The Latest Season of the 'Deep Cover' Podcast Dives into One of the Biggest Stolen Valor Cases Ever

Sarah Cavanaugh was a decorated Marine Corps veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. She received a Bronze Star for pulling her fellow Marines from a burning Humvee, even after the door crushed her hip. When she left the military, she struggled to get VA benefits. Her leg was a constant bother, she needed hearing aids for both ears and she eventually developed lung cancer possibly from the burn pits.

Despite all of that, she volunteered for veterans' retreats, joined a gym and even became the commander of her local VFW. The only problem with Cavanaugh and her post-military life was that she was never actually in the military.

For anyone who's ever wondered what makes a civilian pose as a veteran for personal gain, the "Deep Cover" podcast might have an answer. In its latest season, the sixth of the series, Pulitzer Prize winner Jake Halpern and investigative journalist Jess McHugh pull at the threads of a six-year saga of lies and deceit perpetrated by Cavanaugh.

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"I've been researching female scammers for years, and she's something of an outlier in many ways," McHugh told Military.com. "It's very rare to have a young woman committing stolen valor ... the scale and intimacy of her crime were also so unusual. In speaking to her, however, the motives she claims are similar to many people who live double lives: a desire for admiration and belonging."

Stolen valor is essentially a big lie, and no matter how big the lie itself gets, there's nothing illegal about lying about military service. If someone simply claims to be a veteran when they never served in the military, they're just a liar and not (yet) a criminal. The act becomes a crime when the liar in question uses the lie to receive something tangible, such as money or VA benefits.

Cavanaugh was sentenced to 70 months in prison for the kind of stolen valor that is illegal under the Stolen Valor Act of 2013. In 2023, she was indicted in the state of Rhode Island for falsifying military service, false use of military medals, identity theft and collecting more than $250,000 in cash and benefits intended to be charitable contributions to a wounded and disabled veteran.

"What really captivated me was the sheer scope of the deception," said Halpern. "She kept this going for six years -- six years! -- all within the state of Rhode Island, which is so tiny. I live nearby, and I know the kind of tight-knit communities there. It made me wonder: How do you sustain a lie like this, in a place like that, especially when the people you're deceiving are smart and thoughtful and paying attention? This wasn't just some dime-store grift."

It's not as if her friends and comrades at the local VFW post didn't try to check her credentials. She talked the talk, she walked the walk and even had what appeared to be a legitimate DD-214. The beginning of the end of her stolen-valor sojourn came because the veteran community is a close one. The more she began to reveal her supposed injuries and war stories, the more her veteran friends activated their networks to help her.

"What drew me to Sarah's story was how intimate it was: stealing not just from organizations and institutions but from close friends and loved ones," McHugh said. "That complex dynamic -- and resulting pain -- of this crime of intimacy is pretty rare. Part of why we wanted to do a whole season was to have the space to tell the stories of real veterans with the conditions she claimed to have -- veterans suffering with service-related injuries or cancers -- and all the ways actual veterans support each other in this country."

"I was drawn to the idea of all these veterans rallying together to support one another, especially when the system failed them," Halpern added. "There's something deeply moving -- and, frankly, admirable -- about that. The tragedy here is that their compassion was exploited. That's part of what made me want to dive deep into this story."

Multiple charities dedicated to veteran causes allotted funds to help Cavanaugh. She used the money and other benefits for physical therapy, in-home care, outdoor group retreats, a wedding venue, gym memberships, utility bills, groceries and gift cards for personal purchases. But eventually, someone in the veteran community was bound to do a deeper dive into her past, and if you ask the hosts of "Deep Cover," someone was equally likely to look more closely into her story.

"From the first moment I met her, what struck me was how personable she was," Halpern said. "She was calm, reasonable and likable. It helped me understand how she could create such deep bonds with people, even under false pretenses. In so many true-crime stories, the perpetrator is reduced to a kind of cartoon villain. But that's not what this felt like. Sarah was more complex, more layered. There was a real intimacy in the relationships she built. That nuance -- that gray area between fraud, inhumanity and humanity -- is what kept pulling me in."

"The Truth About Sarah," the sixth season of the "Deep Cover" podcast from iHeart and Pushkin Industries, is streaming now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Related: The Medal of Honor Fraud Case that Took Stolen Valor to the Extreme

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