The Current - The fraudster who faked multiple pregnancies

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Kaitlyn Braun convinced dozens of birth doulas that she was pregnant, claiming she was suffering through an escalating series of disasters: rape, baby loss, and even a coma. Sarah Treleaven tells Galloway about the complex web of lies she untangles in the new CBC podcast The Con: Kaitlyn's Baby.

I'm David Rigeon, host of the award-winning podcast Someone Knows Something. Each season I investigate a different unsolved case, from a mysterious bomb hidden in a flashlight to two teenagers killed by the KKK. The New York Times calls SKS a consistently rigorous, intelligent gem, and Esquire named the series one of the best true crime podcasts of 2021. Find someone knows something wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast.

In November of 2022, a young woman from Brantford, Ontario contacts a doula for pregnancy support. In a phone call, she says she is in crisis, all alone and preparing to birth a stillborn baby. The woman's name is Caitlin Braun. She ended up having contractions while I was on the phone with her. They were timed out properly. When things would get more intense,

her cognitive abilities would come and go. When her labor progressed, she would be throwing up. Caitlin wasn't actually pregnant though, and this was not the first time that she had done this. Kaitlin faked dozens of pregnancies, deceiving Doula after Doula. Last March, Kaitlin pleaded guilty to 21 charges including fraud, indecent acts, false pretenses, and mischief. She was sentenced to two years of house arrest, then three years probation, then just a few

months in, she picked up the phone and did it again, twice. Sarah Trelevin is the host of the new CBC podcast, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. She's in our Halifax studio. Sarah, good morning. Good morning. This is a crazy story. How did you come across this? So, I came across it March 2023, Caitlin Braun is arrested and it's a local news story and I grew up in Burlington, not far from Brantford and it just came across my radar. And interestingly, I've sort of been in this world of, professionally speaking, I've been in this world of women who fabricate illnesses, crises for attention for almost a decade, tracking these stories.

But Caitlin's story was like nothing I had ever heard before. Who is she? Who is Caitlin Braun? So she's a very young woman. She was 24 when she was arrested. She's now 26. She was living in Brantford, Ontario. She was seemingly thriving.

She had graduated from a degree in social work. She had found employment in that area. She had friends and family that she was close to. But ultimately, she was arrested, as I said, in March 2023 and then subsequently pled guilty to multiple counts of fraud, harassment, and indecent acts for serially fabricating pregnancies dozens of times. And her general MO is that she would contact a doula, tell them she was in desperate need of help, and then spin out completely wild fantasies surrounding that narrative she built.

Can you just explain for people who don't know what a doula is, what they do? Sure. I mean, a doula is sort of like, we've been likening it to a pregnancy coach, and they're not medical professionals like doctors and midwives, so they wouldn't be doing things like checking for dilation, a lot of the physicality of a medical professional, but they're trained to give clients support.

They offer emotional and educational support during pregnancy, during labor, and beyond. In the first episode of this podcast, we kind of gave the little thumbnail sketch in the introduction. She contacts a doula saying that she is pregnant, that she is about to give birth to a stillborn child. The way that this proceeds is, and that's why I said that this is a crazy story, because the way that it proceeds is, and that's why I said that this is a crazy story,

because the way that it proceeds is almost unbelievable. Just briefly kind of run us through the story that she was telling, or the stories that she was telling the doulas that she contacted. So, episode one focuses on Amy and Katie. And these are two doulas who are friendly, who are working together, and Kaitlyn reaches out to Katie first and says, listen, I'm in this really tough situation. I am in late stage pregnancy. The pregnancy was a result of a sexual assault, and I wanted to keep the baby.

My entire family has abandoned me. I have no one, and I've just learned that the baby is stillborn. And I'm hoping you might be able to help me. I have no one and I've just learned that the baby is stillborn. And I'm hoping you might be able to help me. And so Katie, of course, you know, sees this incredibly tragic situation, desperately wants to help, and she enlists the help of another doula Amy. Over a series of 10 days, the two doulas help Caitlin deliver a stillborn baby with all of the associated sounds in the background, you might expect from that. And I should add that they were doing all of this by phone and text. And this was during COVID when a lot of medical services were provided online or by phone.

So they couldn't see her face to face. They could not physically see her. But she was sending them selfies from what she said was the hospital. And basically over these 10 days that they attend to her, it's just a cascading series of medical failures. The stillborn is, you know, she just, Caitlin describes to them this beautiful moment where she's finally able to hold her baby. But then the bleeding won't stop.

And then she's hemorrhaging. And then she has to have a hysterectomy, which is this very tragic thing because this baby had been wanted and this is such a young woman who, again, was a victim of sexual assault. And now she's looking at never being able to have her own children. And then after the hysterectomy, the bleeding still doesn't stop. So they have to do more exploratory surgery, whereupon they discover that Caitlin has stage four pelvic cancer.

