Two Podcast Series Put Sexual Assault Survivors Front and Center

Note: This article discusses sexual assault, which may be upsetting to some readers.

After Tara Palmeri left her job as White House correspondent at ABC News in 2019, she began plotting her next move. But after a whirlwind decade marked by a rapid rise through the ranks at newsrooms including CNN, the New York Post, and Politico — where Palmeri has recently returned, to co-author its daily Playbook newsletter — she was less concerned with rushing back to a newsroom than she was with finding a passion project that would allow her to make an impact.

“Leaving [ABC], I realized, ‘Who do I want to be in this world?’” Palmeri said. “I have these skills that I learned — broadcast, writing, television, podcasting. What can I do with them to make the world a little bit better?”

She soon found the answer: Within months, she began reporting on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, alongside the women he abused as teenage girls. Her reporting resulted in “Broken: Seeking Justice,” a weekly podcast that debuted last fall and puts the survivors of Epstein’s abuse front and center. The eight-episode season follows “Broken: Jeffrey Epstein,” a 2019 podcast hosted by Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who uncovered the efforts to silence Epstein’s victims and the secret deal that then-US Attorney Alex Acosta struck with Epstein’s attorney, Jay Lefkowitz, to conceal the extent of Epstein’s crimes and his network of accomplices. (Acosta resigned from his position as Labor Secretary in July 2019, less than two weeks after Epstein’s arrest, following renewed scrutiny — prompted by Brown's reporting — over his handling of the case.)

Unlike the first season of “Broken,” which focused mainly on Epstein’s life, crimes, and inner circle, “Seeking Justice” puts the spotlight on the women who survived his abuse.

“I said, ‘This is going to be about the victims. I don’t even care if we use Epstein’s name,’” Palmeri said. “There’s enough out there on this guy ... this is about the girls, and this is about the people who are still alive.”

In the series, Palmeri travels the country with survivors — including Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Courtney Wild, and Marijke Chartoun — to attempt to track down more of the people in Epstein’s orbit who helped enable the abuse.

About halfway through the season of “Broken: Seeking Justice,” another podcast with a similar focus debuted: “Canary,” a seven-part investigative series hosted by Amy Brittain, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, features the stories of two women who experienced sexual assaults decades apart and became unexpectedly united. For Brittain, who reported on dozens of women’s sexual harassment allegations against former longtime television host Charlie Rose — who was fired from both PBS and CBS following Brittain’s reporting — “Canary” offered a rare way to convey to listeners the challenges survivors face in coming forward.

“In my previous [print] reporting about sexual assault, I’ve had a lot of meaningful, emotional — deeply emotional — conversations with people who are struggling with this decision, about if they want to go on the record or if they want to come forward publicly as a survivor of sexual assault, but I’ve never had permission to record any of that,” Brittain said. “It was frustrating for me as a journalist, because I felt like the nature of a lot of those discussions could shed more light on the struggles that sexual assault survivors go through.”

“Canary” does just that. The first episode of the series features Brittain’s reporting on Lauren Clark, who, as a 27-year-old hairstylist, was attacked by a 24-year-old man, Jayro Cruz, while on a late-night run in Washington, D.C., in April 2013. Cruz was sentenced to 10 days in jail, 80 days in a halfway house, and five years of probation for the assault. (Cruz was also supposed to undergo an evaluation of his mental health issues and substance abuse problems and receive treatment for his violent tendencies, but he never did, Brittain reported.)

After Clark told her story — which Brittain reported in the Washington Post — Carole Griffin, a then-60-year-old baker from Birmingham, Alabama, reached out to Brittain with her own revelation: Truman Morrison, the 76-year-old judge who had handed down to Cruz what Clark and others characterized as a lenient sentence for the assault, had sexually assaulted Griffin as a teenager and young woman, she claimed. (Morrison subsequently admitted to “sexual touching” of Griffin, but disputed parts of her allegations. He resigned from his senior status role at D.C. Superior Court last March, days after receiving Brittain’s inquiry about Griffin’s allegations against him.) The news sent Brittain on a more than year-long reporting journey to corroborate Griffin’s allegations, and eventually share them with Clark — which ultimately brought the two women together to bond over their shared experiences and courage in coming forward, captured in “Canary.”

