hell of a hook.
Deep Cover, “a show about people who live double lives,” has made its home on this well-trodden ground. The star of the sixth season is Sarah Cavanaugh — a young woman from Rhode Island who managed to convince everyone she came across that she was a wounded war veteran with a Purple Heart, who was also battling cancer. Across her years living this double life, she conned ten veteran charities of over $250,000 worth of goods and services. The six-episode series dives into the details of Sarah’s deceptions, by talking to both the many people she scammed and the scammer herself.
Hosts Jake Halpern and Jess McHugh state more than once that the nature of Sarah’s crimes meant that the people she had fooled were kept apart, in “separate shuttered rooms.” Although they don’t quite say so, this seems to explain why the show’s first four episodes are frustratingly fragmentary. Halpern and McHugh talk to a host of different people that Sarah swindled, but there is little effort to establish an overarching timeline. While they are warm and professional interviewers, and the tales Sarah’s victims have to tell are relatively compelling, the lack of narrative cohesion or momentum means that The Truth About Sarah doesn’t develop much of an identity.
Things pick up a bit in the penultimate episode, told from the perspective of Sarah’s ex-wife, Nicole. The two were married for years, Sarah lying the whole time; to add insult to injury, Sarah also had a secret girlfriend who Nicole didn’t know about until Halpern and McHugh accidentally broke the news. Stealing from charities is bad enough, but Sarah effectively stole a whole chunk of Nicole’s life. “I won’t know, from this point on and forever, what was real and what wasn’t,” she says at one point, and the psychic toll of having so many of your most intimate, happiest times infested by such all-encompassing lies sounds like an unfathomable burden to bear. The Truth About Sarah is at its best when it narrows its focus to the person Sarah hurt most of all, and gives her space to describe the ordeal from her perspective.
When it comes to the titular con artist, the podcast is less effective. Sarah’s take on the whole situation is mostly saved for the final episode, and it seems clear that her participation is meant to be the big selling point here. Why did she do all this? Keep listening, the show teases, and hear it straight from the horse’s mouth! Yet when the “explanation” arrives, it’s completely unsurprising.
The show’s approach to Sarah gets caught between two stools. It’s accepted she’s an unreliable narrator, so it isn’t worth pushing her for answers. But that means that what Halpern and McHugh get out of her is so flimsy and inconsequential, it might have been better if they hadn’t bothered at all.
After five episodes detailing how Sarah fabricated injuries and illnesses to gain sympathy, hearing her say, “It felt good to be the center of attention,” prompts little more than a “Well, duh.” Indeed, the fact that she is an avowed lover of the spotlight casts a queasy pall over the whole project. Isn’t this podcast just giving Sarah – who has managed to damage so many lives – exactly what she wants? Empathy is rarely a bad thing, but when the hosts start expressing pity for their subject in the final episode, after everything we’ve heard, it feels as if they’ve been suckered too.
Overall, The Truth About Sarah is not a bad series. It’s sensitive, quite engaging, and well-produced. But in such an overloaded genre, there simply isn’t enough here to convince us that Sarah is worthy of our attention, however much she craves it.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.