Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, this is Jake. Just a quick note before
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Speaker 1: let's get into it. Previously on deep Cover.
Speaker 2: She explained to me that.
Speaker 3: She just got out of the Marine Corps and she
Speaker 3: needed help with some car payments because she was waiting
Speaker 3: for via disability to kick in.
Speaker 4: She was very likable, she was very charismatic, and then
Speaker 4: on top of it, she was a veteran and badass
Speaker 4: and had these injuries.
Speaker 5: We would kind of quietly make sure that when she
Speaker 5: was in our environment at the gym, she was protected.
Speaker 3: So I call up our records keeper and I say, hey,
Speaker 3: I need a copy of her DD form two fourteen,
Speaker 3: and he said, ooh, she just left my house two
Speaker 3: hours ago. She came here to the house to come
Speaker 3: get it. That's when I start thinking something's not right here.
Speaker 6: So like here, right when I get up in the morning,
Speaker 6: I make it a point to go outside.
Speaker 1: This is Sarah Kavanaugh. She's the person you've been hearing
Speaker 1: about for the past two episodes.
Speaker 6: And like, step outside by myself, see the sunrise, look
Speaker 6: at the view because the view behind overlooks the mountains,
Speaker 6: and really enjoy that and just let that be the
Speaker 6: start of my day versus some of the intrusive thoughts
Speaker 6: about the past that would come up before, and I
Speaker 6: would let that dictate my day. So I've really changed
Speaker 6: how I let the past affect my moods, so I
Speaker 6: don't become just a continuous repetition of them.
Speaker 1: Jess and I spent the better part of several days
Speaker 1: interviewing Sarah. We talked about her past and her life now,
Speaker 1: and a great many other things too.
Speaker 5: How we found her, where we found her. We'll get there.
Speaker 5: You're going to hear from her throughout the rest of
Speaker 5: the season, but for now, We just want you to
Speaker 5: hear some of the very first things that she said
Speaker 5: to us in person, so that you get to read
Speaker 5: on her just like we did. We started with small talk,
Speaker 5: like read any good books lately.
Speaker 6: Right now, I am reading The Secret History by Donna Tart,
Speaker 6: which is interesting.
Speaker 2: I had read.
Speaker 6: Goldfinch The Goldfinch and I loved it, so now I'm
Speaker 6: reading this one and I'm really enjoying it so far.
Speaker 1: This was just a few minutes into our first conversation.
Speaker 1: At this point, I knew a fair amount about Sarah Cavanugh,
Speaker 1: what she'd done, about all the people she deceived and hurt.
Speaker 1: I had a pretty good picture in my head of
Speaker 1: who she was, and this this was not it. This woman, well,
Speaker 1: she sounded more like a high school guidance counselor or
Speaker 1: the type of person you'd hope would be taking care
Speaker 1: of your grandma the senior citizen home. In fact, she
Speaker 1: told us working with seniors that was her first job.
Speaker 6: So I was in undergrad working and an assisted living.
Speaker 6: I worked there for five and a half years, and
Speaker 6: I loved it. I did everything from serving in the
Speaker 6: dining room to running activities to housekeeping. I did anything
Speaker 6: they asked me to do to basically pay my rent
Speaker 6: and pay my tuition and kind of survive undergrad at
Speaker 6: all costs. But I developed really meaningful relationships with the residents.
Speaker 5: Right as I sat there listening to her, I noticed
Speaker 5: Sarah was doing this a lot, ending a sentence by
Speaker 5: saying right, it's kind of subtle. She doesn't yank you
Speaker 5: through her version of events. It's more like she was
Speaker 5: feeling around for things that we might have in common,
Speaker 5: and if we nodded along, she'd say right.
Speaker 6: A lot of people don't like older people. I remember
Speaker 6: a lot of people I worked with who were like,
Speaker 6: she's grouchy, or she's.
Speaker 5: This, or she's that, And.
Speaker 6: I thought, well, they've had fifty years to practice.
Speaker 5: Right type thing.
Speaker 6: And also like I always think about our moods as
Speaker 6: a product of something else, right, I know that personally,
Speaker 6: and so I just think there was an appreciation there
Speaker 6: for me. But I didn't really know where that was
Speaker 6: going to go. I think I thought I was going
Speaker 6: to be like an activities director or something like that.
Speaker 1: But instead she got our masters and became a social worker.
Speaker 1: Eventually she got a job at the local VA in Providence,
Speaker 1: Rhode Island, that was her job, helping veterans in some
Speaker 1: pretty tough situations. And this is one hundred percent true.
