Listen Now — Deep Cover: The Truth About Sarah

Pushkin.

Hello everyone. We're gearing up for some exciting things coming to the Bad Women Feed. But in the meantime, I wanted to share with you a preview from the new season of another Pushkin podcast, deep Cover. Deep Cover is a show about people who lead double lives, and their new season, The Truth About Sarah is a story of stolen valor and misplaced terroism. Lies are often fragile and temperamental. The small ones can flourish, while the bigger ones will

Hey, I'm just recording here is it in the car outside your English department? And I just got this letter, which was sent to me by Sarah Cavanar Okay October twelve, twenty twenty four. Dear Jake, thank you for sending me the articles and book that you've written. You have I just think when imposing 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

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 are 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 and she was already sussing me out, tuning in to me and Sarah she's really

I first heard about Sarah when I read a few articles about her online, just snippets, really, But what I read about her was so bizarre, so unusual, I had a million questions. So I tracked her down. We started sending emails, talking on the phone, getting to know each other, and right from the start she felt familiar to me. We have a few things in common. Actually, we're about the same age, both from small towns.

In New England.

But also I've become a bit of an expert on women like her. I've spent years digging into historical research, reviewing court documents, and immersing myself in the world of women who managed to live multiple lives. Found so much that I'm now writing a book about it all. So yeah, Sarah felt familiar to me, but in the most unsettling way. I clearly remember one of the first things I wrote to her after reading those headlines. I told her, I suspect that there is so much more to your story.

There's so much that we've learned since we first started talking to Sarah, so much else that she's told us, and we've spent the last eight months trying to figure out how much of her story is true and what, if anything, we could trust, because this story is all about trust. It's about what it means to know someone or think you know someone, and what happens when reality

One of the first people we interviewed for this story was Catherine Dexter. She goes by des Des. Initially met Sarah Kavanaugh in the mountains in Montana at a retreat for veterans.

You got to see the sunrise and you got to see mountains and the air was like amazing and crisped and smelled a little bit like a campfire.

So you woke up every.

Single morning and you saw these mountains and they were beautiful and you were just like awestruck because you were like, why don't I live here? And that's where you were drinking your coffee at five am.

Dex had served in the Marines as military police in Japan in a couple other bases. When she got out, she felt a bit lost.

So I had kind of steered away from the veteran community when I got out, and I was really really isolated. So that was one of the big things that I struggled with because I had dealt with a lot of life transitions.

The retreat was organized by a nonprofit called Patrol Base Abate also known as pb Abaate. Founder started the organization because he was concerned about the mental health of veterans and their difficulties readjusting to civilian life, and this was kind of the exact crossroads Decks was at. So she applied to go on one of their all expense paid trips to Montana, and that's how she ended up drinking her coffee in Big Sky Country with all these other

I liked her.

I liked her a lot.

It's all in the context of like what I know about her now, but back then I liked her because she put out, because she worked really hard, and she was really humble, and she didn't walk around saying, Oh, I'm a woman and I was in combat. She was injured and everybody knew it, but she was still running.

Part of the ethos of this retreat was you didn't brag about the past, focused on now, and you exercised a lot. The whole point of this retreat was actually strength building. The Vets built a platform that became their outdoor gym. They lifted weights here, did squats, deadlifts, power cleans, and apparently they were also carrying giant slabs of rock up a mountain.

Come on, oh shit, Liam, push that woman.

You can hear saying push it. That's Sarah Kavanaugh. We found this video of her on YouTube from this same retreat. She's in a sweaty gray tank top, has on these mirrored sunglasses and leather workmen's gloves. She has blonde hair and a runners build slim and athletics and that soft inspirational music that's in there because this is a promotional video for Patrol Base of Bate, And in that video we see Sarah giving an interview with the Wild Mountains of Montana in the background.

Because there's such an open discussion about what's really happening to veterans, right, you know, what are we going through? How can we, you know, refit and refresh the skills we have and the skills we learned while we were serving and apply them to our lives and make our lives better now.

I think I was expecting just.

To come together and have some fun and work out, but it was so much more than that.

The person who started these retreats was concerned about all the challenges that that's face as they transitioned back to civilian life, and he wanted this time in the woods to be healing, transformational, even And.

To the veterans who are coming out here, be ready to talk and not talk out loud, but maybe you need to talk to yourself, maybe to hear what other people are saying and process that and come back to yourself and work through some things.

And I think that's happening here. It definitely is.

But I think if you can at least be prepared to do the work, I think you'll get a lot out of it.

Beck says that on this retreat there were just a few female vets. It was her, Sarah, and another former marine named Natalie. The three of them worked out together.

