Kaitlyn Braun, a pregnant young woman in crisis, takes dozens of birth workers through an escalating series of disasters – rape, baby loss, and even a coma. One by one, the doulas struggle to support her and grieve with her, and even save her life as they’re led down a distressing path. And then the truth comes out.In this six-part true crime series, Sarah Treleaven untangles a complex web of lies and deception to ask who Kaitlyn really is and why she did the things that she did. Cases like these puzzle legal experts and raise intricate moral and ethical questions. This is not your average con. Kaitlyn is not your usual scammer.Kaitlyn's Baby is Season 2 of The Con — a podcast exposing the art of deception — from CBC and the BBC World Service. Season 1 - the critically acclaimed catfishing quest, Love, Janessa, launched in January 2023.Content warning: The latest season of The Con contains references to medical emergencies, including baby loss. We also deal with sexual assault and there is some strong language. More episodes of The Con are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/kQaQgc
Chapter 1: What is 'The Con: Kaitlyn's Baby' about?
This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, Sam here. If you listen to Sea of Lies, I want to tell you about another CBC podcast I think you're really going to like. It comes from a CBC feed called The Con. In The Con, Caitlin's Baby, a woman named Caitlin Braun asks dozens of doulas to help with her pregnancy, only to string them along through an escalating series of disasters.
Rape, pregnancy loss, even a coma. One by one, the duelists struggle to support her and grieve with her and even save her life. And then the truth comes out. In the six-part series, host Sarah Treleaven untangles a complex web of deception to ask who Caitlin really is and why she did the things that she did. This is not your average con and Caitlin is not your usual scammer.
Now here's episode one of The Con, Caitlin's Baby.
Chapter 2: Who is Amy Perry and how is she involved?
A warning. This story contains references to medical emergencies, including baby loss. We also deal with sexual assault, and there is some strong language. Please take care. It's a Friday night in November 2022. Amy Perry is at home, in a town just west of Toronto, Canada. And she's sick.
I was fighting an RSV virus that was going around, so I was going to be home not doing anything.
She was spending most of her time in bed, bored and scrolling on Facebook.
I manage a Facebook group for local birth workers called Placenta Squad.
I just love that name, Placenta Squad. Amy, along with most of the Placenta Squad, is a doula.
I'm coming up on eight years. Yeah, I've been a doula for a long time. I've attended over 100 births now, and it's been a ride.
Doulas work with pregnant people. They're not medical professionals. They assist people through labor and delivery by offering emotional support. The focus is on the woman, not the baby. They will help with massage or position or talk you through the pain or when things start to get too overwhelming. And they're different from midwives. A midwife has medical training.
Often a doula will work alongside midwives or doctors, but unlike someone with medical expertise, they cannot give or prescribe medication.
It just made sense for me. I could make my own hours. I could work around my health. I could have my own business. I could be here when my kids were little, and it made a lot of sense for us. I'm the child of two parents of chronic illness. I've grown up taking care of people, and this is very natural for me.
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Chapter 3: How did Caitlin's story begin to unfold?
Katie is working with a client in crisis, who says her pregnancy is the result of an assault. Here's Katie.
She told me that, you know, generally that she didn't have family or friends to support her, that it was just like as traumatic a scenario as it possibly could be because she had just found out that her baby didn't have a heartbeat as well.
This client's name was Caitlin Braun, and she was 24 years old, and she would now have to birth a stillborn baby. Caitlin found Katie through social media. After sending a message and setting things up, Katie and Caitlin connected on the phone. Caitlin said she lived with her mom, but they didn't have the best relationship. Her life had been hard and full of neglect.
She said basically like she is just kind of a victim of the system, if you will, and had gone through like years of different forms of abuse and just was like somebody that had fallen through the cracks at kind of every point along the way.
This is November 2022. Remember COVID? Much of our world was online or by phone, and that includes doula work. So when labor started, it was Katie on the phone with Caitlin.
She ended up having contractions while I was on the phone with her, like working through contractions. They were timed out properly. When things would get more intense, her cognitive abilities would come and go, which is very normal. When her labor progressed, like, she would be throwing up.
It's at this point that Katie has to go to her day job. So she tags in Amy from the placenta squad, who's sick in bed but able to support Caitlin through what is bound to be an emotional and difficult birth of a stillborn baby.
We really spent most of that day on phone calls. She told me that she had earbuds in her ears so she could be hands free and that her phone was just in her pocket. And, you know, I was honestly in the same situation, just walking around the house, phone in my pocket, kind of puttering around, doing some cleaning while I was coaching through contractions.
Well, coaching through a stillbirth really isn't much different than coaching through any other delivery. When the contractions start, you know, we remind them that she's safe, that she's in good hands, that there's people here to help her, that she's not alone, that she's going to get to hold her baby soon.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Amy face while supporting Caitlin?
and a perpetrator who takes up the valuable time of a stressed and overloaded medical system. A woman who took so much from people whose job is to give. The people you will hear from never want any of this to happen again. But no one really knows what they would have done differently.
We always were asking why. I mean, from the very first moment, I wanted to know why. So it's a long story. Settle in.
For CBC and the BBC World Service, I'm Sarah Trelevan. And this is The Con, Caitlin's baby. Episode one, The Barking Dog. Hour after hour, Amy helps Caitlin with the early stages of labor. Amy constantly on the phone, encouraging, listening, crying, everything and anything Caitlin needs.
Yeah, I mean, it sounded exactly like a contraction. It had a buildup. It had a high point. It had to come down. They were well spaced apart. You know, there are some very subtle signs as birth workers that we can see that made sense to us.
The way her voice just got a little in her chest when she was feeling crampy or when she would tell me the different positions she would find herself just naturally going into through the contractions. She would tell me she was on her hands and knees or that she was squatting. That she was sitting on a yoga ball.