Speaker 1: By the way, many of these people coming to Sarah
Speaker 1: for help, they showed up, maybe on a Saturday, kind
Speaker 1: of reluctantly, and it was Sarah's job to put them
Speaker 1: at ease.
Speaker 6: I would just say, hey, how are you like, it's Saturday,
Speaker 6: you know, what's how do you feel about this? How
Speaker 6: do you feel about being here? And if they were like,
Speaker 6: I really don't want to be here. I had to
Speaker 6: get up early and I had to drive to Providence,
Speaker 6: and I'd be like, yeah, I understand.
Speaker 1: When her clients did open up. Sarah took this approach.
Speaker 6: When someone said something like I'm you know, I'm struggling
Speaker 6: with I might be homeless, or my wife and I
Speaker 6: are fighting or something like that, I wouldn't respond with surprise.
Speaker 6: I would just be like, yeah, those things happen. Those
Speaker 6: things happen, and Okay, what do you think you need
Speaker 6: right now?
Speaker 2: Because of that, what she.
Speaker 1: Never wanted to do was send veterans elsewhere to some
Speaker 1: other program, you know, push them off on someone else.
Speaker 6: I know that when I've opened up and told people things,
Speaker 6: if they've turned away from it because it makes them uncomfortable.
Speaker 6: I've then kind of thought, oh, this makes other people
Speaker 6: fee uncomfortable. I shouldn't talk about this, right, and I
Speaker 6: don't want to do that to them. But you have
Speaker 6: to be present in a way that silently says I
Speaker 6: get it.
Speaker 5: When she talked about her old life as a social worker,
Speaker 5: I got this strange sense that I was seeing the
Speaker 5: Sarah Kavanaugh that won over everybody's hearts. Because, let's be clear,
Speaker 5: the people we interviewed for this story, once upon a time,
Speaker 5: they all loved Sarah, and listening to her talk, started
Speaker 5: to understand why she knew, in her own words, how
Speaker 5: to be present in a way that silently says I
Speaker 5: get it. It's weird to say, but I found her
Speaker 5: really likable by the time we met in person. I've
Speaker 5: been talking to her over the phone for nearly a year,
Speaker 5: and I've been hearing about all the terrible things she'd
Speaker 5: done for just as long. Sarah, she seems pretty aware
Speaker 5: of her effect on people then and now, of all
Speaker 5: the ways big and small. Said an un said that
Speaker 5: people come to trust each other to trust her.
Speaker 6: I've always been told I'm a really good listener right,
Speaker 6: and I maximized that while I was lying right people,
Speaker 6: when you create space, people fill that space. And I
Speaker 6: had always been really I had always been able to
Speaker 6: kind of keep my mouth shut and be quiet and
Speaker 6: not share anything. I'd really learned that really well.
Speaker 1: Sarah went on from there, talking about her old job
Speaker 1: and who she once was, because, as you might have guessed,
Speaker 1: she's no longer a social worker. She has another life now,
Speaker 1: very different life, one in which she has a great
Speaker 1: deal of time to think about what she did and
Speaker 1: the people she hurt most.
Speaker 6: I don't think it's ever going to be easy to
Speaker 6: think about the people I hurt, and because these are
Speaker 6: people that even before they knew I heard them right,
Speaker 6: I was hurting them right because I was lying to them.
Speaker 2: And they were.
Speaker 6: People I called every day, that I spent most of
Speaker 6: my weekends with, that they were my friends, some of
Speaker 6: them my best friends. And I think about that now,
Speaker 6: I mean, that's really hard.
Speaker 1: When Sarah says this, she's really talking about two people
Speaker 1: who trusted her deeply. In this episode, we're going to
Speaker 1: hear from both of them. And these aren't just stories
Speaker 1: about friendship. They're about what happens when you meet someone,
Speaker 1: a confidant who seems to get you and understand what
Speaker 1: you're going through, someone who listens quietly with what seems
Speaker 1: like empathy, But here in lies the danger. What if
Speaker 1: that very person takes your most personal struggles and uses
Speaker 1: them to their advantage, sees them as an opportunity. Then
Speaker 1: the line between empathy and manipulation is thinner than we'd
Speaker 1: care to admit. And sometimes the people who know us
Speaker 1: best are the ones we should fear the most. I'm
Speaker 1: Jay Calburn and I'm Jess mchue and this is Deep
Speaker 1: Cover Season six, The Truth About Sarah, Episode three, The Confidante.
