Why I Named The 13th Step #1 On The Bingey List For 2023
Lauren Chooljian, Host and Reporter from NHPR, and Editor Alison MacAdam sat down with Bingeworthy to reflect on how this series changed the way they do journalism, and why this story matters
In December, I named The 13th Step as the #1 listen for the Bingey List, out of more than 50 series I listened to last year.
This series absolutely blew me away and I ranked it a perfect 10.
It’s delicate journalism executed with the utmost scrutiny.
The recovery industry, life-saving institutions like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and other substance-abuse disorder groups, generally follow a 12-step protocol. The first step is to admit that you are powerless to the source of addiction; and the last step, the 12th step, is to go back out into the community and help others.
The following step, the 13th, is not in the handbook. But as this series reports, it happens so frequently that maybe it should be.
In the 13th step, the person who has just achieved sobriety and exited recovery is manipulated into some sort of relationship, typically a toxic one, and this often results in being sexually abused, which then generally means they are thrown back into active addiction, or back to step one. The most confusing part of the 13th step is that it’s often from someone who is in a position of power, perhaps from the same organization or facility they have just graduated from, or is actually the same person who helped them begin recovery in the first place.
This was a difficult story to tell
The reporting began with a tip from an unnamed source who alleged sexual misconduct inside the addiction recovery facility. From there, things escalated significantly.
I ranked it this series first for a variety of reasons, but I will highlight five of them below. And then, please read on to find the excerpted interview with Host and Producer Lauren Chooljian, and Editor Alison MacAdam, where we dive further into the details of how this series came to be.
Here are the top 5 reasons this series stood out for me:
It gave light to a topic that hides in plain sight, and then it gives it a name [the 13th Step]
It speaks to a bunch of brave women who were willing to come forward and go on the record.If you read below in the interview, Lauren recalls exactly how this term [13th Step] came into her lexicon, and how she quickly realized it was about much more than just the one story she heard from her source, Andrea.
This is truly fearless journalism
During the course of this project, multiple legal actions ensued, and there were also personal attacks on the homes of people connected to this project (in retaliation, even the home of the parents of producer Lauren Chooljian was attacked…twice).Lauren and Alison speak below about how NHPR stood by this project, through many difficult moments. Not only did they NOT back away, but they continued to support those affected, in multiple ways, through release and beyond. This is not cheap or easy to do…and it proves that if a small public radio outfit like NHPR can do this, it is possible.
It innovated how to present a “Trigger Warning”
Inside the interview below, Samantha explains what this “warning label” was for, how it hit her, and then both Lauren and Alison speak about how they approached it, and why they did it this way.
This series pushed new boundaries for journalism
The reporting that went into this series offers a playbook for how to corroborate some of the most difficult corners of reporting.
It answers the question of how, and why, you can tell a story with unnamed sources, that often involve fast-dissolving social media images, from a community of folks who are frequently written off as unreliable actors.
It approached this community head-on; it dug deep to get all the facts; it corroborated those and reported them out; and then it watched as sources began to trust, and some of them agree to come on the record.
The narration was perfectly intuitive and personally connecting
There were many times when I was listening to an interview in the series when someone said something audacious or shocking, and I stopped to say, Wait, what? And then Lauren would follow up with a response that I had silently asked for, explain it, and gave it context.
She thoroughly wiped away any stigma that might arrive with this subject matter, speaks plainly and directly to all sources, and then kept her cool when things got very real.
It is exemplary human behaviour, and journalism at its best.
If you haven’t listened already, throw this in your queue:
The following is a selection from a Zoom interview. It has been edited for length and clarity.
[Samantha Hodder]: After I listened to the full series, I went back and listen to the first episode again (which I always do), I realized how much of the full story was laid out in the first episode.
So could you start with the timeline of the reporting? You mentioned there was a one-off that came out a year before….what was the background and the timeline, and how it came to be a full multi-part series?
[Lauren Chooljian]: Sure. I produce longform news-y work as my main job. But with this story, we realized that it was really important to put something out in news-form first, both because the allegations were so serious, and also because for many sources, there was a lot of trust building that needed to happen. People needed to know [that] we were serious, and that we were looking to publish what we had found and corroborated.
Originally, I had received a tip that COVID wasn't being taken seriously at one of these facilities [that was in late 2020]. The company was called Granite Recovery Centers at the time, it was run by Eric Spofford, who was the founder of the company, and then the CEO (he would sell the company later on and is no longer with Granite Recovery Centers).