Dex has this way of like she calls it gassing you up, of like being your biggest cheerleader, and so she'll.

Be like, man, look at those guns.

Natalie.

That's Natalie Markham. She was a clarinetist in the Marine Corps band, a self described band nerd. At the time of the retreat, Natalie was struggling. She owned a CrossFit gim that had been hit hard during the pandemic, and she was worried that it might go bust. So for her to be here in Montana doing something she loved under the open sky with new friends, it was like she could breathe. She asked someone to take a picture of her with Dex and Sarah to commemorate the moment.

The three of us are lined up and being female and in the military, like do you stand tough?

Do you stand feminine?

And then you know, we're in a strength retreat, so we should take one that looks kind of cute, But then we should take one that looks kind of tough, and so will flex and Dex is always the one to be like, oh, we have to flex.

In the picture, the three of them are standing against the backdrop of the mountains, all flexing biceps, and triceps bulging. Natalie and Sarah are smiling. Dex is all business serious as can be, and looking at the photo, I could kind of feel their energy. I'd never guess they just met. They look like they could be sisters, joking, competing, giving each other shit, like the Three Musketeers or something. Dex told us that this kind of camaraderie is not a given.

When you're a woman in the military, the competition among other women is really intense.

A lot of the time.

You're all trying to be the best, not just be the best woman, but you're trying to be the best so that the men think you're the best, because that's what matters. And you know, men are the ones who are always in charge of you. It's their opinion that gets you promoted. 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 was 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 crypto linguist. 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 two decks.

She told me that she had been in a convoy and her vehicle was hit by nid you know, the humby blew up the door from the humphy like crushed her hip and somehow she was able to like get out of the humby.

As Sarah told it, her hip never healed properly from the knee down. Her leg was basically dying. But that's not all.

While sitting in the tent, she's about to even 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 a recap. Here's this woman, Sarah, who at the time was just thirty years old, already a decorated war veteran, strong, modest, whitetly 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, and it got more tragic incrementally, like a kettle on a stove that heats up slowly until all of a

So I'm thinking, if he's not her actual physical brother, I don't think she mentioned ever having an adopted brother, And then I'm thinking maybe she just meant brother, like in the colloquial where all marines were brothers type way, and I was like, maybe that's it.

You can hear Dex trying to make sense of this, but she said she didn't ask Sarah too many questions about it.

That's kind of like if you had a friend that told you that she'd miscarriage, the very last thing that you're going to do to that friend while she's crying about losing a baby is ask her if that actually happened. Like, this is so insensitive. So I was not going to ask this woman these questions because I didn't want to be insensitive because we were.

Friends, so Dex just didn't say anything. Besides, at this point, Sarah was fighting lung cancer and from time to time she'd mentioned to Dex that her medical bills were piling up. Now the VA wasn't covering everything. Dex wanted to help, even from far away. That's when she heard about this charity called Hunter seven. Hunter seven helps veterans who struggle

I was like, this is what I would do for my friends, like, especially a friend who's like struggling at this level. I was like, I understood really clearly, like having a million things going on and all of them feeling very intent. So I was like, let me help you out because I have a minute, and it's no skin off my back to send an email.

She couldn't know this then, but this simple act of kindness would set something in motion, something that would forever alter the way Decks saw Sarah.

Remember Natalie, the third Musketeer from the Montana Retreat, the clarinetist. Yeah, well, Natalie also stayed in touch with Sarah. In fact, right around the time that Dex was visiting the cemetery in Arlington, Natalie and Sarah were actually hanging out in person. A bunch of vets, including a few from the Montana Retreat, gathered at a CrossFit gym in California to have a little competition. Well not so little, even for Natalie. It was a lot.

There was one workout every hour on the hour, for eight hours. Just the grueling nature of eight hours worth of workouts is enough to make most people go, yeah, no, I'm not doing that.

Yeah, pretty insane. This was like an ultra marathon for weightlifters. They broke down into teams of two. Now, at this point, Natalie didn't know about Sarah's cancer, and this is because Sarah had never told her. She just confided this to Dex, which as we've come to learn. It's kind of how Sarah operated. She shared details about her life one on one in these small private moments, and so the secrets remain compartmentalized. Natalie was aware that Sarah had some issue

All four of us are sitting on the floor together and Sarah says.

That she's going to have to have her leg amputated.

And I was blown away, Like, you are in the middle of doing an eight hour workout and you have to have your leg amputated. It was absolutely unfathomable to me. But I distinct remember her saying, if I'm gonna have to have my leg amputated, then I'm gonna make this bitch give me every last ounce of what it's got to give.