Speaker 5: Last fall, Jake and I, along with our producer Amy,
Speaker 5: went on a road trip to Rhode Island. We wanted
Speaker 5: to meet the people in Sarah's inner circle, people who
Speaker 5: were closest to her, who each knew some part of
Speaker 5: the truth. One morning, Amy and I went to meet
Speaker 5: someone named Sam. We're just going to use her first
Speaker 5: name to protect her privacy. We spoke at her boyfriend's house,
Speaker 5: sitting around the kitchen table. Sam is in her fifties
Speaker 5: with short blonde hair. She's a physical therapist and for
Speaker 5: years she was Sarah's physical therapist.
Speaker 2: She was really kind.
Speaker 4: She definitely knew me, and she knew I think what
Speaker 4: I wanted to talk about.
Speaker 2: Type thing, if that makes sense.
Speaker 5: What was it that drew you to her, especially in
Speaker 5: those early yeadies.
Speaker 4: It definitely was her intelligence. I mean her intelligence like
Speaker 4: just sparked something in me.
Speaker 5: Sarah and Sam first met in the fall of twenty eighteen,
Speaker 5: just a few months after Sarah's wedding to Nicole, the
Speaker 5: wedding attended by all her VFW friends. By this point,
Speaker 5: Sarah was fully immersed in this veteran role. Sam told
Speaker 5: me about the moment when Sarah first came in for
Speaker 5: a consultation.
Speaker 4: She was really quiet and reserved, you know. She answered
Speaker 4: questions but very kind of matter of fact. Definitely seemed
Speaker 4: like things were she was uncomfortable with, Like she didn't
Speaker 4: want me to look at her hip.
Speaker 5: This was the Sarah who, in her own words, had
Speaker 5: always been able to quote keep her mouth shut and
Speaker 5: be quiet and not share anything, someone who let the
Speaker 5: silences do the talking. But Sarah did say she had
Speaker 5: been injured in Iraq.
Speaker 4: She said they hit an id and she got hit
Speaker 4: with the door that got blown in and hit her
Speaker 4: in the hit. She wasn't really limping this because this
Speaker 4: wasn't a brand new injury. This is something that had
Speaker 4: happened a long time ago, so it was more like
Speaker 4: a chronic thing.
Speaker 5: Sam had worked with trauma patients before, so when Sarah
Speaker 5: didn't want to show Sam her scar, she didn't push. Plus,
Speaker 5: she already knew a little about Sarah's supposed military past
Speaker 5: because one of Sarah's Jim buddies had connected them. Sarah
Speaker 5: got into a routine of twice weekly pt with Sam,
Speaker 5: and eventually the Wounded Warrior Project started paying for it.
Speaker 5: Sarah was part of their Independence Program. It's super selective
Speaker 5: program for the most severely wounded veterans, usually people with
Speaker 5: traumatic brain injuries, which Sarah claimed she had. Over many
Speaker 5: months of these weekly appointments, these two women became friends.
Speaker 5: They talk about nature, gardening, or books they both love reading.
Speaker 5: They also talked about more intimate things. Sam was recently divorced,
Speaker 5: and Sarah told her in that way she does so well,
Speaker 5: I get it. My marriage isn't working out either. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's right. Sarah told Sam that she was also getting divorced.
Speaker 4: It was less than a year after they got married
Speaker 4: that she said that just the marriage wasn't working out
Speaker 4: and did they were separated, but she also said they
Speaker 4: did have an open marriage.
Speaker 5: None of this was true, at least not according to
Speaker 5: Sarah's wife Nicole. At the time, they were still living together,
Speaker 5: still married, and not in an open marriage. But that's
Speaker 5: not what she told Sam. This, by the way, it's
Speaker 5: also classic Sarah, as we've learned, and it's a pattern
Speaker 5: I've seen with women's gammers in general. They often find
Speaker 5: emotional common ground with victims, even when that shared trauma
Speaker 5: is totally made up. And it worked.
Speaker 2: I think, like anything, basically, just.
Speaker 4: You spend more time with someone and then you just
Speaker 4: appreciate who that person is, and then you find yourself
Speaker 4: wanting to spend more and more time. We just like
Speaker 4: enjoyed our time together and then it just turned into
Speaker 4: more and.
Speaker 5: By more, Sam means Sam and Sarah went from having
Speaker 5: a professional relationship to a friendship to a love affair
Speaker 5: one that was really romantic, started going on a ton
Speaker 5: of trips together.
Speaker 4: Let's see, we went to Florida, we went to Vale,
Speaker 4: we went to the Bahamas. So we went to California
Speaker 4: and then like you know, little driving around New England
Speaker 4: type stuff.