But after quite a number of hours of this, I asked, like, do you specifically want to lean into this? Like, do you want the tips and tricks to like really get this rolled over into an actual active labor? I was really coaching on how to move her body through the contractions.
I was really focused on things like making sure her mood stayed as positive as possible because we know that that negativity just works against us through the labor process. So we were making jokes. We were building a rapport. We sort of learned kind of quickly we have the same sense of dark humor. We
We're making comments about our families, and she was asking questions about me and getting to know me, and I was doing the same with her.
Here is this lonely young woman, traumatized by a sexual assault that led to a pregnancy. A baby that died in utero at around 32 weeks, and she is now birthing her child alone. She tells Amy and Katie that her family has abandoned her, that they blamed her for the rape and didn't support her decision to keep the baby.
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Chapter 5: Why was Caitlin sent home from the hospital?
Okay, well, maybe he's picking somebody up on the way. Like, I don't know. I'm not there. I can't see your phone. And I'm like, okay, did you do everything right? Yes. Another 10 minutes goes by. Once we get it 30 minutes, she tells me that she forgot to hit the confirm ride button. And so that's why the time had been dancing. And so she said, yep, it's for sure hit now.
He's definitely on his way. I have a time he's going to be here. And I am honestly like freaking out at this point, like contractions are strong. And in my head, I'm picturing her having a stillborn baby in the doorway of her house when an Uber driver pulls up. And I, I'm losing it. So I ask if I can call an ambulance for her. And she said no. I don't know her address at this point either.
So even if I was to call 911, I don't have an address to send the ambulance.
Back and forth they go until finally the car arrives.
So she gets in the Uber. I hear a car accelerating and decelerating. She's speaking to somebody else in the car. I can't hear them because I'm just in her earbuds. But she's speaking as if there's somebody else in the car. And we're even making jokes about how this will be the story of his Uber career.
Amy feels a wave of relief once Caitlin makes it to the hospital.
So we get to the hospital. I hear... You know, you hear when people are walking through different environments. So I could hear, you know, it sounded like a lobby. I could hear what sounded like more enclosed space, like an elevator. We did a contraction in the lobby. She was working her way up. She was excited that there was nobody in the elevator.
And when she got to labor and delivery, she told me she was going to hang up so that she could deal with that. And she was going right in.
When they finally reconnect, there's news. Caitlin's labor is progressing. She's four centimeters dilated, which for Amy means she's now in active labor and can be admitted to the hospital.
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Chapter 6: What complications arose during Caitlin's delivery?
But right now, you just need to know that you're safe. These are medical professionals. They're trying to do what's best for you. If you're bleeding this badly, then they're trying to save your life. And I'm here for you, right?
But things go from bad to worse. The hysterectomy didn't stop the bleeding. Caitlin needs life-saving surgery and needs to be moved to a bigger hospital with a trauma unit.
It sounded like she was fading, like it sounded like she was having difficulty talking, like she was having difficulty staying awake. She would talk about how scared she was.
Amy stays with Caitlin on the phone the whole ambulance ride to the bigger hospital.
She would explain what the inside of the ambulance looked like. Honestly, she used a lot of tactics that I have been taught all my life in therapy. Things like focusing on one object in the room and describing that object in the room. or focusing on one feeling you're having instead of all the different feelings you're having. And so we spent time doing that.
I would remind her, you know, it's 20 minutes up the road in an ambulance driving bad out of hell. You know, we're not going to be that long. We can do this. We counted down the minutes together.
Suddenly, Amy realizes that none of the doctors or nurses working on Caitlin have Amy's contact information.
She described to me, and I listened to her speaking to somebody else and giving my contact information, and it being written down on a pink sticky note which was put on the front of her file that was being passed over. That if something happened to her during the surgery... that, like, her mom didn't know us, her family didn't know us, no one would know to call us.
Katie and I were fully prepared to be searching obituaries for the next four days if we didn't hear from her.
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Chapter 7: How did Caitlin's medical situation escalate?
At this point, Katie, Amy's friend and fellow doula, is back on the calls, sometimes together and sometimes with Caitlin alone.
There was no ability to just, like, continue on with life as this was happening, like, everything was on hold. I was calling in sick from work. I told my boss, like, I have a friend going through an emergency. I need some time off.
My partner was like basically keeping me fed and like semi-functional and like having to explain to our families at that point too, of like, I was at my partner's house and his mom was like, Hey, why hasn't Katie left the basement in like a week?
She had told us that the blood clots were getting bigger, that one of them was weighed in at 5.7 pounds. She even explained how it ripped her as it came out. She would start sending us selfies, but they were all very close. So we couldn't necessarily see what was happening in the background. And the whole time she wore the same sports bra.
We had like a half a thought, like why isn't she wearing a hospital gown?
Caitlin tells the two doulas that she's starting to go septic. She needs dialysis. It's a smorgasbord of catastrophe. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong. And all to this desperate young woman who just lost her baby.
At some point, there was a more major surgery that needed to happen or something that we couldn't be there for. And she's getting more weak-sounding, and she says that she can hear doctors yelling at each other, and people are disagreeing with treatment. It feels tense on her end. And we are hysterical. I mean, we are both crying. And...
We just listened basically like at some point she's just stopped talking and all we could hear was her breathing on the phone and we kind of assumed maybe she had been put under but we weren't really sure and then the call was still going but it just goes quiet. And we were even, like, we were both on the call, not speaking, texting each other, going, how long until we hang up?
Like, once in a while, we're just saying, you know, we love you, Caitlin. If you can hear us, like, you're going to be okay. We'll talk to you when you wake up. Everything's going to be okay. Like, you're going to see another day.
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