By 2017, the true crime podcasting house may need already appeared crowded — however maybe what it was lacking was full physique chills.
That was the 12 months Ashley Flowers and her pal Brit Prawat launched their true crime podcast Crime Junkie into an area that already included pioneers like Serial (2014), Technology Why (2012), and My Favourite Homicide (2016). The informal approach Flowers narrated crimes to her pal, who responded with dramatic gasps and her trademark exclamation (“Full. Physique. Chills.”), resonated and their breezy takes on every little thing from native Indiana chilly instances to high-profile murders (they suppose Scott Peterson’s harmless) drew in legions of listeners — so many, in truth, that Flowers was capable of shortly give up her day job and switch her consideration to podcasting, full time.
Through the years, that dedication has paid infinite dividends. Crime Junkie quickly shot to the highest of the podcast charts and by no means left; final 12 months it was Apple’s second most-popular podcast — beating out Joe Rogan. Its success enabled Flowers to launch her personal expanded podcast community, Audiochuck, publish a bestselling thriller novel, and rake in a staggering $45 million a 12 months. Bloomberg lately reported Flowers’s income, together with information of an funding of $40 million from the Chernin Group, a enterprise capital agency that’s funded cultural cornerstones like Tumblr and leisure initiatives like Reese Witherspoon’s manufacturing firm. That possible means the sky’s the restrict for Flowers and Audiochuck, which in keeping with Bloomberg was valued at $250 million. However with nice alternative comes nice scrutiny — and scrutiny hasn’t all the time completed Crime Junkie many favors.
There’s no query that Crime Junkie is a juggernaut. However as a result of it’s a juggernaut, it inevitably performs an outsized function within the broader dialog round true crime itself. Thus far, it sits uneasily inside bigger debates about accountable content material creation, fan engagement, the rights of victims’ households, and the last word query of whether or not true crime is journalism or leisure.
Ashley Flowers’s path to podcasting was unconventional — however, wow, has it paid off
Earlier than 2016, Ashley Flowers wasn’t an investigator — her solely interplay with the world of prison justice was as a volunteer together with her native Crime Stoppers department, the place she served on the board of administrators. However that 12 months, Flowers, then a 27-year-old startup employee, proposed a real crime radio phase to air on an area Indianapolis station with a view to promote the Crime Stoppers group. After a couple of 12 months of doing the native phase, Flowers’s lifelong bestie Prawat instructed she take heed to Serial. Quickly, Flowers had determined to broaden her radio gig to a real crime podcast.
“It actually began as a strategy to get the Crime Stoppers identify on the market, and it has grown into a lot extra and allowed for the platform to carry consideration to quite a lot of actually wonderful nonprofits,” Flowers mentioned in a 2019 radio interview. That’s a barely totally different narrative than the one she gave the New York Instances in 2022. In that model, she mentioned, “I by no means noticed this as a pastime.” A telltale signal that she meant enterprise: As an alternative of signing with a longtime podcast community, as most true crime podcasters do, Flowers launched Crime Junkie beneath her personal studio, named Audiochuck after her canine. (Each Audiochuck podcast ends with a callout to Chuck, adopted by an approving doggie yowl, presumably from the pup himself.)
If Flowers was all the time gunning for achievement and independence by means of Crime Junkie, she discovered it quick. Crime Junkie’s progress from the outset was phenomenal; its listeners had an unimaginable zeal for the present. For followers of talky “comedy” true crime podcasts like My Favourite Homicide, Crime Junkie provided a barely extra severe mode of supply: Ashley bought proper right down to narrating the story, with Brit chiming in to ask main questions the way in which a listener may. Was it extremely scripted and infrequently awkward? Positive. Did audiences care? Not a whit.
2022 gave the impression to be a breakout 12 months. Flowers gained new mass media consideration when the New York Instances coated the launch of her present The Deck, which she hosts. (The present focuses on the chilly instances to date gone that legislation enforcement places them on the backs of taking part in card decks that they distribute to prisons, hoping to seek out solutions amongst inmates). That 12 months, per the Instances, the Crime Junkie fan membership had “tens of 1000’s” of subscribers; that very same 12 months, Crime Junkie entered the No. 2 spot amongst top-ranked podcasts, behind Joe Rogan and forward of The Each day, and has stayed there ever since, refusing to be dislodged. The present’s huge reputation with girls undoubtedly has a hand in its endurance; Edison Analysis has reported ever since 2022 that Crime Junkie reaches extra girls than another podcast.
Whereas complete listenership is tough to quantify, the stats are staggering: as of this 12 months, Crime Junkie has racked up 500 million streams on Spotify alone, whereas the Audiochuck community boasts jaw-dropping stats of over 2.6 billion complete downloads.
Alongside the way in which, Flowers has launched a number of extra podcast sequence, most notably The Deck. She’s additionally introduced a number of sequence to the community, together with three sequence from journalist Delia D’Ambra and Anatomy of Homicide, co-hosted by former prosecutor and Investigation Discovery host Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi. Along with Flowers writing her debut novel, All Good Individuals Right here — a second novel arrives in Might — she and Prawat repeatedly tour the nation, performing the present for sold-out audiences. The pair will quickly play Radio Metropolis.
On prime of all this, Audiochuck lately introduced that it will be transferring into movie and TV, which provides it the potential to broaden an already huge platform even additional.
However whether or not that growth is a internet good for true crime itself is determined by who you ask. The reply lies in whether or not Audiochuck is finally about serving journalism, leisure, or an unholy mixture of each.
For Crime Junkie, accolades and controversies go hand in hand
In 2019, journalist Adam Wren put collectively a longform profile of Flowers for Indianapolis Month-to-month dubbed “The Downside with Crime Junkie.” In it, he wrote scathingly a couple of dwell present efficiency wherein Flowers and Prawat closely implied the guilt of the sufferer’s father, despite the fact that he was provably harmless.
