Betrayal - A Conversation with RAINN | BONUS | Saskia’s Story

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Host Andrea Gunning sits down with Jennifer Simmons Kaleba, the VP of Communications at the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. They discuss Betrayal’s approach to working with survivors and telling stories about trauma.   Content warning for discussions of rape, child sexual abuse, and child sexual abuse material.  If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at [e-mail] and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Follow our newsletter and join the Betrayal community at betrayal.substack.com. For resources on sexual violence, visit rainn.org/betrayal. You can also get free, confidential, 24/7 support through RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline. Just text HOPE to 64673 or call 1-800-656-HOPE. Every state has a domestic violence coalition, and many counties also have resources available. If you’re looking for help, go onto your county’s website to see what resources are available locally, or search the web for your state’s domestic violence coalition. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human. Hi, listeners. I'm Jamal Jordan, the host of Roershack, Murder at City Hall podcast. In July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis, an ambitious rising star in Brooklyn politics, was murdered inside New York City Hall, shot to death in front of more than 200 people. The killer? His political opponent, a man named. named Neil Askew.

The full story of this shocking public murder and the relationship between these two men has not yet been told. Until now. I want to let you know that you can get access to all episodes of Rochak murder at City Hall 100% ad-free with an I-Heart True Crime Plus subscription

available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to all episodes of Rochak Murder at City Hall one week ahead of everyone else, available only to Iheart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head's Apple Podcasts, search for IHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. This financial literacy month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore,

building a business around the life you actually want. It was just us, making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened. On Those Amigos, entrepreneurs like America Sam and Joe Huff, get real about money, taking risk, and while your dream might be. be the smartest move. At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about? And the conclusion I'm came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way. Listen to those amigos on the IHIR radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of IHard Media. And I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic,

stories from the frontiers of marketing. Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing. Coming up this seasonal math and magic, CEO, of Liquid Death Mike Cessario. People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower. It's really like a stone sculpture. You're constantly just chipping away and refining. Take to Interactive CEO, Strauss Selnick, and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.

Listen to Math and Magic on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

you get your podcasts. I'm Andre Gunning and this is Betrayal. Today we have another bonus episode. On our show, we tackle sensitive topics, from rape and child sexual abuse to financial fraud and identity theft. We handle this work with a lot of care, using trauma-informed interviewing techniques,

consulting mental health experts, and communicating with our subjects in every step of production. But we're always trying to do better and to evolve as our culture evolves. That's why last year we reached out to Rain, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. Throughout season five, they've been advising us on ways to approach our work with survivors.

Recently, I sat down with Jennifer Simmons-Kaliba. She's Rain's Vice President of Communications. I wanted to share a bit of our conversation with you and to give you a look into the kinds of conversations we're often having at betrayal. I hope you enjoy. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself in your position at Rain,

and what Rain is? Rain is the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization. I'm the vice president of communications. So my role is to ensure that people are more aware and educated about what sexual violence is. And the work that I get to do is make sure that more people understand that the resources are there, that they are not alone, and that if you or somebody in your life has experienced sexual violence, that you have people to turn to. How would you define Rain's role in working with the trail?

So one of the things that Rain does is we work with entertainment companies and studios and producers to insert and establish responsible and relevant storytelling in the journey of making people more aware through storytelling about sexual violence. So we worked with you guys. We did a responsible storytelling. training session with you. We've worked with you when it comes to interviewing survivors during season five of betrayal. And it's just been such a pleasure to be able to be a part of both the education and also the advancement of this responsible storytelling that you guys are doing a

betrayal. You know, when I look back on the canon of betrayal, there are certain things that our team would probably write differently today. I'm curious from your point of view, When you look back on a body of work that still survives and exists in the world and is there for people to meet it at any given time, what type of obligation do creators and writers have to address that work if it's outdated culturally with language? What do you feel is the obligation of those producers and creators? It's a really interesting question, particularly for something that you put out into the world and then still have some measure of control over. You produce a movie or a film, you produce a book, and it goes out there. And the level of effort that it would take to recut, redo, republish, all of that is a challenge. But for serialized shows like yours, the question of going back and looking at the things that you wish you had done differently is a really valid one.

And I think what I hope people who are creating this kind of content do is that they give themselves a degree of grace for what they knew at the time and for the best that they were doing at a time, and that if they get it really wrong, that they have some sort of clear discussion or apology or, hey, that really was not what I wanted to do. And then they move forward and change the behavior. And then they change how they approach, because that's really the measure. And that's really where the learning happens. Yeah. I think one of the places that we often struggle with is the language around victim and survivor. And I'm curious if there is like a hard and fast rule for you in terms of that language. Yeah. The hard and fast rule is it's what the person wants to be called. And respecting that and respecting what it means to them.