Speaker 5: And it wasn't just a fling. Their lives became really entwined.
Speaker 5: Much of this I actually learned from other interviews. Sarah
Speaker 5: would talk about Sam as her partner so much that
Speaker 5: it got really confusing for us as we reported this.
Speaker 5: There were times I would talk to someone for this
Speaker 5: story and they'd mentioned Sarah's significant other and I had
Speaker 5: to double check, who did you think was Sarah's wife?
Speaker 5: A woman named Sam or a woman named Nicole. Oftentimes
Speaker 5: people said Sam. Sarah was living a full on double
Speaker 5: life with Sam, a second double life because she was
Speaker 5: still living with her actual wife at the time, Nicole. Still,
Speaker 5: Sarah found a way to spend lots of time with Sam.
Speaker 5: In fact, Sarah and Sam would socialize with Sarah's VFW pals.
Speaker 5: Sam met Sarah's mom and a brother. Sarah told Sam
Speaker 5: she was really close with her five siblings and talked
Speaker 5: about them all the time.
Speaker 4: She told me that she had a twin who was
Speaker 4: also marine and died in combat, and then she had
Speaker 4: two older brothers and they were all like in the military. Wow, yeah,
Speaker 4: And she said that her dad was a two star general.
Speaker 5: Sarah would show Sam pictures of her five brothers with
Speaker 5: their wives and kids, Brody, Joel, Oliver. She'd tell her
Speaker 5: about their marriage spats, or what they were dealing with
Speaker 5: at work, about their childhood growing up in Georgia. One
Speaker 5: brother in particular was worrying Sarah, Joel. She told Sam
Speaker 5: that he was also a VET who now did private
Speaker 5: military contracting.
Speaker 4: He decided that he was going to do this mission
Speaker 4: because they would make a lot of money for these missions.
Speaker 5: Sarah told Sam that while Joel was on this mission,
Speaker 5: got shot and ended up in a coma, and that
Speaker 5: her mom flew to the Middle East to bring him
Speaker 5: back to the US, but the doctors couldn't revive him.
Speaker 5: They told Sarah that he would never wake up. One day,
Speaker 5: Sarah tells Sam, I need to fly to Georgia. Now.
Speaker 5: I have to be the one to take him off
Speaker 5: of life support.
Speaker 2: I said, I'll go with you, and this is gonna
Speaker 2: be a really hard thing.
Speaker 4: I'll go with you. You know you can fly down
Speaker 4: there and you know I can support you. And she's like, no, no,
Speaker 4: it's fine, I'll do it. And she called me at
Speaker 4: two o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 2: I'll never freak.
Speaker 4: She called me at two o'clock in the morning and
Speaker 4: said that it's done and he was gone.
Speaker 5: Sam was devastated for Sarah. Here was this woman dealing
Speaker 5: with all of these injuries and now this, And just
Speaker 5: to zoom out for a second, because it can be
Speaker 5: easy to get lost in Sarah's world. The people in
Speaker 5: those photos that Sarah shared, they were real people with
Speaker 5: real lives of their own. They just weren't Sarah's brother.
Speaker 5: This version of Sarah, the person with the big military
Speaker 5: family from Georgia, it's someone only a few people saw.
Speaker 5: And my take is that maybe it's because she couldn't
Speaker 5: really let Sam into her family life, because her whole
Speaker 5: family had watched her Mary Nicole, they'd been to the
Speaker 5: home that she and Cole still shared. But I think
Speaker 5: it's deeper than that. Sarah seems to have understood something fundamental.
Speaker 5: Tragedy brings us together, whether it's a friendship or a
Speaker 5: romantic partnership. Being vulnerable enough with another person to let
Speaker 5: them help you through a crisis, to stand by you
Speaker 5: at a funeral or a hospital bed. This is where
Speaker 5: real intimacy is created, and Sarah seems to have taken
Speaker 5: this idea and just run with it. Same of course,
Speaker 5: didn't know any of this at the time. She continued
Speaker 5: bringing Sarah deeper into her world, her real world.
Speaker 4: She was very very meshed into my life. She knew
Speaker 4: my family intimately.
Speaker 5: Sam's mother has been battling stage three ovarian cancer for years.
Speaker 5: So while Sam drove her mother up to Boston for
Speaker 5: treatment at Dana Farber, Sarah would help out. She'd help
Speaker 5: Sam's kids with their homework, plan meals for the family,
Speaker 5: walk her mother's dog, and get this. While Sam was
Speaker 5: taking care of her mother's illness, holding her hand through chemo,
Speaker 5: she was also doing the same for Sarah. Sarah had
Speaker 5: told her the cancer lie too, said she had lung cancer.