At the time, what we had heard from people who work there was that they weren't taking COVID seriously. And this first tip came in in the summer of 2020...pretty high, early COVID time. We were all doing a lot of stories about COVID outbreaks, so I ended up publishing a news story about [the COVID situation]. And in response to that, I got some pretty serious allegations.
I got a tip that Eric Spofford, the then CEO, had been accused of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, and had been paying women to stay quiet. This was a clinician who had given me this tip. So that was pretty overwhelming news to receive in your inbox.
So then, for the next couple of months, I went about reporting that out, corroborating some of these allegations.
We took a lot of time to make sure to hear from victims directly, what they were alleging, but then also that we had to corroborate it with multiple additional sources. These are pretty serious allegations about a person, and would change a lot of people's lives once made public. So we took a lot of time to make sure that not only do we hear from victims directly, and what they were alleging, but also that we would corroborate it with multiple additional sources.
And in the middle of this, I went on maternity leave. My colleagues filled in the gaps while I was gone….and that time actually ended up being helpful because a lot of sources were really nervous to fully come on the record.
Over the course of that period, [an] HR Director decided to go on the record. And that's when we realized we had enough, and also that people really need to know what we had.
So in March of 2022, we published a news story about the allegations we'd found; [both] sexual misconduct and toxic workplace [allegations]. By that point, we really understood that this was something that people in New Hampshire were really well aware of in the recovery community, [but] that they just didn't know you know what to do, or who to go to.
[ED Note: As Lauren mentions later in the conversation, Spofford denied all allegations of misconduct].I'm a local reporter. We want to make shows that are interesting to anyone, whether they live in New Hampshire or not.
But it wasn't until the day the story came out, when I got a call from another woman who had experienced sexual harassment from Eric [Spofford] after an AA meeting, and she actually put a name to what we were learning about: And that's “13-Stepping.” This is Andrea, for anyone who's listened to the podcast already.
It was Andrea who really showed me that this isn't just a story about one guy, and one center, and the women who knew him. This was about a phenomenon that people in recovery are very aware of…and if you're not in recovery, you may never have heard of it.
That really gave us the essential piece of information that helped us [to see that] this podcast [is] less about this one place, and more about: Why that kind of behavior happens in treatment centers, places that are really sacred for people who are trying to get well?
And that put us on a whole other journey. And of course, as you well know, there was also a lot of retaliation that we faced for the reporting, which I'm sure we'll get to.
We ended up putting out the podcast in June of 2023.
[SH]: So then two around years of reporting, and a year [between the news story and the podcast series?]
[LC]: Yeah…which is the longest I've ever worked on anything, which is remarkable experience.
[Alison MacAdam]: Lauren first got tips alleging sexual misconduct in December of 2020. I came on in February or March of 2021. And at that point, Lauren was about four months from going on maternity leave, and the question was: What can we make before she goes?
For all the reasons Lauren explained, this is really complex reporting. It's urgent in the sense that if people are being harmed…you want to get it out there. But you also want to make sure you've got it right.
So ultimately, the answer was, we are not going to get [the full series out] before Lauren goes on maternity leave.
I was with the project from [March 2021 until release in June 2023].
[SH]: One of the gifts of podcasts is that there's always sort of a transparency report… that’s when you explain why the tape is what it is, and where title comes from. And I love that you basically you gave it all to this woman with an incredible Boston Southie accent...you went in to report a story about sexual misconduct and sexual abuse…but then suddenly blew it open when she gave it a name [13th-Stepping]…is that how it actually happened?
[LC]: Oh yeah…somebody said recently to us that they learned it as we learned it while listening to the first episode, which is was really high praise, because that is exactly how it happened for us.
I had some semblance of [an] understanding of why a power dynamic like that would be so difficult. If a person is in charge of a treatment center, or even if a person is in a counsellor role or a case manager role, and then the person being hurt is in early recovery, trying to get well, I could see (at that stage of the reporting) why that would be really difficult and why it would be so hard to come forward.
But what I didn't really understand understand, until I learned that there was a word for it—13 Stepping—was how vulnerable early recovery truly is. And that the power dynamics aren't just: person who owns a company and person who's going to the treatment center.
It's a person with more sobriety under their belt, versus person who is trying to find that.
