My pick of the best podcasts for women

I WASN’T a fan of podcasts up until recently. When the girls were younger, naturally, I found the house very loud so the thought of having yet another voice I needed to concentrate on seemed almost ludicrous.

Now that the mornings are significantly quieter with all my four ladies in school, it seems only right to fill the house with tales of scandal from around the world.

I bought myself some cheap airpods from Amazon (don’t buy expensive ones if you have a puppy!) so now, if I am outside doing the gardening or jobs around the house, I am transported to various worlds that, quite frankly, often leave me with my jaw dropped.

Just like with books, we all love different genres of podcast; some love true crime, others self-empowerment, some like business, some like sport. The first podcast I ever really got into was My Therapist Ghosted Me by Joanne McNally and Vogue Williams – a conversation style podcast, which again some people love and others don’t. At the start, I found them hilarious, but I’ve drifted from them recently as it felt a little repetitive and the conversational style can sometimes feel a little busy – I need my podcasts to flow at a slower tempo.

My favourite genre is scamming. It is honestly the most fascinating thing to listen to if you have an interest in amateur psychology. Firstly, it is mind-boggling the mental tricks and tortures some people can put others through for love, attention or financial gain. Secondly, and probably more interesting, is hearing from those who get drawn in by these people.

Listening to them you’d almost scoff and think they are crazy for getting so utterly fooled by these manipulative people, as some of the claims or lies they tell are truly wild. But the ‘scammers’ are usually incredibly smart, often damaged people, who target the perfect people to draw into their web of lies and deceit.

The first scamming podcast I really enjoyed was an Australian-based one about a woman called Melissa Caddick. She was a seemingly wealthy and clever financial broker who ‘invested’ money from family, friends and anyone and everyone she could. She took millions of dollars from people, some of which she used in a quasi Ponzi scheme, the rest of it she spent on herself.

The fascinating thing about the whole story is that, as soon as the Australian revenue moved in on her she disappeared off the face of the planet, never to be seen again, until her severed foot washed up on Australian beach months later. Those who were scammed by her are convinced she is still alive and that she cut off her own foot to try and throw people off the scent. I’m still not sure!

Scammanda tells the story of Amanda C Reily, an American woman who conned people out of more than $100,000 and emotionally duped so many when she led people to believe that she had cancer. The podcast is a fascinating look into the lengths she went to to convince people she was sick, much of which played out over her blog and social media.

Closer to home, Neil Prendeville and Red FM have a podcast series, You Couldn’t Make This Up, that interviews Cork woman Kathleen Allen. She documents her life and experiences with her partner and the years of gaslighting and deception she endured as he conned people out of thousands both in Cork, Waterford and the UK.

Believable – The Coco Berthman Story is the latest podcast I am enjoying, and I am currently halfway through it so no spoilers on this one. Coco Berthman is a German woman who escaped to the U.S and claims to have endured years of child sex trafficking at the hands of her mother. She worms her way into the LDS church in Utah, finding many kind-hearted people to take advantage off, primarily for want of attention. She is also strangely obsessed with Celine Dion!

It remains to be seen whether any of what she claims is true, but there is no doubt she endured some trauma as a child as she is a deeply troubled young woman.

Doc on One, the podcast series by RTÉ, is brilliant if you are after some interesting one-off podcasts. There’s the story of what happened on Spike Island in September, 1985, when prisoners escaped and set fire to the island. There is the story of Mary Folan, a woman from Inis Meáin who emigrated to the U.S but whose dying wish was to be buried back home. The tale of her final journey to home is farcical.

There is also a series by Doc on One called Finding Samantha which is about Samantha Azzopardi, an Australian woman who some might remember as the ‘young’ girl who was found outside the GPO some years ago, seemingly unable to speak. The podcast goes on to document the cycle of deception she created worldwide, often presenting as a child or an au pair to worm her way into people’s lives, including one family in Dromod, Co. Leitrim. Hers is the most complex web of deceit – she had over 70 different aliases from an abused Russian gymnast to talent executive, crazy stuff!