Speaker 5: Sarah told Sam, I'm terrified, overwhelmed with medical results. I
Speaker 5: just can't take any more bad news. So Sam started
Speaker 5: receiving Sarah's test results, and then she would be the
Speaker 5: one to relay those results to Sarah. More than once.
Speaker 5: Sam remembers sitting anxiously in her pet practice, refreshing her email,
Speaker 5: waiting for results to come in.
Speaker 4: I remember crying in my practice getting bad news, but
Speaker 4: then I remember getting really really great news and then
Speaker 4: being able to tell her and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: It was a big rollercoaster. It's awful. It was awful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was a lot of emotional strife on my part,
Speaker 4: you know, a lot.
Speaker 5: As both Sarah's partner and her caregiver. Sam was in
Speaker 5: Sarah's world twice over, totally enmeshed. Fast forward to January
Speaker 5: twenty twenty two, the moment when everything started to spiral
Speaker 5: out of control. News was getting around that Sarah may
Speaker 5: have lied about a great many things, including her service
Speaker 5: in the Marines, her medals, possibly even her claims of
Speaker 5: having cancer. When the news first reached Sam, she was
Speaker 5: in total disbelief. She'd seen a pile of proof over
Speaker 5: the years, her enrollment in the Wounded Warrior Independence Program,
Speaker 5: years of blood work that she'd received directly from the VA.
Speaker 5: Sam was trying to wrap her head around this, so
Speaker 5: she hopped on the phone with one of Sarah's VFW buddies,
Speaker 5: a guy named Justin. Had gotten to know each other
Speaker 5: over the years. She wanted his perspective.
Speaker 2: Can you believe this? This is crazy?
Speaker 4: Someone's making this up, you know, Like, why would they
Speaker 4: do this? Why would they make this up about her?
Speaker 4: This is insane.
Speaker 5: Sam told Justin, I've seen years of medical documents, even
Speaker 5: her cancer diagnosis. There's no way Sarah's lying. How would
Speaker 5: someone even make that up? More after the break.
Speaker 1: While Jess was meeting with Sam, I was just a
Speaker 1: few miles away meeting with Justin. He's the guy that
Speaker 1: Sam called to get a reality check when the rumors
Speaker 1: first started. Justin was one of Sarah's buddies from the VFW,
Speaker 1: and initially, like Sam, he was very much in disbelief.
Speaker 1: Even now, knowing everything he knows about Sarah, Justin still
Speaker 1: struggles to wrap his head around everything that happened.
Speaker 7: I'll be honest, I was a little hesitant to kind
Speaker 7: of relive this, but I think now we're gonna tell
Speaker 7: a story. I think it needs to be told fully,
Speaker 7: and so that's why I'm here.
Speaker 1: Justin is in his early fifties. He's fit, he looks
Speaker 1: like he could be part of a marketing campaign for
Speaker 1: Peloton or something, and he has this really disarming, gentle
Speaker 1: energy about him. It feels like an old soul to me.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to Justin for a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of reasons, but mainly because Justin's story. It's really compelling
Speaker 1: in its own right, which is probably why Sarah was
Speaker 1: drawn to it. Justin spent most of his career as
Speaker 1: an officer in the Navy as an aviator, and when
Speaker 1: he looks back on his life on all the dangers,
Speaker 1: all the near misses, all those moments that quietly changed
Speaker 1: the course of things, he often thinks back to two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, when he was in his mid thirties
Speaker 1: stationed in Iraq, and what he remembers is the fog.
Speaker 1: The fog came every night, thick and heavy with the wind.
Speaker 1: It got so bad some nights they could barely breathe
Speaker 1: this fog. It would stay with Justin in the years
Speaker 1: to come in ways that he could never have foreseen.
Speaker 1: It would lead him right into the haze of Sarah
Speaker 1: Kavanaugh's say, the fog in Iraq. It started like this.
Speaker 7: We weren't in a on a base called Taji, which
Speaker 7: is outside of Baghdad, and where we lived, we had
Speaker 7: this kind of compound area. It was about fifty yards
Speaker 7: from a burn pit. And at night the wind would
Speaker 7: shift and our whole living area was enveloped in what
Speaker 7: was a fog. You couldn't you could, You could barely
Speaker 7: see in front of you, a fog of what smelt
Speaker 7: like burning plastic every night.
