True Crime

The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall

by CBC

True Crime

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About the show

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.

Latest episodes

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

December 13, 2025 · 42 min

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…
Yet another helping from Satan: The Devil’s storytellers

December 12, 2025 · 23 min

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

December 11, 2025 · 38 min

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…
Episode 8: Where Are We Now?

December 8, 2025 · 58 min

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…
A second helping from Satan: Satanic Injustice

December 4, 2025 · 37 min

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…
Episode 7: Four Lesbians and a Baby

December 1, 2025 · 52 min

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…
A second helping from Satan: SATANISM 101

November 27, 2025 · 33 min

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…
Episode 6: I’m Just a Teenage Cultist, Baby

November 24, 2025 · 47 min

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…