EXCLUSIVE: Here’s a trailer for Doula – A True Crime, a Canadian doc series from The Walrus and the Whistleblower filmmaker Nathalie Bibeau about a bizarre criminal case of a woman who faked pregnancies.
The three-parter, which will premiere on Canadian pubcaster CBC on October 7, looks into the story of Kaitlyn Braun, who aged 24, reached out to more than 40 doulas with the same shocking story: that she had been sexually assaulted and was in her third trimester carrying a stillborn child.
We can reveal Boat Rocker Studios has acquired the international distribution rights to the Muse Entertainment-produced show and will launch it at MIPCOM Cannes next month.
The doc is notable for including the first interview with Braun, who was hit with 53 criminal charges after doulas, who had helped her and provided pro bono services such as hours of phone and video calls and round-the-clock in-person care, began to question her narrative.
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After piecing together the pattern that had formed over nine months between June 2022 and February 2023, many found others like themselves and started a grassroots campaign for to alert authorities through a viral TikTok counter-offensive.
In the trailer, we hear from several doulas shaken by their experience. “I can’t tell you I was assaulted, that’s not really what happened and I can’t tell that I was scammed, that doesn’t encompass what she did to me. I have to tell you the whole story so you understand,” says one. “I have no felt fear like that in my entire life,” says another later in the trailer.
The one-minute clip ends with a camera making its way up a porch, where it is met by Braun, who smiles as she opens the door and says, “Hello!”
The film was made over several years, and attempts to go beyond the sensationalist reporting that followed the story at the time. Braun conversed with Bibeau several times over extensive interviews and phone calls, offering insight into her actions and motivations.
“Everyone knew that Kaitlyn Braun had committed crimes. I wanted to understand why,” said Bibeau, writer, director and producer of Doula: A True Crime. “The deeper I went, the less the story yielded to easy conclusions. Kaitlyn’s deception played on empathy, and the harm it caused was real.
“But the very thing that made the harm possible was also what I needed to understand her. I’m drawn to the places where human behaviour resists a clean moral frame. And this story lives in one of those places – where empathy doesn’t get in the way of truth, but brings us closer to it.”
Jonas Prupas, Managing Director of Unscripted and executive producer at Montreal-based Muse, said the story “could easily be reduced to its more sensationalist elements,” but that Bibeau had made it “into something nuanced, surprising and deeply human.”
Mellany Welsh, SVP and Global Head of Distribution & Brands at Boat Rocker Studios, added the doc offered international buyers “a story they won’t find anywhere else.”
Muse – known for the likes of Sullivan’s Crossing, The Kennedys and Nose Deep – made the show for CBC and CBC Gem, with the series premiering on October 7 at 8am ET on CBC. Prupas and Courtney Dobbins are exec producers for Muse, with Michelle McCree overseeing production for CBC.
A CBC and BBC podcast titled Kaitlyn’s Baby launched last year.