If you enjoyed Spotlight: Snitch City, you might be interested in the new season of Deep Cover from Pushkin Industries. Deep Cover: The Truth About Sarah is a podcast about people who lead double lives, reveals a story of stolen valor and misplaced heroism. Sarah Cavanaugh was many things: a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a young woman fighting cancer. Sarah was everything people wanted her to be – until she wasn’t. Turns out, no one knew the real Sarah. Not her comrades. Not her wife. No one. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jake Halpern and acclaimed investigative journalist Jess McHugh unravel an epic six-year deception that upended lives of countless people. Here’s episode 1, The Warrior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the story behind Sarah Kavanaugh?
Hey everyone, Dugan here. I'm back in the feed to share an episode from the new season of Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah, a podcast from our friends at Pushkin Industries. Deep Cover is a show about people who lead double lives and weave webs of deception, and their new season is a story of stolen valor.
Lies tend to be fragile and temperamental, with small ones flourishing and bigger ones wilting under their own weight. Not in the case of Sarah Kavanaugh. The bigger her lies grew, the more real they became. Sarah was many things. A decorated veteran. A Marine who saved her comrades. A young woman fighting cancer. Sarah was everything people wanted her to be. Until she wasn't.
Turns out, no one knew the real Sarah. Not her comrades. Not her wife. No one. On this season of Deep Cover, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jake Halpern and acclaimed investigative journalist Jess McHugh unravel an epic six-year deception that upended the lives of countless people. If you want to hear more, find Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah, wherever you get your podcasts.
And now, here's the episode.
Hey, I'm just recording here because I'm in the car outside the English department and I just got this letter. which was sent to me by Sarah Cavanaugh. Okay. October 12th, 2024. Dear Jake, thank you for sending me the articles and book that you've written. You have a distinct style when posing questions that really makes one think about the messages between the lines.
Jess and I have spoken twice and emailed several times to talk about my actions and the consequences. It is important to me that you know, I know and knew several months before my arrest that what I was doing was wrong. I could not have imagined the laws I was breaking, but know now that I was always guilty. What is your opinion about my crime?
I ask this because no matter who we are, we bring biases and I'd like to know what you are bringing to the conversation. Also, I have not always thought about others before myself and will always be deliberately sensitive to other people for the rest of my life. I'm looking forward to meeting you, even if it's virtually. Sincerely, Sarah.
This letter that I just read you, it's written on lined paper, the kind I used in grade school, and the penmanship is flawless. When I read it for the first time, I was in my car outside my classroom at the university where I teach, and I found myself just sitting there, reading and rereading this letter. "'What is your opinion about my crime?' she asked. Now that was interesting to me.
It was almost like right from the jump, this woman, Sarah Kavanaugh, had flipped the script, like she was interviewing me." And then there was this line. I'd like to know what you were bringing to the conversation. Funny, because we weren't even having a conversation yet. But looking back, I understand now that the conversation had already started.
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Chapter 2: What was Sarah's life like before the retreat?
So if you're falling short, I mean, you're already doing one thing wrong because you're a woman. So it's like you can't do two things wrong.
Dex was especially impressed with Sarah. She was somehow doing all these really intense workouts while also dealing with what seemed like a pretty serious leg injury.
She also was taking injections of some kind, some type of medication for her hip. And she was like telling us like if she doesn't, you know, put this shot in her hip, like her leg goes numb.
Because Sarah was so modest, because she didn't boast or advertise about who she was and what she'd done, there was an air of mystery about her. Sarah said she was a cryptolinguist. She'd served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. She came from a military family. Her brother had been a Marine, too. He was killed in combat and buried at Arlington Cemetery.
In private moments, Sarah began to open up to Dex.
She told me that she had been in a convoy and her vehicle was hit by an IED. You know, the Humvee blew up. The door from the Humvee, like, crushed her hip. And somehow she was able to, like, get out of the Humvee.
As Sarah told it, her hip never healed properly. From the knee down, her leg was basically dying. But that's not all.
We're all sitting in the tent and she's about to leave and we're talking. And she tells me that like she just got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. And I like remembered this because she cried because I got up to give her a hug.
So just to recap, here's this woman, Sarah, who at the time was just 30 years old, already a decorated war veteran, strong, modest, quietly brave, sprinting down these mountain trails and giving herself these injections to stem the pain. And on top of it all, she also has stage four lung cancer. Dex had to coax it out of her because Sarah's story came out in dribs and drabs.
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Chapter 3: How did Sarah's past impact her present?
How she'd gotten a bronze star for her bravery. And now, she had cancer in her lungs because of the toxic chemicals in that explosion.
It seemed incurable. It was terminal. The VA wasn't helping because she couldn't prove that the cancer was combat-related. I was just like, goodness gracious. Like, everything that you've been through from...
your injuries to the cancer to gonna lose your leg the amount of tragedy that in trauma and I just resolved in that moment like I am gonna do everything that I can do to help you and what do you need and she needed employment she said she didn't have a very good job
She told Tom that her plan had been to get a PhD in English literature. She'd even been accepted into a program at Johns Hopkins. But then the VA delivered some shattering news. They told her that she couldn't use her GI Bill. Why? Because her life expectancy was shorter than the time it would take to finish the program. It was devastating. All of it.
Tom, being a guy of action, was like, maybe I can create a salaried position for you at Patrol Base Abate. At the time, the organization was run entirely by volunteers. There were no paid positions. But the organization did have donors, some with deep pockets. And Tom thought, maybe one of them would be willing to pay for this.
Tom even had a particular donor in mind, a woman who lived up in New Hampshire.
So he wants to get all his ducks in a row. He asks Sarah for a copy of her DD-214. That's the official military discharge paper that all service members receive explaining how and when they left the service. Sarah sends him the paperwork. He says he remembers vividly the moment he received it. He was sitting in his car, in a parking lot, about to get a haircut.
He starts scanning through the documents on his phone and something catches his eye. The DD-214 says Sarah retired as a corporal, which is weird because she'd made it all the way up to staff sergeant. In fact, he'd seen a picture of her with a staff sergeant insignia. So he calls her up.
And so I just said, hey, Sarah, I'm going to New Hampshire tomorrow to ask for $60,000. before I do that, could you help me understand why it says that you're a corporal here? And she's like, well, I didn't really want to get into all that, but I was sexually assaulted on ship by the commanding officer.
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