Monique LaBorde
speaker
121 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 9 Apr
Monique LaBorde’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I want to ask you about what it has been like for you to work on the weekly series because you worked on three seasons. You were really enmeshed in those stories.
And then this is a totally new format for you. So I want to talk a little bit about what your experience has been like in hosting the weekly series.
Mm hmm. Another thing that has been so special about Betrayal and working on Betrayal is the community that's developing. I mean, from the people who write in to us and to our Gmail to the people who share their stories on the podcast, they're like a part of making this with us.
And as you know, some of our storytellers choose to receive listener mail and connect with people directly who want to share their story and connect with them over the phone. So it feels like there is a real community around this show.
Okay, let's get on to some listener questions. I want to start with like a rapid fire round of questions we've gotten a lot of. Okay. So first off, the question is, why do you mostly feature stories from women? Why are there so few men on Betrayal Weekly?
You know, what's interesting is that sometimes we get women writing in being like, I know a man who was betrayed, but it's not the man writing into us. Men do write into us. And we have featured a few stories from men on the weekly series. And some of those we had to go looking for, like Ramon Sosa. We had to intentionally find him because we didn't want to create a lineup of exclusively women.
But at the same time, there is something going on that's bigger than just our podcast and the selection for our podcast, which is I think that maybe there's more shame. Men have more shame about saying I was deceived. That might not be as common or as practiced for men.
Our next question is, do we vet people? Or similar question, how do we fact check these stories?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. So when we get a story that comes in through the inbox and we reach out to the person to talk for what we call a pre-interview, which is just not recorded, hearing a little bit about their story, one of the first things we ask is for documentation. And it's not that we don't believe them. In fact, a trauma-informed approach to this work is that we're approaching everyone in with belief.
However, we do put all these stories through a rigorous legal process in order for them to air. We ask our guests for documentation like divorce records, criminal records. And throughout the process, we're checking those things against the story that they're telling us.
Another part of the vetting process, which is just as big, that we talk about internally is, is this person ready to tell this story at this time?
And generally, we like to work with people who are professional. a few years out from their betrayal experience. So they've had a little bit more time to process it. And so when I'm first reaching out to someone who's written us an email and they wanna share their story, You know, in that initial call, we asked them about their support system, if they've told this story to other people.
And I don't mean in a formal sense, like writing a book, but I mean, like, do people in your life, your kids, your friends, do they know this has happened to you? Which is not necessarily, you know, mutually exclusive of telling your story on this show. But I think it's a sign that this person is comfortable in this story and having the story associated with who they are. Right.
We have a pretty conservative in-house legal team that wants to vet everything and make sure that anything that's a potentially defamatory claim has documentation available. behind it. And so that is a burden on us to make sure we get that documentation in order to run the episodes.
And something else that this brings up is we hear from a lot of people who want to write books or want to tell their story publicly and they don't have the documentation. Or let's say they were so mad they burned it all, something like that. They threw it away.
You know, if someone's listening right now and if you're in a situation where you're feeling taken advantage of or you're feeling like something's going really wrong, definitely from where I am right now producing these stories and getting them legally vetted, I can say it's super important to keep those receipts and keep those pieces of paper, those emails, those interactions, those financial statements, that kind of stuff can allow you to be able to legally tell your story in the future.
It can't be overstated how important it is.
Yeah. I mean, a lot of times in working with people who've experienced any kind of trauma, there is a way, a trauma-informed way you're supposed to approach what they've experienced. The sort of three principles are, I believe you, it's not your fault what happened, and you're not alone in this feeling.
So anytime we're interacting with the storytellers, we're basically trying to take those three principles and adapt them into a media framework. So a setting like an interview or in the finished product of the podcast. That's all because we want to give the storytellers who are the lifeblood of this show autonomy and respect throughout the whole process.
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