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The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall – CBC — True Crime
The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall – CBC

In the 1980s and 90s, Satan and his followers were accused of brainwashing children, sacrificing babies, and infiltrating North American society on a massive scale — yet these thousands of alleged Satanists were nowhere to be found. Even so, the narrative became embedded in our cultural memory, warping everything it touched — including the lives of innocent people.. And it never quite died out.
In a new 8-part series, Sarah Marshall (You’re Wrong About) explores the tangled web of the Satanic Panic, in a journey that will take you everywhere from Victoria, B.C. to rural Kentucky to San Antonio, Texas. This is a show about the people who experienced the Satanic Panic in real-time — the believers, the skeptics, the bystanders, and the wrongfully-convicted. What was it like to be a psychologist told to look for Satanists in every case; a mother slowly recovering memories of supposed Satanic abuse; a teenager accused of conspiracy to murder? The stories of these eyewitnesses point us toward the real underlying problems — individual and societal — that the Panic was a response to. The fault, as ever, was not with Satanists, but in ourselves.

Copyright: Copyright © CBC 2025

Latest Episodes:

One more helping, for good measure: Satan (Taylor’s Version) Dec 13, 2025

Show notes

In this bonus episode, Sarah talks to Yvonne Eadon, a professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in conspiracy theory and online misinformation, about GAYLOR — the online fan theory that claims Taylor Swift is a closeted queer woman.

Yet another helping from Satan: The Devil’s storytellers Dec 12, 2025

Show notes

In this bonus episode, Sarah talks to Professor Bill Ellis who specializes in folklore and urban legends, and they chat about the innate human behaviours that lead us to create panics in the first place.

A second helping from Satan: Elizabeth Knapp’s Possession Dec 11, 2025

Show notes

We travel back in time to 1670s Massachusetts to review the famous case of the so-called Satanic possession of 16-year-old Elizabeth Knapp — which took place twenty years before the Salem Witch Trials. In this bonus episode, Sarah and producer Carolyn Kendrick talk to professor Elisabeth Ceppi to find out more about possession in Puritan America.

Episode 8: Where Are We Now? Dec 08, 2025

Show notes

Now that we know where we’ve been, where are we going? As the Satanic Panic receded from view, we almost forgot it had happened at all – until it came back. How do today’s moral panics compare to the one we just learned about? And what can we learn from the tragedy at Jonestown?

A second helping from Satan: Satanic Injustice Dec 04, 2025

Show notes

How did the U.S. legal system allow the Satanic Panic to proliferate as rapidly as it did? In this bonus episode, Sarah chats with journalist Josie Duffy Rice (Justice In America, The Appeal) who has written extensively about prisons, prosecutors and criminal justice.

Episode 7: Four Lesbians and a Baby Dec 01, 2025

Show notes

Though it sounded like a wholesome sitcom premise — four lesbian housemates raise a baby in San Antonio — reality proved anything but. Instead, Liz, Anna, Cassie, and Kristy found themselves caught in a nightmare of a crime drama after being accused of Satanic abuse. They face all the twists and turns of court proceedings, junk science, Satanic allegations, and wrongful convictions — for 22 years.

A second helping from Satan: SATANISM 101 Nov 27, 2025

Show notes

Dr. Justin Sledge (who you heard from in Episode 6) is a professor of philosophy and religion. in this bonus episode, we learn how his own experience as a teenager implicated in an alleged satanic plot led to an academic career studying esoterica and the occult.

Episode 6: I’m Just a Teenage Cultist, Baby Nov 24, 2025

Show notes

How does a victim of a school shooting become accused of masterminding the whole thing in the name of Satan? When Justin Sledge was 17, a friend of his opened fire at their high school, killing two people and wounding seven others. It was one of the first modern-day school shootings, even before Columbine. Over the next few weeks, their once tight-knit town is embroiled in fear and rumors as people search for a reason for the tragedy — eventually landing on a cult of devil worshippers. Justin finds himself at the center of these rumors, leading to him also being arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Check out Justin's YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel

Episode 5: The Devil in Delaney Nov 17, 2025

Show notes

As women increasingly spoke out about the abuse they suffered under the patriarchy, many still struggled to be heard. And the new field of recovered memory therapy became a vehicle for both legitimizing women's trauma and exploiting it.

Delaney is a housewife and mother of three, living in Manitoba in the 1980s. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she seeks out counselors and psychiatrists and then… she begins to remember. Years later, her son Matt describes growing up during the Satanic Panic, with a mother trying to work through her trauma. We hear from Delaney herself through a biographical manuscript she wrote before she died, exploring her experiences of childhood abuse, her eventual belief that Satanists were involved, and how she came to terms with all of it.

A second helping from Satan: Arab Spring, Satanic Summer Nov 13, 2025

Show notes

In this bonus episode, we look at some impacts of satanic hysteria outside of North America. We hear from Cherine Amr, the founder of the Egyptian metal band Massive Scar Era, who was accused of being possessed by the devil himself in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Producer Mary Steffenhagen speaks with academic Pasqualina Eckerström for a deeper look at heavy metal’s connection with satanism.

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