Natalie is looking at Sarah's leg and it's trembling, and she thinks to herself, you are like a.

Whole other level of badass ory than I have ever known.

And the proof was Sarah's team then goes on to beat Natalie's team in the competition, and Natalie she's in awe. The two women went to another retreat together not long after this, and it seemed like Sarah's leg was in bad shape.

We did one workout where Sarah was having a really hard time and like at the end of the workout, her leg was shaking so badly, and she's like, Natalie, will you please help me?

Can you please help me?

Stretch?

I took her shaking leg and placed it up on my shoulder and am holding her quad in one hand and her foot up here and kind of leaning in and I'm talking her through, like breathe into the muscle, like take some breath, exhale slowly, picture your leg relaxing, and just remember her like having this moment of her leg finally relaxing and this is the leg that she's supposed to have amputated, and feeling some sense of gratitude that I could help somebody in that situation to have

Looking back, Natalie still recalls the intensity of this moment with Sarah, the tenseness of her hamstring, the tremors and her muscles, the pain on Sarah's face, it all seems so real. In the coming weeks, Natalie texted Sarah about the amputation to see if it had been scheduled, and Sarah eventually gave her a date, January twenty sixth. The date sticks in Natalie's mind. She keeps thinking about it as it draws closer, and then the night before the surgery,

And like, I'm so genuinely worried about her that in the middle of the night, I wake up and the first thing I think of is I must be waking up because I've got to pray for Sarah. I should text her and let her know that I'm praying. And so I text out my prayer to her and send it to her.

I asked Natalie to read me that text.

January twenty sixth, twenty twenty two. A prayer for you today is what I wrote. God, Thank you for Sarah. Thank you for her intelligence, kindness, humor, bravery, courage, and service to United States, and for her gift of friendship.

Did she write anything back, She.

Wrote, thank you so much. I can't tell you what this means to me.

The next day, Natalie shot Sarah another text to see how the surgery went, and Sarah explained that they had to call off the amputation.

She said that when she was going into her surgery that her blood pressure had dropped and they couldn't They weren't able to perform the surgery because of that, and I remember thinking at the.

Time, like, that's really weird.

You would think that if.

You're going to go have your leg cut off that your blood pressure would be sky high.

The next day, I was like.

Trying to reach out to her, but thinking that she's still in the hospital and it's in the middle of me.

Trying to get a hold of her.

Then I receive a message from Tom through WhatsApp.

That guy, she mentions Tom, that's Tom Schumann. He's the founder of Patrol Base ABATA, the nonprofit that organized those retreats up in Montana. Tom also knew Sarah, and now he was texting with an urgent message.

And he's like, Hey, Sarah is not who she says she is.

Tom says that Sarah has been lying about a number of things, and that she may have lied about her military service. Natalie, I didn't know who were what to believe.

I specifically asked Tom like how do you know this? Because now I'm questioning him, like why would you even say something like that, like how do you?

How do you? How do you know for sure?

But it turns out Tom had his reasons. In the weeks leading up to this moment, he'd been digging into Sarah's story and he discovered a few red flags, some things that just didn't add up. More on that.

After the break, Tom Schumann first met Sarah Kavanaugh in the snowy mountains of Boulder, Colorado, at a patrol base of Batte retreat.

We're staying in canvas tents. It was an intimate setting where we're spending all day night, which is a small group of people. We connected over our intellectual and academic and literature interests, had read the same books, talking about the same authors. Pretty immediately we started hitting it off.

This retreat was similar to the one in Montana. We told you about hang out, workout, talk connect.

That was the goal.

That's why Tom founded Pibi Abaatee in the first place. He's a marine and when he returned from his tours overseas, he watched his comrade struggle. He told us three of his fellow marines died by suicide over the course of one month, and that is what led him to start Pibi abaate In Colorado, Tom and Sarah started to get to know each other. Sarah told him she was a professor, which appealed to him. Tom himself taught literature at the US Naval Academy. Sarah also told him that she had

Within the first twenty four hours, I felt like we had bonded, and then throughout the weekend there were a couple of experiences that solidified that bond and strengthen it.

On the last day of this retreat, a guy named Brian Shantash led them on an adventure workout. Shantash is a former marine and a leadership guru famed for his wilderness programs and his workouts have a reputation for pushing people to their limits. So everyone, even Tom, was nervous. They were told to break down into teams of two. Sarah and Tom partnered up.

And one of the things that you had to do was drag a weighted sled up the mountain and back a couple different times, dragged this on a mile loop.