Speaker 1: This fog that Justin's talking about, it's really a miasma
Speaker 1: of smoke and fumes. It came from a burn pit,
Speaker 1: which is how the military disposed of waste in both
Speaker 1: Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 7: Like when you eat, there's no there's not there's no
Speaker 7: water to do dishes, So when you go eat, everything
Speaker 7: is off plastic and that all gets thrown away. They
Speaker 7: dig a big pit. They throw all this stuff, plastic,
Speaker 7: medical ways, batteries, whatever, into this giant pit. They throw
Speaker 7: jet fuel on it and they light it on fire.
Speaker 1: Justin was responsible for nearly five hundred service members. Their
Speaker 1: safety was on his shoulders, and he and his leadership
Speaker 1: team were worried about the long term effects of the fog.
Speaker 7: We knew this wasn't gonna be good, right, and the
Speaker 7: contractor kept claiming that they do They did air tests
Speaker 7: and it was it was, it was okay, But I
Speaker 7: didn't buy that for a second.
Speaker 1: Then one day it all kind of came to a head.
Speaker 7: My master chief and I actually drove out there to
Speaker 7: the burn pit because we just saw this thick black
Speaker 7: smoke coming out, and we're like, what the hell's going on?
Speaker 7: And we went out there and you know, just like
Speaker 7: yelled at the guy basically like, what the hell are
Speaker 7: you doing?
Speaker 1: Justin says the contractor just shrugged and said, that's what
Speaker 1: I was told to do. No explanation, just business as usual.
Speaker 1: It would be more than a decade later before Justin
Speaker 1: learned the real consequences of those burn pits. By then,
Speaker 1: he was living in Rhode Island with his wife and
Speaker 1: three kids. He was happily retired from the military. All
Speaker 1: was good until he started to feel this small ache.
Speaker 7: I felt like, what it was a slightly pinched nerve
Speaker 7: in my left chest. And you know, I exercise so
Speaker 7: I get pinched nerves and stuff for once in a while.
Speaker 7: So I'm like, oh, it'll just go away.
Speaker 1: But it didn't go away, and eventually Justin's doctor at
Speaker 1: the VA suggested that he get a CT scan just
Speaker 1: to be safe. That's when they found the mass in
Speaker 1: his lungs. At first, the doctors told him not to worry,
Speaker 1: it probably wasn't anything too serious. I mean, he was
Speaker 1: so young, so healthy, so fit. But then he went
Speaker 1: to see a pulmonologist at the VA and learned he
Speaker 1: had stage four lung cancer.
Speaker 7: It was a huge shock. I'm working out, I'm healthy,
Speaker 7: everything's going great, and then someone tells you you're about
Speaker 7: to die. I just like I couldn't wrap my brain
Speaker 7: around it. My wife was I just kind of like
Speaker 7: broke down.
Speaker 1: Justin says his wife had always been his lifeline. Even so,
Speaker 1: this cancer diagnosis was uncharted territory for Justin and his family.
Speaker 7: When you know you're dying, it's a very lonely thing.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's very comforting that I have a family
Speaker 7: around me and a wife to support me and everything,
Speaker 7: But at the same time, you're the one that's dying
Speaker 7: and you're the one going through this personally, and it
Speaker 7: feels like you're very much alone.
Speaker 1: But he did have someone who seemed to get it
Speaker 1: at a personal level, and that was Sarah Kavanaugh. Sarah
Speaker 1: and Justin knew each other from the VFW. They've been
Speaker 1: close for several years, ever since Justin joined the Post
Speaker 1: back in twenty seventeen, and that whole time, Sarah herself
Speaker 1: claimed that she had been fighting cancer, lung cancer. Sarah
Speaker 1: claimed the cancer came from her military service. Claimed her
Speaker 1: vehicle had been hit by an ied and she'd inhaled
Speaker 1: the metal particles in the blast. For some people, cancer
Speaker 1: is now a chronic condition, something you can manage and
Speaker 1: live with, and that seemed to be the case with Sarah.
Speaker 7: So I immediately went to Sarah thinking, Okay, well there's
Speaker 7: someone going through the same experience I am. I don't
Speaker 7: feel so lonely anymore. I was still scared, but what
Speaker 7: she was sharing, what her experience was someone who's already
Speaker 7: started this journey is telling me, you know, things are
Speaker 7: going to be okay. That definitely helped.
Speaker 1: Sarah had always been a friend, but in this moment,
Speaker 1: their friendship seemed to take on a deeper meaning.
Speaker 7: No one really was in my shoes except her. At
Speaker 7: least that's what I thought. Here's another veteran that's going
Speaker 7: through the same thing I'm going through, so at least
Speaker 7: she knows we can support each other. And then we
Speaker 7: started actually opening up more about our treatments and how
Speaker 7: our chiatments were going.