And basically, her prospects for survival are slim. So along with Katie and Amy on the phone, she goes through her options for hospice care, telling them she's reading from brochures. They're talking about which facility would be better for her. They're talking about how they'll be able to come visit her and decorate her room at Christmas. It gets even crazier after that. Amy helps Caitlin write a will to disperse her possessions because she's now dying.

Shortly after that, Caitlin says she's being transferred to another hospital. She gets into the back of an ambulance. There, Caitlin graphically describes being sexually assaulted by a doctor. This continues to go on for several more days as these doulas are fielding all of this panic and devastation from Caitlin, doing their best to help her, until suddenly something happens and they realize, wait, maybe this isn't what it seems.

That's just the first episode, by the way. That's just the first episode, by the way. That's just the first episode. As this is unfolding, do these two doulas have any sense? Because you listen to that story, the average person's going to listen to what you just said. Is it, come on? All of that happens in the space of this short period of time. Did they have any sense that something was up?

Did the Spidey sentence go off? Anything picked up on the radar at all? In hindsight, yes. But I think something to remember about Caitlin is she was extremely good at this and extremely practiced and thorough. Dula's told me that they heard her getting into an Uber when she said she was going to the hospital.

They heard her talking to an Uber driver when she said she was going to the hospital. They said they heard background noises you might hear in a healthcare setting, like, you know, the beeping and whirring of machines and things like that. She sent them photos, photos of a tumor, for example. Photos of a tumor, photos of a stillborn baby. Like this was incredibly well documented and Caitlin constantly offered up proof of her situation.

And I think you also have to remember, she was consistently offering up these very practiced emotional hooks. You know, these doulas are in a caring profession. And Caitlin really targeted her narrative to people who were primed to believe her. She, the details of sexual assault, of stillbirth, of family alienation,

those are all things that really induce the people she contacted and manipulated into wanting to help her, into feeling like they were her only support system and maybe even clouding their ability to question her narrative. The series is called The Con, and it's not easy to be conned, right?

I mean, you feel at the end of it that you've been had and there are a bunch of things that maybe you should've noticed, things that you've seen, you feel bad that somebody was able to take you as a sucker in some ways. You spoke with a number of people, including one doula, and this was her very first client. That doula's name is Shawna. She asked that we keep her last name private. And when she found out that Caitlin wasn't pregnant, as I said, there's a real emotional wall that comes with that. Have a listen.

I have a history of depression. I have struggled for a long time, but I was actually on really good meds at the time, so I was doing fine. And then this happened and it was like a, there's a lot of thoughts that, that kind of hit me hard. One of them was, you know, how could I let this happen to me? Blaming myself for it even happening in the first place. What was the, the long-term emotional impact of Caitlin and the deception that she sold to Shana? So I think there are a number of different aspects to the emotional fallout of this for victims.

One, I think it's this idea of this self-doubt that Caitlin sows. This was Shana's very first client. She was excited about being a doula. She wanted to put her training into action. She really wanted to help other people. This is why she chose this profession. And I think Caitlin shattered Shauna's perception of herself as someone who

could do this work and do it safely. And it has taken a long time for her to overcome that. What did you hear from other doulas about this? You know, it's interesting. When I tell people about this story, a lot of people are kind of dismissive. You know, they're sort of like, well, she lied about being pregnant.

What's the big deal? But I think people really underestimate how destabilizing it is to think you're helping someone, to sacrifice elements of your own well-being to help someone, only to learn that that reality doesn't even exist, that that person you believed you were developing this intimate bond with doesn't really exist. And I kind of feel like it's, you know, in this case, it's been subject to the criminal justice system, and there are questions about whether it belongs there.

But you know, I feel like it has some similarities with romance scans, you know, where someone has purposely built intimacy under false pretenses with the ultimate intention of destroying the relationship. And the idea that someone has targeted you for manipulation, that they used you for some form of self-gratification without regard to your consent, without regard to your basic humanity, is a really specific violation. And there's professional fallout for these doulas. The work they do is predicated on trust.

And Caitlin has forced these doulas to second-guess their ability to blindly trust clients, especially those who have unusual or devastating stories. And those are the clients that need these doulas the most. In 2017 it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, the other thing about this is you start to, you like to believe that you're too smart to fall for something like this. This always happens with a scam. Oh, I would never fall for that. I'm, I'm, I could something like this. This always happens with a scam. Oh, I would never fall for that. I'm, I could see through this. I could be able to, to sniff this out and, and not be victim to something like this. You spoke with a clinical psychologist about why it is that doulas would have fallen for a con like this.