And that this is a really unique, vulnerable space, that people are so desperate to achieve a new life, or just their life back in general, after all that they've gone through. And all the hard work that they’ve done.
Someone just said to me yesterday: You may not have those toxins in your body, you may be rid of the drugs or the alcohol (or whatever your substance of choice was), but you haven't really done that emotional work on yourself. That takes a really long time. And so you may still have that “seeking behavior,” where you're looking for something to help you fill the void.
If so somebody comes towards you and is acting in a way that gives you attention…maybe you're like: “Oh, I am okay, I am feeling well,” and this person is validating me in a way that I need to be validated. And unfortunately, that “safe moment” can be exploited in such a bad way.
When I learned about [the 13th Step] it was kind of a light bulb moment—for the whole team I think—because nobody on the team had heard about it. I have friends and family who are in recovery or trying to achieve recovery; I'm not in recovery, and I don't know everything about it. But I had never heard the term, ever.
It just kind of clicked into place for me. And I think so it was really an essential stepping off point for listeners too, that it gave them a helpful framing for everything else that was to come.
[AM]: We had a lot of time to talk, given that Lauren was reporting for months before we were actually put any words on a page. We were very aware, in a good sense, that there is a lot of reporting these days about sexual misconduct [in many sectors]. We're all used to seeing it.
We were also aware of the challenges that that presented, that this would just be just another sexual misconduct story, fill-in-the-blank for what industry it’s in. And I think that the 13th-Stepping concept was one of the reasons that it was so powerful for this project, was that it gave us a very unique way to talk about this.
All of that reporting can and should be done, and there are still industries, including this industry, that have a lot of work to do, in terms of the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct. But to give it a name that makes it stand out was really helpful for us in our thinking.
[SH]: One of the things that really jumped out at me in the first episode is how you address the “warning label” [that’s the trigger warning for the listener that something might come up in this conversation that could be difficult for them to hear].
I've never seen it done like this. Never. It literally stopped me in my tracks. I was like…Oh, my God…she did it…where she's supposed to do it. [You didn’t insert it] at the top of the episode, when you're not really thinking about [the difficult subject yet] or when you're not already slightly triggered.
You stop, not once but twice, in the [middle of the] episode to say: “Hey, I’m just gonna pull the just pull you aside for a second and say…You're gonna hear some stuff here that's really difficult. And if this difficult for you, I want you to do this, I want you to pick up the phone and dial this exact number.”
Tell me about this process. What went into the thought to make it look like this?What's the backstory of these production decisions?
[LC]: I just thought that that's how it should be done.
Of course Alison and I talked a lot about it…but it just never made sense to me that you'd be warned about something that might come an hour later. And then the whole time, if this is sensitive spot for you, you kind of have your backup the whole time you're listening, and then you're not really listening, listening.
This is from personal experience. I'll hear something like that, and [think]: “Oh, God, what am I gonna hear?” And then I'm not really present. And also, I'm not going to write the number down and then wait for it to happen. It just didn't make any sense to me.
I'm not trying to slight anybody, because I think the point of doing it at all is in good faith. But I felt like why wouldn't you tell someone right before they were going to hear it, so they have all the information immediately, and then they can move on? I was psyched that everyone let me do that. Because you know, there are ways of doing the things that we do….that was more for the heads up about discussing suicide.
But the the other one I think you're referring to is about language, which that was our attempt to not be stigmatizing in a world where, unfortunately, substance use disorder is still very stigmatized. I didn't want to police people's own language about the way they talk about themselves. That didn't feel right.
There are rules set in place by advocates, about how they want people in the media to talk about addiction. And the word “addict” is the first one to go on those lists. I wanted people to know that I wasn't going to use it. But people like Elizabeth and Eric Spofford…that’s just a word that they use, and so I wasn't going to beep it out. That doesn't feel very authentic to their experience at all.
We got good feedback about that; people who were thrilled. A professor of Addiction Medicine in Florida wrote to me and said: “Finally!”
[AM]: Credit goes goes to Lauren for having that idea; I think I loved it from the beginning.
We’re big listeners…we spent a lot of time listening to how all of our colleagues and our peers do things. I have absolutely edited a podcast that said at the very beginning: “We're going to be talking about some hard things. Please take care while listening.”
That is one of these lines that gets repeated that to me has become meaningless. It's obviously very well intentioned.
