The Binge Cases: Doctor Billions

Incredibly sad and real. The narrator does not try to sugar coat or sensationalise the information she gathers. Doesn’t try to guide the listener to a finality. That’s the saddest part. There isn’t any finality as long as our social systems remain the same. Like a choose your own adventure book, you can watch the protagonist on their life’s path and there being only one choice or the other , their story can only end in the way that it does. No matter how hard supporting characters try, no matter how easy it is after the fact to see the peril ahead. It’s a story of everything. That’s not a story or fantasy or padded to lead the listener to feel a certain way. It’s much bigger and a podcast that will leave an impression depending upon the listener it will be different for each. Thank you for making it. I’m grateful for the grace I’ve been given for no reason other than the random acts of the universe…..

Has anyone writing these negative reviews about the framing of the story actually listened to this podcast? This is a story of a journalist who got to know a woman in prison and came to the situation wanting to believe her story of victimhood. Then the story completely unravels as she does more digging and we learn that this woman actually is not a victim but a calculated killer. The journalist isn’t making excuses, she’s walking us through the process of discovering this. This is one of the best series I’ve listened to in a long time and I just subscribed to hear the rest because I just can’t wait!

A reason I find this story compelling is the difficulty the legal system finds itself in in bringing cult leaders to justice, given how hard it is to prosecute someone for psychological manipulation that can lead to their followers doing harmful things to themselves and others.

I highly recommend this series. Having known a family directly impacted by this group I was extremely interested in this series. As the series title seems to imply a possible simple “scary” explanation & tone- it actually goes much deeper. As the legal system is just now starting to catch up with new laws in coercive control we have a long way to go. There is a lot to be learned in this series by those in the legal as well as psychological fields. As prevention & awareness is crucial- ways to prosecute evil amongst us must be pursued as well. Great job in getting so much in a 6 part series.

The content is good but the way the narrator speaks is grating. It’s like she’s intentionally trying to record ASMR sounds with her mouth. She speaks very differently during phone interviews in the podcast—in a way that feels natural and easy to listen to. Conversely, her altered speech during narration is distracting and I find it to be uncomfortable and difficult to listen to. I had to stop listening.

I waited to review this season (titled “What She Buried”) until the final episode in the hopes that there would be some type of genuine redemptive arc either for the narrator/host or the subject. The best I can offer this season is that it is a well-produced deep-dive into a serial fabulist who murdered someone in cold blood and maybe, maybe the last 20 minutes of the last episode circumspectly acknowledge that the previous six episodes incredibly misleadingly imply there’s more worth understanding about this person than that. The heavily implied framing of this show is that the subject, Kwaneta Harris, is a narratively complex individual who may have been unjustly sentenced relative to the circumstances of the murder she was convicted of committing. The reality is that nearly every aspect of Kwaneta’s story presented as potentially redemptive falls apart upon attempts at corroboration. Yet despite documenting lie after lie, the host continues to credulously platform unverifiable claims by Kwaneta, giving her the benefit of the doubt any time events were too far in the past or where she is the only living witness, when nothing about her indicates she has any interest (or perhaps even capacity) to be truthful. At times the host works to zoom out to highlight general injustices in the prison system (including extended solitary confinement), narratively implying perhaps that these injustices unfairly restrain Kwaneta’s capacity to reform or tell the truth. But it then wields these injustices to continue to excuse Kwaneta’s words and actions today, somehow presenting her as both highly charismatic and with agency while still downplaying her lies and crimes as matters she lacks a certain agency in. The podcast closes with extended discussion of mixtures of truth and lies, presented with a lingering hope that if Kwaneta were to understand the virtue of truth telling she could then be legitimately recast as someone more than a murderer and fraudster. The reality is this podcast instead allows a murderer to seemingly slander her victim, unrepentant in the face of egregious facts if it allows her to dupe one more mark. Honest journalism recognizes that the time dedicated to a subject, and the framing afforded a subject, present emotional valence to favorably or unfavorably cast a subject even beyond the words used. There was a point in investigating this story where the host knew she had selected a subject whose facts were as damning as the court system had convicted her on and who remained pathologically unwilling to acknowledge otherwise. She should have ended the podcast then and there.