Sound Judgment

Elaine Appleton Grant

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How to Track a Liar with Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story Showrunner Karen Given

11/16/2023 • 43 min

If you’ve ever worked on a serialized narrative podcast, at some point you may have gotten all tangled up. Did Miss Plum find the gun in the library in episode 1? Then why is that same dialogue here again in episode 4? Why was the victim found dead in episode 2 but somehow you forgot and he's alive and kicking three episodes later? Keeping a complicated narrative straight across multiple episodes is hard enough when you’re sure of all of the facts. When you’re investigating a compulsive liar, it’s almost impossible. That’s the situation showrunner Karen Given walked into when Dear Media hired her and reporter Sara Ganim to investigate a serial scammer for Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story. Coco claimed to have been sex-trafficked for years, after which she gained acclaim as an advocate for trafficking victims. She also claimed her therapist locked her in a basement, her mother killed her sister, and that she was dying of cancer. The more Given and Ganim investigated, the more it seemed reasonable to assume that Coco Berthmann lied about everything. But what if parts of her outlandish story were actually true? Karen Given and I dissect an episode of Believable: the Coco Berthmann Story to give you some hard-won lessons on how to create a serialized narrative podcast when you can’t be certain of anything.

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