There's a whole longer conversation that we could have, and others are having, about whether these kinds of trigger warnings are actually more problematic than helpful. But I loved the idea because it was both breaking out of something that has just become a kind of a template, and also, it just was much more organic and logical. I really believe so strongly in being as transparent with the listener as you can.
So the way that Lauren, for example, talked about how she wasn't going to use the word addict, but other people do, it's just her explaining it. And through that, you actually learn something. It's a bit of journalism about journalism, and substance use disorder at the same time.
When these things are kind of stuck up at the top, it's just this kind of weird asterisk—language in italics—which you will forget you heard.
[SH]: Lauren really does a good job to remind people that it's hard to it's a challenge to report on this industry, because you’re dealing with people in recovery, who are often discredited immediately because they're unreliable, or they don't remember things, or because they've done something that is illegal, so to speak.
Tell me about how you approach the tape to make sure that [your subjects] sounded the best, or that you were getting the good part of them, that you were getting the you were you were able to take those character traits?
Maybe it was something you did instinctively, but what was your approach, or what are the steps that you took to present your characters and your sources so that they sound their best?
[LC]: I think part of stigma is not giving people a chance to be listened to. And I was never going to write anyone off for their history with addiction. It is a disease, it is not the person. And also, bad things do happen to people in active recovery. And yes, people in active recovery also lie; everything in their body is geared towards trying to get themselves to feel good. Yet that doesn't mean that harm couldn't have been done to them.
So I think the first thing is just listening, and giving people a chance. And understanding that, unfortunately, there's still so many people in our society who wouldn't even allow that. Which I think is wrong. And so that's just number one.
Number two is, then we just do our job, like we always do, which is that we corroborate. Whether a person is in recovery or not in recovery, I'm not going to let their story stand on its own, especially if they're making sexual misconduct allegations against somebody publicly.
So I then went and did what I would normally do, which is: Did you tell anyone? Did you write it down? Do you have any text messages? And I think what was really unbelievable, as I learned it, was a lot of these people didn't know each other. And [yet] their stories additionally corroborated each other.
[SH]: Did you go over and above what you normally do to prove, to corroborate this story? Or did you approach this the exact same way you approach it or approach every other story?
[LC]: Yeah, I do the same as I would always do it.
I should say that Eric [Spofford] sent us a statement saying that he didn't do any of this, and that he would sue us if we published it…that was the first initial response from them. [He sent us a letter through his lawyer] where he said: “Others relapse and revert to the lies that tragically go hand-in-hand with addiction."
He and his lawyers were trying to use that stigma against our sources, whereas, I corroborated it.
So, to me, it's not that I would ever do anything different. We’re all people. If anything, you just have to do your job, which is what I did. And that’s why the station continues to so vigorously defend the reporting. Because it's rock solid.
[AM]: I'll just just add one other quick thing to it, which is that I think Lauren did such a good job of addressing the kinds of hesitations that some listeners might have.
Because these sources have the courage to share not just what happened to them, but in a really raw way, there's a lot of shame associated with this kind of experience. And I think anyone who's been remotely close to any kind of sexual misconduct experience knows that it's immensely humiliating.
And that's one of the reasons you don't want to share, and these people were willing to share that part of it. And I think, had we not included that—had they only been outraged and seeking justice—it wouldn't have been true, not only to their experience, but to the majority of experiences, of being on the end of that kind of treatment.
And so, I don't think it ever crossed our mind to sort of make people sound good. I think it was important to embrace the complexity of their experience, and then to the degree that it might be needed, for Lauren to speak openly to the listener about things they might be thinking.
[LC]: It's not [about] making someone sound good; people contain multitudes.
So for Employee A, [she had] this awful moment in her life. And then later, when she comes back to talk about what this experience had been like for her, it was critical to me that we also give her the space to say: This is who I am, [but] my life isn't defined by this one sexual assault.
It’s a trauma-informed style of reporting: You're not defined by this bad thing that happened to you, just like people aren't defined by having substance use disorder.
Also, just like, Eric [Spofford] isn't defined by these allegations. We wanted people to understand how helpful and powerful he is, and was, to them. But also, did some bad things. People contain multitudes, this space contains multitudes, and that had to come through.
[SH]: NHPR is a public radio outfit. You don't have a backing of Series A Funding to get through this. And I imagine this was a pretty expensive endeavour. There were a lot of there were a lot of off ramps that NHPR could have taken and they stuck by it. Talk to me about that.
