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COME CLOSER — NEW EPISODE

Betty Broderick died in a prison hospital after thirty-seven years served. And if all you know is the headline version, you know her as the woman who found out her husband was cheating and lost her mind: the ultimate woman scorned.

That version has been the narrative for a long while, but it also skips almost everything that actually happened to her before she ever picked up that gun.

This week's episode goes back through it: the marriage, the affair, the divorce that was rigged against her before it started, and the term for what she was actually going through that nobody used at the time. We pulled the three moments that hit hardest. Here's what's inside.

Betty spent years supporting Dan financially while he went through law school and medical school, raising their four kids, and running the house, so that he could become one of the most successful medical malpractice attorneys in San Diego. Once he'd made it, he hired a 21-year-old legal secretary named Linda Kolkena and started an affair Betty knew about almost immediately.

When she confronted him, he didn't stop. He gaslit her instead, and quietly built a case that she was the unstable one. He pushed this narrative to her face, to his friends, and to her own friends. There's a clinical name for what that does to a person, and it isn't heartbreak.

It's betrayal trauma: the profound psychological injury that happens when someone you depend on for your emotional or physical survival violates your trust.

Watch: the exact mechanism of what Dan did to her, and why "heartbreak" doesn't cover it.

Dan filed for divorce while he was president of the Bar Association, after years of quietly building the case among his own colleagues that Betty was crazy. She couldn't find an attorney willing to go up against him.

She lost the house. She lost custody of all four kids because the divorce fell under a no-fault system, the years she'd spent supporting his career carried no legal weight in the split.

In November of 1989, using her daughter's key, Betty went to her ex-husband’s house in the middle of the night, walked into the bedroom, and fired five shots from a revolver into the bed where Dan and Linda were sleeping. Both died. Dan was 44. Linda was 28.

None of this makes the headlines when someone says "woman scorned." It's a lot easier to write her off than to sit with how much of this was actually preventable, by the people who were supposed to protect her, and didn't.

Full episode's linked below if you want to Come Closer to the whole case, start to finish.

xx Rae