They get to it, they start pushing this weighted sled up the mountain and then back down the mountain on this mile long loop, again and again and again. And remember this is the Rockies in December, so it's freezing and the wind is whipping them as they trudge through.

I just really respected this gal, who was apparently very valorous in combat, still dealing with her injuries from combat, toughing it out on the side of the mountain, and so I admired that she was being what I felt like, pretty courageous through the event.

Tom's not a very effusive guy, so this is basically his version of gushing. He didn't know about all of Sarah's health issues, the cancer and the leg amputation. Sarah had never told him about this, though he would soon find out.

Within a few weeks, Tom hears about Sarah's cancer, and then he feels like he's got to do something.

I am a guy of action. I reached out to her and I said, hey, I didn't know you were sick. We should meet soon to see if I can I can help, if there's anything that I can do.

At the time, Tom lived in Rhode Island, where Sarah also lived, so they met up for coffee and talked for hours. He learned how she'd seen combat in Afghanistan, how our convoy was blown up, and how she'd been seriously hurt in the blast, and how despite it all, she still managed to save some of the guys in her patrol, dragging them to safety even with her own crushed hip. How she'd gotten a bronze star for her bravery.

It seemed incurable, that 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 Basabat. At the time, the

So he wants to get all his ducks in a row. He asks Sarah for a copy of her DD two fourteen. 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

Up and so I just said, hey, Sarah, I'm going to New Hampshire tomorrow to ask for sixty thousand dollars. 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. He had pulled the gun during the sexual assault, and

Suddenly Sarah's whole story, with all its drama and all its heroics is feeling very shaky. Tom knew he needed back up, so he reached out to a friend who had access to personnel records. The friend, he punches in Sarah's DoD number, the military equivalent of a Social Security number, does some more digging. That friend gets back to Tom with what he's found, and he.

Said, the DODD number for this D two fourteen belongs to a corporal so and so, and it's a guy. And he's like, fifty percent of this document is his record than fifty percent of this document is altered.

It looks like she'd taken someone else's records and doctorate them, inserting her own name and other details. And this, by the way, it's not a small thing. This isn't forging your mom's name on a sick note. This is a huge deal, felony level huge. Tom is in a state of shock.

That's like, uh yeah, that was I mean, that was it. Like at that point, I'm like, I've been bamboozled, uh hoodwinked.

Tom goes home and tells his wife. His wife, she's pissed. She knows how hard Tom has been working for this woman, trying to help her, and now she seems to be a fraud. She's like, not on my watch. So she goes over in person and reports this whole thing to NCIS. That's the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Maybe you've seen the TV show. They're the badass investigators for the US Navy and Marine Corps. Anyway, the NCIS folks, they're like, okay, we'll look into this.

Around this same time, something else very important happens. Remember how Dex, the friend from the Montana Retreat, tried to help Sarah with her medical bills, how she contacted a charity called Hunter seven. Well, that charity had also started digging into Sarah's backstory, and what they discovered prompted them to alert both Tom and the FBI. But what no one realized, not Tom or Dex or NCIS or even the FBI, was just how deep this deception went. None

This season is about a betrayal writ large, a deception that played out over the course of more than six years, not just in Montana, but in Colorado and Texas and Tennessee, California, and Rhode Island too.

To this day, much of this story is shrouded in mystery. There's no detailed public record of what really happened. What's more, most of the people caught up in all of this haven't spoken publicly or even to each other, so the story itself remains compartmentalized, like rooms in a mansion with no doors between them. Jess and I have spent the last year or so finding our way into these rooms and listening coming up this season on Deep Cover.

I remember sitting on her couch and like me like telling her, asking her.

Is this real?

Is this real?

Is this real? Is this real?

I was like, wait, wait, were you ever in the military?

I just kind of brought my head around what kind of person would do that to another person, especially that was you knew was sick, that was getting treatment, that was you know, dying.

I've seen a lot of stuff over thirty years, and this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters.

Can you introduce yourself.

I'm Sarah Kavanaugh and I'm originally from Rhode Island.

I can see.

Where in some ways it can fit this aspec of like this huge plan to get all this money, like this master plan.

Or something, but I never thought about it like that.

Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Tally Emlyn, Additional production support by Sonya Gerwick.

Our show is edited by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.

Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Fact checking by Anica Robbins.

Special thanks to Sarah Nix, Busy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake Flanagan and Greta con Additional thanks to Vicky Merrick. I'm Jess McHugh and I'm Jake Halpert.

That was an episode of the new season of deep Cover The Truth About Sarah. You can find more episodes of deep Cover wherever you get your podcasts.