[LC]: Yeah…I think I've said before that it would have been totally understandable, if once bricks were thrown [through the windows of some houses], that NHPR was like, okay, Lauren, I think we're done here.
But that's never what happened. And that's both a testament to NHPR, but also, and our boss would say this, it’s also a testament to the reporting. This isn’t just a one-source interviews. It's deeply corroborated.
For those that haven't heard or don't know, a month after the news story was published, three homes tied to us, my News Director's house, my parents house and a house that I used to live in were vandalized with the C-word spray painted, and bricks thrown [at houses or through windows].
And then a month after that, they found where I actually live, and sprayed: “Just The Beginning” under a window, and threw a brick through the window. And my parents house was hit again, [spray painted with] the C word, and a brick [thrown] that missed the window (which I like to point out). So yeah, that was awful.
And a couple of months after that was when Eric [Spofford] sued me [for defamation, as well as] my News Director, Jason Moon at NHPR, and three of our sources for defamation [ED note: That suit was dismissed “without prejudice” by a New Hampshire Superior Court Judge in January, 2024].
So it's been a lot. And yeah, I mean, that's not cheap, on like six levels. The station paid for my window to get fixed; those kinds of things were not budgeted for in the fiscal year.
But I think it's a testament to our Station and our Board [who said]: We're going to help with this. The Board helped pay [to fix the] windows, and security at my house. It was astounding how people stepped up.
And then, when the podcast came out, we heard from people across the country that donated to NHPR because they were so just horrified by what had happened. That's certainly not why we did any of this; that was never the point.
But I want to just, what’s been on my mind a lot, was how lucky I am, and how lucky our team was, to have resources like that—even at a small station. This is a big chunk of money that had to be put towards this reporting….but at least we could make it happen and had people to ask. The three sources that were [also] sued, they didn't have lawyers, they didn't know who to call. Other sources received scary legal letters, that was completely out of the realm of normal for them.
I was really aware, I don't [want to say] we were lucky; but we're fortunate to have resources at our disposal to deal with this.
[SH]: I imagine this series pushed you as a journalist in a whole bunch of ways. Could just speak to where it pushed you? Has it given you some different ammunition, or new protocols moving forward? What was the push that it gave you?
[LC]: Well, I definitely have a new skill set, and that is doing more trauma-informed reporting. Nobody wanted to live through all of this, but if there's a bright spot, it’s that I now feel more geared towards trauma-informed reporting. And [an] understanding [of] what people might bring to an interview, beyond what they're saying into the microphone. And being more sensitive and approachable when I'm having tough conversations with sources. Understanding that sometimes people disappear, but they may [also] come back. And that has nothing to do with me and my reporting; it has everything to do with what they carry.
I think I've been really—happy is not the word but I'll just use that—I've been happy that I can help other reporters who are dealing with situations [where they] feel their security may be at risk, or whoever they're reporting on might be litigious. It makes me feel like we're using this situation to help others.
I visit newsrooms now, public radio newsrooms, to offer advice or, here's what we did, here's what we, you know, might have done otherwise, in retrospect. I'm happy to be able to do that.
[AM]: There's loads of things…but a couple that come to mind…one of them is the immense complexity of source management. So much of the time that Lauren and I were working together, it wasn't that we were looking at words on a page, or listening to tape together, it's that we were, Lauren especially, going through the challenges of talking to people, having people come forward and then pull back.
It can't be summed up in a in a paragraph, but it was just immensely complex in a way that nothing I've worked on has been; I will take that into any other project.
Like Lauren said, trauma-informed work is not just about how you interview people or reach out to people, it's how you work with each other too.
We thought a lot about this question: Does there have to be a named source? I'm sure this is oversimplifying sexual misconduct reporting, but there's some sense that you can't really put the story out there until someone is willing to put their name on it.
And my question is: What if what if no one is ever going to be willing to put their name on it because they are afraid of retaliation, and rightfully so?
And that means that the perpetrator, the person who allegedly did these things, is forever safe?
We ultimately published a story with deeply corroborated sources, but without a name. We gave the subject of the reporting, Eric Spofford, many opportunities to explain why any of these people—any case he had to make against any of these allegations—he never offered up one. He only claimed they were all false, and that he would sue us.
And I feel that it was the right choice; but it was months and months and months of working and thinking corroborating. And I hope that that can help some other journalists.