29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Podcast Corner: Witchcraft, cults, and a splash of fake news
The first series of Guru: The Dark Side of Enlightenment came out during summer 2020 and was one of the most engrossing series of the year. Revolving around Oprah-endorsed self-help teacher, James Arthur Ray, tragedy strikes his exclusive retreat and questions about his unorthodox methods soon follow.
Season two, titled Don't Cross Kat, features witchcraft and alien baths, the South American psychedelic brew ayahuasca, missing women, and influencers gone rogue. The sixth episode was released on Monday, with two bonus episodes to come — they're already available if you subscribe to Wondery+ on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (if you don't subscribe, just be aware that episodes are laden down with adverts throughout).
Kat is Kat Torres, a wellness influencer and wannabe self-help guru, with whom Desirre, a lively and ambitious Brazilian, follows religiously. She posts about manifesting and nourishing your spirit. 'There are plenty of life coaches in Brazil who have found a lot of success by telling other people how to live their lives — for a fee of course,' says narrator and journalist Chico Felitti — he already covered Torres' story in a Portuguese-language podcast, A Coach, for Wondery a couple years ago. Desirre's friend Paty reluctantly signs up for an appointment with Kat, who turns up late and presides to offer up very general pop psychology about her breakup.
While Paty soon comes to think of Kat as crazy, Desirre is infatuated, so much so that she disappears to become one of Kat's 'witches' — if it looks like a cult and sounds like a cult, well…
The episodes clock in at a zippy 30-45 minutes and the third, titled The Voice, offering a lesson in fake news. At Cannes Film Festival 2013, Leonardo DiCaprio is pictured at a nightclub with a woman leaning in — Kat Torres. In October, the photos spread across Brazil, then the world, including the Daily Mail, that she is the actor's latest girlfriend. It looks like Kat's big break, says Felitti, but she was just in the right place at the right time — her path is a much darker one from there.
The Binge Cases: Fatal Beauty
For a similar true crime vibe to Don't Cross Kat, Fatal Beauty is a six-part series (also ad heavy) from Sony Music about Sandra Bridewell, a brunette in 1980s Dallas high society who had two husbands and a best friend die under suspicious circumstances. It took years for anyone to suspect Sandra of wrongdoing, even as mysterious deaths trailed in her wake.
In the opening episode (released fortnightly, the first three are out now; subscribe to The Binge+ for early access), we hear that Sandra had already become ostracised in the community — it was an open secret that she was trouble — when Alan, her third husband, came to Dallas. After he goes missing, she soon became known as the Black Widow.
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