Hey, Betrayal listeners! Episode 4 just dropped yesterday (along with Episode 5 early and ad-free, exclusively on iHeartTrueCrime+). If you haven’t listened already, head over to Apple Podcasts, the iHeartApp, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or listen right here, on Beyond Betrayal.
If you’ve listened to Episode 4: SHOCK TO THE CONSCIENCE, you’ve heard the tapes of Joel’s Internal Affairs investigation — and how that process brought out the truth. In this installment of our Behind Betrayal series, I talk with the producer of our weekly Betrayal series, Mo LaBorde, about how her search for weekly subjects led us to Karoline and a much larger story than we could have expected. We also dig into our pre-interview process, how Joel’s Internal Affairs tapes changed the way we view internal police investigations, and what it was like having a front row seat to a manipulator’s attempts to control the narrative. You can find the transcript below.
If you have a story you’d like to share with us, or just want to say hi, reach out at betrayalpod@gmail.com. We always want to hear from you. And if you become a paid subscriber to our Substack, come on down and join us in the chat!
Andrea Gunning: I am here with my producer of the Betrayal Weekly series, Mo LaBorde. Thank you for talking with me today. I wanted to talk to you about Episode Four, which launched yesterday, so thank you.
Mo LaBorde: Hi Andrea. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Andrea Gunning: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Betrayal and the weekly series 'cause you primarily work on our Always On. What inspired you to apply to work on Betrayal?
Mo LaBorde: Wow. Great question. So I've been a podcast producer for about eight years now. I love true crime. Um, I love ethical true crime, true crime that's done well that I feel like centers the victim. And I remember years ago, I was working at another podcast production company and I heard Betrayal Season One, uh, Jenifer and Spencer's story. And I thought that the, the things I was hearing in that season were not conversations I had ever heard before. That really got me interested in the show. And I think I was also interested in the kinds of stories you were telling about crimes that go unseen, crimes that go untalked about, uh, CSAM, child sexual abuse materials, and child sexual abuse cases.
And I think that those are things that need to be talked about more. And so when I was hearing those conversations on Betrayal, I felt connected to the mission of what the show was doing. So when I saw that y'all were looking for a producer, I immediately applied.
Andrea Gunning: And so we've been working together for over a year now. We built the format for the Always On together. You are the backbone of our Always On show. And one of the biggest things about the Always On is finding diverse stories and finding, you know, unique perspectives for the Always On, because we really wanna show the the breadth of deception and how it impacts a lot of people's lives.
Which leads me to the biggest point here, is Karoline was originally slated for the weekly show. Tell me a little bit about how finding Karoline came to be, where did we find her, and what piqued your interest?
Mo LaBorde: Yeah, so I had been working, um, on the weekly series, we were just developing it. And one of the ways we started looking for stories was going through the inbox, the Betrayal Gmail, betrayalpod@gmail.com, where listeners write into us with their stories. You know, sometimes they just say, thank you for this episode, but sometimes they say, I have a story that I wanna share, and would you talk to me for the podcast? So there were thousands of emails that had come in over Seasons One and Two, when I wasn't part of the production, and when we were looking for stories for the weekly series, I started going back through the back catalog of emails and flagging ones that I wanted to follow up with. So I started reaching out to people who had written into us.
Andrea Gunning: Mm-hmm.
Mo LaBorde: And that is how I saw an email from a woman named Karoline Borega. And I'm gonna pull up this email that she had initially wrote to us.
Andrea Gunning: Oh, great.
Mo LaBorde: Yeah. The subject line was: "Spencer as a Police Sergeant."
Andrea Gunning: Mm.
Mo LaBorde: And Spencer, of course, being the perpetrator from Season One.
Andrea Gunning: Yeah.
Mo LaBorde: And in this email, you know, I think what really grabbed my attention is that she described what an amazing life they had had together. That they had had this incredible family, and that they had built their entire family around a shared value system. And a big part of that was that he was a good guy. You know, he was a police officer in their town and he was always the 'do the right thing' kind of dad. And they had just renewed their vows, she wrote about in this email, it's a long email.