The person who was indicted by a grand jury on 22 felony counts, together with the homicide of one other baby, is just not the little woman’s father. Any armchair detective may inform you that immediately.
Certainly, fees of irresponsible and unethical dealing with of instances have dogged Crime Junkie ever since its inception. Living proof — the present’s therapy of the Scott Peterson case, which was its second episode (a multi-parter) and amongst its hottest.
“It looks as if the only real supply for that Crime Junkie episode was them watching the A&E documentary sequence in regards to the Peterson case, which was closely biased and disregarded quite a lot of incriminating info pointing to his guilt,” Robin Warder, host of long-running podcast The Path Went Chilly, instructed me. “And so they in all probability didn’t do any extra analysis.” Warder additionally factors to the present’s conspiratorial tackle the Kendrick Johnson case, a demise he explains is mostly understood to be a tragic accident. “This may undoubtedly be a problem when your present has a bigger viewers than anybody.”
Nonetheless, Warder is fast to acknowledge that many of those issues are a lot, a lot bigger than Crime Junkie itself. The true crime podcasting group has lengthy struggled with moral concerns and questions on how you can pay respect to victims and their households whereas balancing the necessity for scrutiny of the prison justice system. Then there’s the truth that, nicely, this is leisure. Flowers and Prawat have by no means recognized as journalists, although they’ve employed and labored with journalists previously.
That lack of journalism coaching turned a serious supply of controversy for the present pretty early in its run. As Wren reported, Cathy Frye, a journalist previously of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, inadvertently ran throughout a Crime Junkie episode wherein she claimed Flowers had completely plagiarized her reporting on a 2002 homicide. In a since-deleted Fb remark, Frye alleged that not solely did Flowers replicate particulars, story construction, and fail to provide attribution, the podcast cheapened her award-winning reporting, turning it into leisure.
After Frye’s put up, a number of podcasters, together with Warder, went on to allege that Flowers was routinely stealing their content material, with out giving them credit score nor directing any of her huge listenership towards their exhibits. This 2019 dust-up wound up not solely catching the eye of mainstream media, however prompted a community-wide dialog about plagiarism, each in true crime and podcasting writ giant.
“The plagiarism scandal was helpful at serving to change the business and making individuals acknowledge the problem,” Warder acknowledged. Ultimately, Flowers made a behavior that continues to this present day of extensively itemizing her sources — although Warder claimed that she by no means really apologized to him or different podcasters who accused her of theft.
One other main criticism of Flowers entails her podcast, Purple Ball, which was meant to be a deep dive into the infamous unsolved Burger Chef murders. As an alternative, as Wren profiled, a lead investigator on the case wound up being reprimanded for giving Flowers and Crime Junkie unauthorized entry to the case information — a transfer that finally led to Purple Ball being truncated. Different podcasters have since claimed that the debacle left the Indiana State Police unwilling to work with different media retailers, to the detriment of fixing instances. (Audiochuck was unavailable for remark.)
Final 12 months, Charlene Shunick, whose sister Mickey was murdered in 2012, blasted Crime Junkie for releasing a paywalled episode in regards to the crime. Whereas Flowers did take away the episode, Shunick instructed me she wasn’t pleased with the response she acquired from the corporate. In an e-mail alternate offered to Vox, Shunick reached out to thank the podcast for eradicating the episode and encourage Crime Junkie producers to endure ethics coaching. She additionally needed to know why her household’s pleas for privateness in a closed case hadn’t been revered. After a notice assuring her that Audiochuck was “taking [her] message to coronary heart,” her subsequent query — about what the corporate would do in another way sooner or later — acquired no response.
Shunick instructed me that different victims’ relations had shared related tales together with her about their very own interactions with the present. “I don’t suppose it’s absurd to anticipate to be requested for permission to inform our life tales,” she mentioned.
“In my view, it doesn’t actually seem to be Crime Junkie cares in regards to the relations of the individuals whose tales they revenue off of.”
Nonetheless, whereas these criticisms come up, different households have nothing however reward for Flowers and her dedication to advocacy and utilizing her platform to advertise precise crime-solving. Crime Junkie has additionally targeted extra closely on unsolved chilly instances and lacking individuals instances because it’s grown extra in style, generally regardless of complaints from followers. Flowers herself has donated cash to prison justice teams, DNA testing funds, and different investigative non-profits.
She additionally based her personal cold-case fund, Season of Justice, which has confirmed to be remarkably efficient at creating motion and even fixing instances. The group claims to have generated 20 “SOJ Solves” since its inception.
Warder himself is fast to notice what a distinction Crime Junkie’s huge platform has made in fixing instances — each as a result of it’s enabled Flowers’s monetary philanthropy and since it’s gotten listeners concerned. “Years in the past,” he mentioned, “I coated this homicide case on The Path Went Chilly, and it wound up being solved and an harmless man was exonerated as a result of the best listener simply occurred to be listening to a Crime Junkie episode about it and took motion.”
Warder speculated that Crime Junkie listeners could not discover the group outdoors of the realm of Audiochuck. Whereas there are ample examples of Crime Junkie listeners asking for and receiving recs for different podcasts, it’s true that Crime Junkie, and the Audiochuck community, can seem to be its personal remoted archipelago within the true crime ocean.
Maybe the larger query is: Does that matter? In case you’re on an island of true crime, who cares if that island is your model of a five-star resort? If all of that is finally about leisure, then by any commonplace, Crime Junkie is a roaring success.
But when true crime strives to enlighten in addition to entertain, then Crime Junkie should still have plenty of room to develop.
