‘Beth’s Dead’ Sparked Discussion About the Parasocial Nature of Podcasts. Fans Have Questions

It’s almost too easy to form a parasocial relationship with a podcast. After all, these folks are speaking directly into your ears. Lately, a podcast dropped that is basically the final boss of such a phenomenon: a show co-hosted by a former fan about a fan that has fans of that podcast getting a bit more involved than might be wise.

That show, Beth’s Dead, dropped in September, but has recently exploded online as listeners speculate about the ending — digging into perceived loose ends. And that’s fair — the story behind the pod is a series of twists, even before you get to the conclusion. 

Before the term catfishing made it into the dictionary, podcasters Elizabeth Laime and Andy Rosen found themselves trapped in a particularly wily pretender’s net. The married couple were early adopters of the podcast genre — they launched Totally Laime in 2010. That was basically a chat show where Laime and Rosen hosted comedians for wide-ranging conversations, and gave listeners advice about everything from child-rearing to sex. They also hosted Totally Married, where they discussed their relationship, and Totally Mommy, a pod about being parents.

Laime had a tendency to get involved with her listeners, trading emails back and forth after doling out advice. “My ego was getting boosted left and right. I was giving advice,” Laime says in the first episode. “I was responding to all these emails. I started to develop relationships with some people.” That openness took a darker turn in 2015, when the pair received a question via Totally Married, subjectline: “You’ve probably seen my vagina.” The contents of the email were a bit more tame; a woman named Beth asking for advice regarding intimate photos she took in the past that she hoped wouldn’t get back to her fiance’s family. 

Laime felt for Beth, and started exchanging more and more emails with the woman, who grew increasingly more intense as the relationship developed. And if Laime tried to pull away, Beth came on stronger — at turns threatening suicide and donating $1,000 to the show. Until, one day, Beth’s brother emailed Laime to let her know that Beth had died. After a few more odd emails from the brother, though, Rosen and Laime started to put it together that there was no Beth and that a cadre of their most loyal fans may, indeed, be one person: a lonely professor with an obsession and too much free time. “I know it doesn’t seem extreme, but I was very fearful because of this,” Laime says. “It did affect me in a really big way for a long time.”

Scared and burned by the deceit, the couple stopped podcasting in 2018 and left “Beth” in the rearview, leaving one fan dejected: Monica Padman, who now hosts the Golden Globe-nominated podcast Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. “I fully had a parasocial relationship with Elizabeth and Andy,” says Padman. “I really felt like I knew them.” 

Unlike Beth, though, Padman kept her fandom in check, connecting on a professional level and asking to shadow them when she was just getting into podcasting. She always wondered why they stepped away from their shows, though, so when they resumed another chat show, Nobody’s Listening, Right?, in 2022, she dropped the question during a catch-up dinner. “I really thought they were tired, because they had a lot of shows going on, and I could relate,” she says. “And then they told me the story and I was like ‘We’ve got to do something.’”

And so Beth’s Dead was born. Over the course of 10 episodes, Padman, Laime, and Rosen dig into how Laime came to become so entangled with Beth, and set out to confront the professor head-on. However, in the end, they discover that the person behind the fake accounts is actually the son of the man they suspected, and had targeted Laime during a period of addiction. Armchair sleuths, though, descended on the pod, speculating that the son was covering for his father and digging into his identity. “I understand this instinct for wanting justice and wanting the right answers and wanting the truth,” Laime says. “And I also understand that people are listening to a podcast that has twists and turns and it makes it hard to trust anything.”

Padman sees the phenomenon as an extension of that parasocial relationship that spawned the show in the first place. “I would say everyone is just sort of looking for connection,” she says. “And that circles back to this show.” 

As the podcast only continues to grow in popularity months after its release, Rolling Stone spoke with Liame, Padman, and Rosen to answer those lingering questions.

Do you consider Beth’s Dead a true-crime podcast?
Laime: There was a crime involved, and there is an investigation happening during it. So I do consider it true crime, but I think that the way people are used to consuming true crime — it might feel very different, because we’re all chat show podcasters, and we aren’t scared of getting into the weeds a little bit and kind of really exploring all the feelings around everything. 

It must be strange to find yourself in the middle of a story like this.
Padman: I have this privileged position of being kind of on the outside; I didn’t experience what Elizabeth and Andy experienced. But it’s cool to be part of something that’s really caught fire. People really connect with it. And I think because [of] the way it ends, it has attracted a lot of different kinds of people. And everyone has different opinions on what happened and what they think and what they feel.

How has this experience changed the way you interact with fans?
Laime: Probably not enough. I am pretty trusting still, but I have guardrails in place, and I’d say Monica and Andy are two of those guardrails for me now.

Rosen: I feel like I have the highest guard rails of everybody. I feel like everyone’s full of it.

There’s a lot of speculation online about who the professor is. How did you go about making sure folks don’t find out?
Laime: I don’t wish for anyone to [find that out], because all three of us, by and large, believe that it was not the professor. I think that there are a lot of people who think that the son was covering for his dad. So my feeling is that he’s kind of an innocent bystander to this whole thing without even knowing it. I don’t want anyone putting this on his radar. We did our due diligence and tried to protect him as best as we could. 

What convinced you that it was the son and not his father?
Rosen: He was on video, which I think really changed the experience. I went into the situation ready to pounce on this person, not believing anything. But there was something about that call and seeing him.

Padman: I just think he was not trying to do anything except apologize in that call. And a big thing for me is the addiction aspect. I have a lot of addicts in my life, and have had interactions with them in their addiction. There’s so much that goes on in their sober lives that they cannot give an explanation other than, “Yeah, I was not in my, in my right mind.”

And people can be addicted to catfishing.
Laime: I think that I was part of the addiction. People are so thrown by the $1,000 and I think that for him, keeping me emotionally invested was a drug of its own. It’s much more likely that maybe he stretched the truth about not remembering things because he’s embarrassed and didn’t want to have to rehash all these details. 

All I wanted was to feel safe. And I think that because it wasn’t this big, scary crime that happened, that gets a little lost. But the truth is, I was truly scared about having some psychopath show up. And after seeing him for like the first half second, such a weight lifted. And whether he’s covering for whatever it is, I’m no longer scared of some boogie man out there in the world. 

Folks were curious about how you reached out to him in the first place, since he said he didn’t have access to his catfish accounts anymore.
Laime: We reached out to all of the character emails, but I also realized that the PayPal donation came from a different email account. I believe that’s his actual email. So I just had done a search and used every email that was even remotely linked to this person, and that was the one he replied to.

Have you heard from “Beth” since the podcast came out?
Laime: No. And, in fact, the last interaction we had, he said, basically, “Please don’t reach out, and I will not be reaching out.” We put it to a real close. Everyone wished each other the best at the end of that. I don’t want him to get dragged back into things. I think there was some closure for him, I hope.