Andrea Gunning: Mm-hmm.
Mo LaBorde: And, you know, then she went on to describe the day that her life changed, which we hear on the podcast, Season Four, you know, D-Day.
Andrea Gunning: D-Day.
Mo LaBorde: And when I read this email, I thought: we have to talk to her. And so we scheduled a pre-interview, I think we ended up talking for an hour. You know, and that's typical of, I do a, I do a ton of pre-interviews and about one in every ten ends up in a story that we hear on air. But it's not recorded, and it's just a way to see if we're aligned and if this might be, you know, a collaboration.
Andrea Gunning: Right.
Mo LaBorde: So that is, that's how it all started.
Andrea Gunning: I remember when the email came in and, you know, she's a brilliant writer and she's so detail-oriented. And I remember like, us saying, you know, if she's interested, we should really talk to her. I remember you doing the pre- and then pursuing it for the weekly, and originally Karoline was going to be a weekly episode. Maybe a Part One and Part Two, because there was a lot to her story. But at one point, you know, you came to me and said, I think there's something bigger here.
Mo LaBorde: Yeah. Well, I wanna back up even before that, because, you know, after the pre-interview, sometimes I talk to the person only on email again, until we do the interview.
Andrea Gunning: Mm-hmm.
Mo LaBorde: But with Karoline, she was cautious. She talked to me, I think three more times.
Andrea Gunning: Yeah. I forgot about this. Yeah. You're reminding me.
Mo LaBorde: Yeah. And I think we kind of developed a, a connection there. So then, by the time that we, um, got to the interview, there was a lot of emotion that I hadn't heard before because she was very guarded.
Andrea Gunning: Sure.
Mo LaBorde: And when we got to the interview, there were so much more, um, that I hadn't heard previously in the pre-interviews. And again, I was struck with that same theme from her email, of how good her life was before all of this came to light. How, how genuinely she believed in her husband, Joel. And I think I was really moved, I was moved to tears during that interview during the, especially the part where she talked about the birth of her first child, of her son, and how she's questioning that moment today. I think we took a break after that and came back to do a Part Two of the interview a few days later, because that had been so emotional for both of us, to be honest.
Andrea Gunning: Mm-hmm.
Mo LaBorde: And after the interview, it was long, it was like five or six hours, and there's a lot of tape you hear in Season Four that actually came from that interview. Like you said, we were initially gonna use it-
Andrea Gunning: Honestly a lot, like the majority of it. That original two-part interview that you did with her is the mid, is a good part of the series, really. Because you can't really always go back to the well, I mean, emotionally, she's so raw in that initial interview. But yeah, I mean, just even the length of the interview alone, there was a lot of, there was a lot there.
Mo LaBorde: There was. And so, after that interview, I remember coming to the, the weekly meeting with you and saying: this story is huge. It might be a three part for the weekly series. At this point, the limited run producer, Carrie, is deep into producing Stacey and Tyler's story, Season Three, and we're just trying to fill out the, get those episodes filled out for the first, uh, batch of 32 for the, the weekly. So, we're really like, great. Okay, we have a three-part story. And then, I remember you said, well, because he's a cop, maybe there are public records.
Andrea Gunning: Yeah.
Mo LaBorde: And our associate producer, Kaitlin Goldin, and I wrote to our legal team and basically asked for help in requesting files from the Colorado Springs Police Department to see if we could get any public records.
Andrea Gunning: So you knew, you knew that he had a whole investigation done. You knew that there were two, because you had already interviewed Karoline for many hours and she had shared, um, a lot about this, and so, you know, different states are, states are different, right? But Colorado had recently put out in 2020, um, they'd passed a law where you could look up history on police officers, if they had had any disciplinary action, you could get basically the files of their Internal Affairs investigation if it is of public interest, and does it rise to the level of public interest, and does the public have the right to know?