Speaker 1: Sarah told Justin she was on an experimental dose of
Speaker 1: an immunotherapy drug and it was working, but according to Sarah,
Speaker 1: the VA was cutting back on her treatment. This story
Speaker 1: hit home for Justin. He'd faced his own bureaucratic roadblocks
Speaker 1: within the VA. In fact, he'd eventually gone outside the
Speaker 1: system to Dana Farber in Boston to get the experimental
Speaker 1: treatment that he needed and it seemed to be working,
Speaker 1: which gave Justin an idea.
Speaker 7: I thought, well, Dana Farber's this amazing place and I
Speaker 7: know that they can help her. And I said, well,
Speaker 7: do you have private health insurance because you need to
Speaker 7: go to someplace like Dana Farber and get real help
Speaker 7: because the VA is not going to help you. And
Speaker 7: she said, well, I don't have or I can't afford it.
Speaker 7: She just kept saying like she couldn't. That was too
Speaker 7: much for her.
Speaker 1: The whole thing was frustrating for Justin and he felt
Speaker 1: like he couldn't just sit there and do nothing.
Speaker 7: We veterans look out for each other, and I'm not
Speaker 7: going to sit here and let a fellow what I
Speaker 7: thought at the time was a fellow veteran die from
Speaker 7: lack of treatment when I know there's an alternative if
Speaker 7: I can help it. So I said, look, I will
Speaker 7: at least begin by paying for this insurance for you
Speaker 7: to be able to go to and a farmer.
Speaker 1: It was an incredibly generous offer which Sarah turned down.
Speaker 7: She initially said no, I can't ask you to do that. No, no, no.
Speaker 7: But then she kept telling me that, you know, she
Speaker 7: wasn't doing well, and eventually, you know, I said, look,
Speaker 7: I don't want you to die.
Speaker 1: At last, Sarah agreed. In the months that followed, Justin
Speaker 1: gave her money to pay for private insurance, over five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in total, all in the hope that it
Speaker 1: would keep her alive. Then one day, Justin gets a
Speaker 1: call from Dave Ainslie at the VFW. You know, the
Speaker 1: guy with the handlebar mustache. He was the previous commander
Speaker 1: at the post before Sarah.
Speaker 7: Dave told me like, hey, you know, like I got
Speaker 7: to tell you something about Sarah, and she's you know,
Speaker 7: she's face, she's not a veteran, and I was just
Speaker 7: in shock and trying to just like wrap my brain
Speaker 7: around it.
Speaker 1: Dave explained how he tried to retrieve Sarah's discharge papers
Speaker 1: her d D two fourteen, and how Sarah had been
Speaker 1: one step ahead of him, absconding with the paperwork before
Speaker 1: Dave could get his hands on it. Justin says that
Speaker 1: he believed Dave, but part of him resisted, part of
Speaker 1: him was in denial. He kept asking himself, who would
Speaker 1: do something like this and why. Around this exact same time,
Speaker 1: rumors began to swirl about Sarah being a fraud, and
Speaker 1: then Justin heard from Sam. Her head was also spinning,
Speaker 1: trying to make sense of all this.
Speaker 7: Sam and I talked on the phone and Sam was
Speaker 7: still in I think, still in denial, and said, this
Speaker 7: is not true. She actually does have cancer. I've seen
Speaker 7: the record, her medical records.
Speaker 1: Because remember Sam, she'd seen all the proof, the wounded
Speaker 1: warrior enrollment forms, stacks of medical records. Someone claiming to
Speaker 1: be Sarah's VA caseworker had even sent Sam official documents,
Speaker 1: blood work, diagnoses, intake forms. It all looked legit. It
Speaker 1: was enough to give justin a moment of pause.
Speaker 7: There was a little bit of a question in my mind.
Speaker 7: I'd say, she's actually seen medical records. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Like, was there some other explanation here, a story that
Speaker 1: made sense of it all, that turned the world right
Speaker 1: side up again and somehow transformed Sarah back into Sarah
Speaker 1: And if not, well, then so many other questions bubbled
Speaker 1: to the surface, like where did that stack of medical
Speaker 1: records come from? And what if the rumors were true,
Speaker 1: what did that mean, for Justin, if the one person
Speaker 1: who got it, who'd been through it, what if that
Speaker 1: person was just performing, mimicking his own pain, where did
Speaker 1: that leave him?