And then the idea that if you get it wrong, you say that somebody is something that they don't feel they want to be, you change it. You say you're sorry, you change it. It's interesting because we tell stories over 10 episodes. And in those 10 episodes where we're talking about one person's story, it's one person's journey. So episode to episode, they can be in a different place in relation to what happened to them. And that language can. can be tricky to know. And I think you're validating something for me, which is having constant conversations with our storytellers to be like, at this point in the story, how would you identify it?

You know? Yeah. But also holding in consideration where the audience is meeting this person and this journey too. So for season two of betrayal, I remember a big discussion was, does our audience know what CSAM is?

And does our audience know why we can't say what people would colloquially say that material is? Curious what your thoughts are, even just saying it as a manner of explaining and showing why we're not going that route? Like, how do you feel about that? We talk about this with media training a lot. So I'm going to say the words that people will say, so you're going to say kitty porn. That's what's what it's kitty porn. No, no, no, no. But when you say child sexual abuse material, for the person who has no connection, they have no idea what that actually means.

But you know that that person, if they knew what it meant, they'd be like, oh my God, that's horrible. So like explaining and breaking down why the sentence doesn't work, but acknowledging that people may need to see that to make that next connection is important. And that's something that in the media people are now getting really comfortable with. But if we go back to the beginnings of rain in the 90s, when we were trying to get people to recognize that this issue was important, networks weren't saying rape on TV. Right. And it's so important. So, you know, euphemisms around rape as a storytelling device because you couldn't say the words. So how important is it to be able to be able to.

to say, you know all these kind of workaround phrases? What you're actually talking about is rape. And that's actually something I saw with Saskia this season, and it struck me. One of her friends saw the videos. And instantly, the words that came out of her mouth were she's being raped. There was no hesitation, no working around it. No, her husband is doing something terrible.

Nothing. She was raped. That is progress. You go from not talking about rape. not saying the word rape 30 some odd years ago to a everyday individual who is looking at something happening through the lens too of intimate partner violence and naming it, naming it immediately. That's the kind of progress we're talking about. Then my producer, Caitlin, chimed in.

In season three, we were telling the story from the perspective of both Stacy and Tyler. Tyler, Tyler being a child victim of sexual abuse, and Stacy being a mother who had her life absolutely torn apart by what her husband did to her son. I think as a show, we've changed our approach a little bit in how we've learned to balance the perspectives of multiple victims without getting into that comparative trauma piece. And I also think as creators we struggle with, well, are there ways we could have done even better as storytellers in doing right by the victim of child abuse? So at Rain, when you think about that issue of how do you tell stories from the perspectives of multiple victims, what are some of the strategies that come to mind? To the point of comparative trauma in any kind of storytelling, I think about it as a handful of, of different size rocks that you throw into water. No matter the size of the rock, there is a ripple.

But every single person is the center of their own ripple. Every single person is feeling a impact, feeling a ramification, an emotion. They are all coming to it from their own center of the story. And as long as we acknowledge that everybody's ripples matter to that person at the center of them, then we can stop comparing the trauma of other people and then just start thinking about the individual humans involved.

To me, it's not a zero-sum. There's space for every version of this conversation. And that's something that we're often discussing. You know, I knew that the way that Stacey and T's in three, the way that she talked about our ex-husband, would be really difficult for people to hear. But I also knew that there were people who were alone in bed in the middle of the night, staring at their ceiling, thinking, I just wish my life could go back to before times,

before the knowing, before everything came apart. It was the version of my life where I didn't have to be wrestling with all of these terrible thoughts and feelings. And yeah, the purpose of all of these different viewpoints is really what do you want people? people in the end to be able to connect to. The clarity for me is purpose, is just doing it intentionally. What is the purpose? If one person feels less long by listening to this,

we've done our job because that was the intention going into the project. Yeah. Well, thank you for everything that you do. And thank you for everything that Rain does and contributes. And thank you for contributing to betrayal. Hi, listeners. I'm Jamal Jordan, the host of Roershack Murder at City Hall podcast. In July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis, an ambitious rising star in Brooklyn politics,

was murdered inside New York City Hall, shot to death in front of more than 200 people. The killer? His political opponent, a man named Neil Askew. The full story of this shocking public murder and the relationship between these two men has not yet been told until now. I want to let you know that you can get access to all episodes of Rochak murder at City Hall 100% ad-free with an I-Heart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

Plus, you'll get access to all episodes of Rochak Murder at City Hall one week ahead of everyone else, available only to IHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iOS. Heart True Crime Plus and subscribe today. This Financial Literacy Month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore, building a business around the life you actually want. It was just us, making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.

On Those Amigos, entrepreneurs like America Sam and Joe Huff get real about money, taking risk, and while your dream might be the smartest move. At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about? And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way. to those amigos on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of IHard Media, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing. Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries

while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing. Coming up this seasonal Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario. People think that creative ideas are like these light-balled moments that happen when you're in the shower. where it's really like a stone sculpture. You're constantly just chipping away and refining. Take to Interactive CEO, Strauss Selney, and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey. Listen to Math and Magic on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change.

We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.