And so there was a lot of discussions, I know, remember when we were working this out, that we believe that the public should know about what was done here, and we were discussing it with our attorney and he agreed. And so we didn't really know what we had, but...we had the right to get access to these files, but we didn't know what those files would look like.
Mo LaBorde: Right. And like you said, Colorado is a particularly good state to try to report on the police because you're more likely to get, uh, documents. So we submit this request, and then we got an email from our attorney with an attachment of hundreds of files.
Andrea Gunning: Yeah.
Mo LaBorde: From the Colorado Springs Police Department.
Andrea Gunning: Mm-hmm.
Mo LaBorde: Including audio files. And that's really when I think we all met to say, not only is this story in line with the kind of things we talk about at Betrayal, in these crimes that go unnoticed and untalked about, these kind of hidden ways that as a team, we really came together to say: this story is a fit for the, the limited run, for Season Four.
Andrea Gunning: What felt important to me was, and what resonated with me in the original interview with her, was I could clearly hear there are moments in her life that she remembers one way, and then after D-Day, they looked very different. And, you know, you hear one person's account.
But then we had access to audio files, which, yesterday we launched Episode Four of Betrayal. And this is the episode where we really live in those audio files that we got from Colorado Springs Police Department. And when you hear them, what was astonishing to me is, you know, when we often work with subjects, you hear their accounts, and we do a lot of legal vetting, and we get a lot of additional sources to really vet all the different points of view to really be objective.
But when you listen to these Internal Affairs interviews, these are Joel's words. These are Joel's words on the record. He had signed a Garrity Advisement, and when you listen and you live in them, you can understand exactly what Karoline had been dealing with for 20 years. And it was in those interviews, during his Internal Affairs investigation, that really turned this from a weekly episode into a 10-episode limited run.
Mo LaBorde: It was pretty clear to us that what we had here was really an exceptional case, because a lot of times people like us, we wanna be able to report on the police. We wanna be able to report on, um, these positions of power that, you know, can go unchecked and unquestioned sometimes. But it can be very difficult to really get in behind the scenes, and get enough material to, enough sources, enough archival tape to develop that story. And once we were given those, um, Internal Affairs recordings, I think we all knew that this, this was meant to be a larger series.
Andrea Gunning: How do you feel like Karoline's story impacts how you think about police misconduct and Internal Affairs investigations? Does it impact how you think about it?
Mo LaBorde: Yeah. I do think so. I also, as a fan of true crime, you know, I listen to podcasts hosted by cops, like, uh, or detectives. Like, there's this podcast, Yeardley Smith's podcast, Small Town Dicks. And it's a great show, but the, it's police investigators basically reviewing cases that they have worked on, talking about them, breaking them down.
So as someone who follows true crime, I definitely understand that there are voices in this field that have been fighting for justice, fighting for victims' rights. And I think, when it comes to Joel and what Joel did, I have sort of developed the, the view on it that there are some people that are attracted to this job of policing because they like to have power over other people. And I don't think that's everyone that's attracted to the job. But I do think it was Joel.
And that fits with a lot of the other perpetrators we see in the stories we tell on Betrayal, is people who want control over other people, people who want power over other people, um, who wanna control the narrative, who wanna be able to keep things hidden and operate in ways that are self-serving for them. And I think that he used his badge to do that. And we really hear it in the story, and we hear it through the tape.
Andrea Gunning: I mean, it's arresting, to use the right, I mean to, when I first listened to the stringout, it was...it transports you into that Internal Affairs room. It really does.
Mo LaBorde: Yeah, it really does. And that's the kind of interaction and, and world that we never get to see as the public.
Andrea Gunning: I think the one thing that was clear after listening to the Internal Affairs investigation, when they're interviewing him, it's very clear that they really did investigate the allegations that were brought against Joel. And they were doing it to protect Joel, because Joel was claiming that someone was basically posing as a police officer, or, he says he was being catfished and someone was pretending to be him, and it wasn't. And so they really took it seriously to protect Joel, only to uncover that actually, all of that is a lie, and these allegations are true. And so one of the things that, I actually was impressed of how seriously they took the allegations, it's only after, and we won't get into this and the listeners will see this in the next episode, what happens with the investigation, where does it go? That's kind of a more, also shocking twist.