That podcast, along with “Broken: Seeking Justice,” offers listeners the chances to hear firsthand these emotional conversations between survivors and reporters. They join a growing genre of podcasts centered on survivors of sexual assault, including New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and Kill,” on the survivors of convicted sex offender and former film producer Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes, and NPR’s “Believed,” on the young women who, as children, survived the sexual abuses of convicted serial rapist and sex offender and former Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. The podcasts allow reporters to do what they can’t in print: take listeners behind the scenes of reporting on sexual assault to highlight the sensitivities and complexities that are inherent in the processes of bringing these stories to light — for both the survivors who live them and the reporters who cover them.

The two face distinct challenges. As Brittain details in “Canary,” reporting on allegations of sexual assault requires extensive — and oftentimes intimidating — corroboration efforts, as journalists have to confront the accused. (For Ronan Farrow, and the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, their reporting on sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein resulted in being followed by an army of spies and private investigators hired by Weinstein.) Survivors typically have to relive details of their assaults over and over again, as reporters seek to confirm the details of their accounts, and often have to deal with their alleged abusers’ denials of their claims — along with being discredited, or worse, by family and friends.

“I can tell you as a reporter who has covered this topic before, these are hard stories,” Brittain says in the second episode of “Canary.” “They require a high level of sensitivity, and before these stories can ever be published, they have to go through a vigorous process of vetting. There’s also the challenge of confronting people — typically men. You have to ask them to respond to allegations of improper behavior. It takes a lot of work to represent all the facts fairly, and completely. And these stories can seriously affect the lives and careers of everyone involved: The accused can face permanent damage to their reputations, or even legal consequences. And the people who come forward, they can be criticized — and in some cases, even vilified.”

The amount of time Brittain spent with Griffin and Clark — and the emotional nature of their conversations, captured on the podcast — required her to reinforce that her principal role was as a journalist working to corroborate their claims, rather than a friend lending them a sympathetic ear, she said. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t sensitive to how the women felt: Brittain made sure the women felt emotionally supported while sharing details of their assaults, by conducting interviews in spaces that were comfortable to them and offering breaks when they felt overwhelmed, she added.

“As a journalist, your first and only loyalty is to following the truth — wherever the truth leads you,” Brittain said. “But it’s certainly important when you’re doing interviews related to sexual assault to be a human being before you’re a reporter — to realize when someone’s struggling.”

Palmeri’s approach to “Broken: Seeking Justice” was more overtly personal than Brittain’s was to “Canary”: In the last episode of the podcast, Palmeri reveals that she was raped at 16 years old — and that the Epstein survivors inspired her to come forward with her own story of sexual assault.

“I struggled with the idea of telling my story on this podcast — this is about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, not me,” Palmeri says in the episode. “But through this year, I’ve met so many incredible women who have shown me that you can be a victim and be strong — that being abused is not shameful.”

Palmeri’s realization helped her to approach the survivors with empathy, and with a desire to portray the difficulties of coming forward that she had also endured, she said.

“I think having had my own experience [of assault], I definitely came at it with a certain sensitivity,” Palmeri said. “I wanted to show the frustration of being a survivor and how so many people deny your story to protect themselves, and how that can be so painful.”

Ultimately, both Palmeri and Brittain were guided by the same journalistic impulse: to gather, corroborate, and present the facts of the cases — particularly given that, in both cases, the women’s accusations of sexual assault were met with at least partial denials from the accused, and in Epstein’s case, from his accomplices as well.

“I truly wanted to spend my time corroborating the stories of these victims, helping them to be presented as ironclad as they can be,” Palmeri said.

The reporters also share the perspective that their podcasts, and others like them, possess the potential to restore trust between journalists and the public, as listeners can learn how exactly journalists go about reporting stories — especially sensitive ones, like those focused on sexual assault.

“I think that if you show your work, it can add a tremendous amount of understanding of what it takes to report a story like this,” Brittain said. “I think ‘Canary’ does some of that — we show the work.”

Palmeri agreed, adding: “In this world of conspiracy theories and QAnon, it’s really good to be able to show people, ‘This is what real journalists do: They knock on doors, they go to people’s houses, they get facts.’”

She hopes to bring back another season of “Broken” in the future, focused on how survivors are moving forward as the truths of Epstein’s crimes continue to emerge. In the meantime, both Palmeri and Brittain hope their podcasts offer solace to survivors and insight to listeners about how reporters cover high-stakes stories centered on sexual assault.

“The more transparency we can show in the process, I think the more we can regain the trust of the public,” Palmeri said.