Speaker 5: In the days after that phone conversation with Justin, Sam
Speaker 5: still held on to the hope that maybe this was
Speaker 5: just some terrible misunderstanding. Sarah kept maintaining her innocence, saying
Speaker 5: she had the paperwork to prove it. Sam says she
Speaker 5: believed it, maybe because she wanted to believe it. At
Speaker 5: one point, Sam was driving to work and talking to
Speaker 5: Sarah on the phone about all of this. She got frustrated.
Speaker 5: She asked, Sarah begged her, really.
Speaker 4: Where's the paperwork? And she's like, I can't find it.
Speaker 4: I'm like, what what do you mean you can't find it?
Speaker 4: You're the most organized person I know. And she's like
Speaker 4: then she said, it's all a lie. And I was like, wait, wait, were.
Speaker 2: You ever in the middle terry?
Speaker 5: And that's when Sarah finally said it a one word confession. No,
Speaker 5: she'd never been in the military.
Speaker 2: I literally turned around and I was going to my work.
Speaker 2: I turned around and I went right to her house.
Speaker 2: What was that drive?
Speaker 4: Like, I don't even remember. I don't even remember like
Speaker 4: that drive. I don't remember walking into her house. I
Speaker 4: remember sitting on her couch and like me, like telling her,
Speaker 4: asking her, is this real?
Speaker 2: Is this real? Is this real? Is this real? You know?
Speaker 2: And she was like no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 5: It was an avalanche of betrayals. The cancer, the military service,
Speaker 5: the family down in Georgia, the brother she'd taken off
Speaker 5: life support. None of it was true. Sarah had been
Speaker 5: lying to her every single day for years about nearly everything,
Speaker 5: even things unrelated to her soulen valor scam, like still
Speaker 5: being married to Nicole, and in doing so she had
Speaker 5: made Sam the other woman. We actually talked to Sarah
Speaker 5: about this very moment.
Speaker 6: I remember her coming to my house and having that
Speaker 6: conversation and her sitting on the couch across from me
Speaker 6: and telling her the truth, like watching it hit her,
Speaker 6: you know, watching it overcome her. It was like watching
Speaker 6: her heartbreak, you know. And she started to cry and
Speaker 6: told me she couldn't do this and how could I
Speaker 6: do it?
Speaker 5: And all of those things. Sarah had spent hours and
Speaker 5: hours with Sam and her family in their home, nursed
Speaker 5: the wounds of Sam's divorce, helped her find happiness again.
Speaker 5: Sarah hurt Sam in all of these intimate, profound ways,
Speaker 5: and then she made that pain dirty, shameful.
Speaker 2: I'm still coping with it. Will it be upset?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 4: Memories will come up and I'll be like, oh, did
Speaker 4: that really happen? And I think, probably not, it was
Speaker 4: probably a lie because I'll still.
Speaker 2: Like be like driving or whatever, and then memory.
Speaker 4: Will come and all they I'll be like, oh, I
Speaker 4: wonder how Brody's doing, like things like that, you know,
Speaker 4: like it's so crazy.
Speaker 5: To me, Brody one of Sarah's fake brothers. Memories like
Speaker 5: this come back to Sam even now. And then there
Speaker 5: was the fact that Sarah was also Sam's patient, that
Speaker 5: she'd been getting physical therapy from her for years, and
Speaker 5: some of those bills had been paid for by a
Speaker 5: wounded warrior. That meant that the very basis of their
Speaker 5: relationship with a theft a crime. She sat on the
Speaker 5: couch confronting Sarah, the implications became crystal clear.
Speaker 4: I was like, oh my god. I was like, you
Speaker 4: basically stole money. And I said to I, go, You're
Speaker 4: gonna go to jail, Sarah, And she's like, you.
Speaker 5: Think next time on deep cover?
Speaker 6: I said like Hey, we are at your house.
Speaker 5: It's the police.
Speaker 1: Are you in the house.
Speaker 5: We need you to come to the door.
Speaker 1: Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy
Speaker 1: Gaines McQuaid and Tali Emlin, Additional production support by Sonya Gurwit.
Speaker 5: Our show is edited by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer
Speaker 5: is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.
Speaker 1: Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara.
Speaker 1: Our show art was designed by Sean Carney, fact checking
Speaker 1: by Anica Robbins.
Speaker 5: Special thanks to Sarah Nix, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake
Speaker 5: Flanagan and Greta Cone. Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick, I'm
Speaker 5: Jess McHugh and I'm Jake Halper.
Speaker 1: My co host Jess McHugh is currently researching a book
Speaker 1: on female con artists.