This is Dr. Catherine Nunes. You don't question a grieving mother or someone who's claimed that they've been raped, especially in the context of a society that historically has a narrative of not believing women. And so you're left with these injured people being unsure about how to balance that. How do I stop this happening to me again?

But also I believe people and I don't want to let go of that. Sarah, tell me more about that and what else you learned from her. So I think it's this profound destabilization that comes with no longer knowing who you can trust and what you can believe. And that really, really, again, undermines the work that these doulas do. Dr. Nunes also talks about this thing called betrayal trauma, which I sort of alluded to earlier, which is the unique damage done when you're lied to, when you're

trying to help someone. And in many of these cases, these doulas sacrifice their own well-being. You know, this was playing out over days, but it's hard to overestimate the intensity of the relationship they had with Caitlin. You know, lots of these doulas tended to her around the clock. I mean, they were fielding text messages and phone calls from her at 3 o'clock in the morning, at 5 o'clock in the morning. They skipped other work and personal commitments. Some of them sent their kids to stay with co-parents because their attention couldn't be divided because they were helping this young woman who so desperately needed them.

And to learn that it was all just in service to someone who set out to manipulate them is incredibly tough to swallow. So the big question that I had listening to this that people will have is, is why did she do this? What was she trying to get? What would she have to gain from telling lies like this? I mean, that is the key question. And I would love to have Caitlin herself explain it, though I wonder if Caitlin even fully understands why she does what she does or if she's acting primarily on impulse.

I have spoken to people close to Caitlin, and they've described this sort of overwhelming anxiety that Caitlin had from a very early age. spoken to people close to Caitlin and they've described this sort of overwhelming anxiety that Caitlin had from a very early age. She had a profound sense of abandonment that was related to her parents' divorce. Caitlin's mother told the court that, you know, when Caitlin was really young, she used to call her mother at work making sure she was still going to come home. Caitlin just seemed to, for a very long time, have a bottomless pit of need, particularly a need for intimacy.

And I am not an expert, but based on the people that I've spoken to and the research I've done, it sounds like this is some sort of maladaptive coping mechanism to try to fill that void. Because she wasn't doing it for money. She was not. She's not doing it for fame. No. She's trying to fill it for money. She was not. She's not doing it for fame. No. She's trying to fill a hole in some ways.

Maybe. Yeah, and I mean, I think that's part of what makes this series and the story so inscrutable, right? I mean, we're used to people manipulating us for money and status and sex and things like that. You know, what Caitlin did was weaponize compassion, right? That she made compassion this cynically transactional thing. And it's a complete inversion of our social construct of women as nurturers.

You know, and I think that part of the reason Caitlin chose doulas was not just because she appears to have some kind of pregnancy fetish, but also because she knew that these doulas would have what she wanted, that they would be someone to believe her, someone to pay attention to her, and someone to tell her exactly what she needed to hear. Is that why you said earlier that,

I mean, this is now in the criminal justice world, that maybe it doesn't belong there, or there are questions as to whether it belongs there? I mean, I think these cases of women who fabricate these kinds of things, they rarely end up in the criminal justice system. They're weird. There aren't a lot of parallels.

And our criminal justice system is primarily set up to deal with financial theft and physical violence. It's not really equipped to deal with the kind of emotional betrayal we saw in this case. You know, and even though Caitlin was flagged as being very high risk to reoffend, you know, the judge's hands, the joint submission by the Crown in Defense, they were limited in what they can do with a young, nonviolent, first-time offender.

And, you know, I attended a number of Kaitlin's hearings. The conversation that predominated was about her mental health and about how to get her help and questioning whether jail was the right place for her, even though there are public safety considerations for someone who's determined to reoffend. But you know, we can talk about mental health, but the paradox Caitlin presents is, how do you get someone to meaningfully engage in therapy to commit to getting well when they get off on being sick, when they've developed a whole persona around it? As you can imagine, people would like to hear from her.

And CBC put all these allegations to her. She would not comment on the record, but she called you. She did. What was that like? That was a shocker. I was completely unprepared for it. I mean, I had been trying to contact her for months, and she still had these charges pending. So I didn't expect to hear from her.

She asked if we could speak off the record. I agreed because I wanted to keep her on the phone. So, I can't tell you the substance of our conversation. I can tell you that she was lucid, she was extremely self-interested, and she appeared to me to be more than capable to advocate for herself. Did you get, and again, not betraying that confidence that you went into this with, but did you get a better sense as to what her MO was? Or at the very least, what might have motivated her? You don't have to say what that was,

but did you come out of that conversation kind of understanding a bit more what she was trying to do? No, I didn't. Wow. She says that there's a disorder that she says she has, right, what is this? Factitious disorder. Factitious disorder.