What shocked you the most in this episode, and what are you most excited for, for our listeners to hear in the, in the episodes to come in this season?
Mo LaBorde: I think what shocked me the most was hearing Joel in that reckoning interview with Strossner, when he realizes that he's really been caught and he might actually face consequences. You can kind of hear him crack a little bit, and I think the entire time in Episode Four, we have heard him trying, spinning his wheels to try to regain control of the narrative. And you can hear live, him realizing that he's lost control of the narrative in that, in that interview with Strossner.
I mean, we tell these stories all the time. I can't think of a single other story that, that we've featured on Betrayal where we've been able to really hear the perpetrator in real time, or hear the, the person who has done these things in real time, be confronted with them and realize for the first time that, that he might actually be caught.
Andrea Gunning: Right. So what are you excited for the audience to hear coming up?
Mo LaBorde: Oh my God. Well, we have a few big twists coming up in the series. And for me personally, one of the reasons I thought that this story was right to take on, I remember she was like, why are you doing this? Why did you pick me? And I remember thinking, like, you know, the police and the ways that they can sometimes go unchecked and abuse power.
Andrea Gunning: Yeah.
Mo LaBorde: That is a part of society that we have not been able to hear stories from. It is rare to hear stories from inside that world. And to be able to tell your personal story, along with this larger story, of the way this department has handled misconduct as a microcosm of, kind of how to police policing, and how it really works in one American city.
I think is, we are going to tell more stories of the way this department has handled police misconduct and the fact that Joel is not a one-off. So I think I'm, I'm definitely eager for people to see that larger, that larger pattern and context as well throughout the series.
Andrea Gunning: Yeah.
Mo LaBorde: Episode Four is like a masterclass in manipulation, in a way. You get to see how he is trying to do this live, how he's trying to lie and manipulate people in the moment.
Andrea Gunning: Yeah.
Mo LaBorde: But maybe just to call it a masterclass is not quite correct, because you also see him ultimately lose control of that narrative.
Andrea Gunning: Yeah.
Mo LaBorde: Her email to us is not even the only one in our inbox from a spouse or a loved one of a police officer. But I think similarly to what y'all did with Season Two, on CSAM, she is the one who wrote into us, and she also is the one who was willing to open her life up to us, to allow you to come into her home, literally, in Colorado Springs, and to bear all of this, because I think she wants to expose, I don't wanna speak for her, but I think that she's ready to tell her story and to reclaim the, her own story.
But I also think, you know, it's important to acknowledge that like, although this isn't the most egregious case of police misconduct we can find, it is a everyday case of police misconduct. There are a lot of spouses of officers who have had an experience like this before. And it, found out that their, their spouse or their loved one was hiding behind the badge and wasn't who they claimed they were.
Andrea Gunning: A huge part of this project and why we are reporting on this is that it is of public interest. People need to know what's happening within their police department. And this is just everyday people behaving like this, in a way that we really need to examine, and how are they being held to an account. And are they being held to account? So these are examples of stories that can't necessarily be put on the shelf. It's happening too often and more often than you'd like to think. So that's why we choose stories like these.
It's, it's, it's a pivotal episode and we, you know, we spent three episodes really building to what happened, their life, the immediate aftermath, understanding that there are two realities. And then in Episode Four, we really live in Joel's world through these IA investigations, and so it's a pivotal episode for the audience to really hear how Joel conducts himself, you know, outside of just taking Karoline and her community's word for it. So it's a really big moment, and then it starts this larger conversation about policing and what's happening at the Colorado Springs Police Department.
So, you know, there's a lot more coming in Episode Five. I'm really excited.
Take good care,
Andrea
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