Yeah. I've never heard of that before. It's in the DSM-5 and broadly it describes when someone fakes illness or crisis, again, not for money, not for status, not for sex, but for emotional gratification. And that gratification typically comes both from the inducement of compassion,

but also from the ability to manipulate people, to invent scenarios, to create whole worlds, and then watching people perform for you essentially. The court appointed doctor in her case rejected that diagnosis. Why was that? So, you know, I'm not an expert. My understanding of the rationale is that the clinician found that Caitlin's actions

were too deliberate, too organized, suggesting that this clinician's understanding of fictitious disorder was that it was sort of an act of pure compulsion. But I have spoken to many experts who study fictitious disorder, particularly Mark Feldman. He's a clinical professor of psychiatry and adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He also wrote a book called Dying to Be Ill, True Tales of Medical Deception. This is really his area. And Dr. Feldman says that planning is actually a hallmark of this disorder,

that these narratives, these manipulations are often planned over weeks, months, and sometimes even years. And I mean, again, people might think that this is in some ways a familiar story, that they may have heard tales of somebody who said that they have, they're dying of cancer, for example, and that story spreads on social media, but often there's a financial component to this. There is. That's not the case here.

That is not the case here. And that's what makes this case additionally puzzling. And I think that's also what gives this case shades of additional darkness. You know, there's something really straightforward that we can comprehend about someone who's just trying to rip us off. They're just looking for money or sex or fame or whatever, as you said. You know, there's something really straightforward that we can comprehend about someone who's just trying to rip us off.

They're just looking for money or sex or fame or whatever, as you said. Exactly, that kind of makes more intuitive sense to us. I think that somebody trying to rob us of something emotionally is much darker and much harder to understand, and in many ways, it feels like a much more personal violation. Having been violated in that personal way,

and robbed of, as you said, emotional investment and empathy, for those doulas that were taken by Caitlin, what are they looking for? I mean, what would justice in their cases look like? I mean, as with many cases, I'm not sure there's a complete consensus on that. I will say that most of the doulas I spoke to, their key concern was that Caitlin never be able to do this again. And it's interesting what happens to victims sometimes in criminal cases.

They can sometimes turn to very hard line positions because their sense of violation is so great and they just don't want anyone to go through the same thing again. You know, one of the doulas I spoke to said she thinks that Caitlin in an ideal world would be locked up until she was in her 50s and could never do this again because it's not believable. I mean, that would be at least a 25-year sentence, right? But I think the doulas and the justice system were sort of at odds ultimately. There was an interest in public safety, but again she's a young nonviolent offender and there was a limit to what the system can do with someone who offends in this way, but is seemingly committed to reoffending. Where is she now? Where's Caitlin Braun now? She's back in jail. And that comes to the surprise of almost no one, to be completely honest.

There was sort of this almost grim understanding in the courtroom, I think, when Caitlin was sentenced and she received a conditional sentence in February 2024. So she was released to house arrest by April. So about two months by the end of April, she was back in jail again. She had again contacted individuals seeking emergency pregnancy support. And she's sitting in jail now, awaiting sentencing on those new charges. What is it, this goes back finally to the thing that I started out with,

which is how you came across this story, but also what intrigued you about this. Having looked at similar, certainly not the same, but similar stories in past, what is it about this case in particular that is so intriguing to you? I mean, there's definitely a number of things that were and continue to be intriguing to me. I was very drawn to the duality of Caitlin's life. This is somebody who lived a completely

bisected reality. On one hand, she had a degree in social work, if you can believe it, and she found employment in that field you can believe it, and she found employment in that field and she had close friendships and, you know, she had this very curated life on social media and the whole time she was hunting. That was really fascinating to me, the ability to cleave herself into two separate halves and in such a functional way. And then the other thing that has really, I think, persisted from the very beginning, since I first started exploring this case, is how we should perceive Caitlin.

You know, whether we should feel sorry for her. Is she a victim in this because of what she's going through? Yes. I mean, and maybe victim's too strong a word, but is she sort of, maybe is she a victim of her own mental health? And deserves our compassion too. And deserves our compassion. And I think it's a really tough question because on one hand, there's no question that she has a long history of mental health issues.

On the other, it appears that she is rational and capable of understanding that what she did was wrong. But I think so much of our ability as society to forgive people who do heinous things is predicated on their sense of remorse and their commitment to cease doing harm. And I'm not sure that Caitlin is genuinely remorseful. And I'm certain that at least right now, she's not fully committed to stopping the harm. This is a wild story. Sara, thank you very much for this.

Thanks, Matt. I appreciate it. Sara Trelevin is the host of the con, Caitlin's Baby from CBC Podcasts. The first episode is available now wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.