Why Did Kaitlyn Braun Scam Dozens Of Doulas?

Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of sexual abuse, miscarriage and medical trauma.

SEANNA STARTED WORKING as a doula in August 2022. The then-34-year-old excitedly set up an Instagram page for her London, Ont., business, and, after a brief exchange, she found her first client: Kaitlyn Braun. Braun, who was 23 and lived with her mother in Brantford, Ont., was due in two days and needed help with labour and delivery. Shortly after that, Braun’s contractions started.

When Seanna, who asked that Chatelaine only use her first name, arrived at Braun’s apartment, she saw signs of impending motherhood: a car seat in the living room, a bassinet in the bedroom, tiny baby clothes, even a breast pump. “It all checked out that this was an underprivileged, under-supported young woman who was making do,” says Seanna.

Unlike midwives, doulas aren’t medical professionals. Instead, they provide emotional and informational support. Over the course of several days, Seanna coached Braun and massaged her; she even taught her to “curb walk,” an exercise that would encourage Braun’s pelvis to open up and speed up the process.

After several days of labour, Braun’s contractions were now close together. On the drive to the hospital, Braun bashfully announced that her water had broken, and apologized to Seanna for the mess. Seanna told her not to worry about it. But when they got to the hospital and Braun got out, Seanna noticed something odd: the passenger seat Braun had been sitting in was dry.

After getting out of the car, Braun seemed to be stalling. She was walking so slowly and stopping so frequently that a one-minute walk to the hospital doors took almost an hour. But Braun also described rectal pressure—a sign that the baby was already in the birth canal. Seanna was determined that her first client wasn’t going to give birth on the grass outside a hospital.

When Braun was finally admitted, an obstetrician arrived with a bedside ultrasound machine. Braun told Seanna that she was nervous. Seanna had her eyes fixed on the screen, looking for the baby, but nothing appeared. The doctor stopped the ultrasound and silently wiped the goop off Braun’s belly. She sat on the side of the bed. “There is no pregnancy,” she said gently to Braun. “The only thing in your uterus is an IUD.”

Seanna took Braun home in the car, the two of them in awkward silence. “The only thing she said to me the entire ride is ‘I’m so confused,’” remembers Seanna.

But Braun wasn’t confused. Nor was she pregnant. And it wasn’t just this once—she had been play-acting pregnancy for years. A group of Ontario doulas who discovered Braun’s deception all share a remarkably similar story of a young woman in distress: a victim of sexual assault trying to make the best of an unintended pregnancy and now facing the loss of that baby, often in the context of family alienation. She was all alone. They attended to her tirelessly, often working for days without rest while she went through the motions of labour and often seemed close to death.

Even the doulas who tended to Braun in person were convinced that she was pregnant. She was sufficiently larger-bodied that it was believable, and her supposed labour and contractions seemed real. “I’ve given birth myself three times and been present at multiple births,” says Amy Silva, another doula who works in London, whom Braun also deceived. “She’s clearly done her research to be able to fool people into believing her.”

Even more amazing is just how prolific she was. As they connected online, the doulas learned that Braun had targeted dozens of others across North America. And the stories she fabricated only got wilder as she became more and more emboldened.

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AFTER HER EXPERIENCE with Seanna, Braun continued honing her scam. At first she paid doulas out of pocket, though she also stiffed some when they tried to collect their fees. But with many doulas offering good-natured pro bono support for those dealing with loss, she changed the trajectory of her con, and virtual or phone sessions with doulas gave her latitude to act out her fantasies.

In November 2022, Katie Nelson received a message through her Instagram doula page. Braun claimed to be 32 weeks pregnant, the result of a sexual assault, and she’d just learned that the fetus didn’t have a heartbeat. Braun said she had recently come out as queer to her unsupportive family. She was scared, alone and in need of someone to help her through the agony of a stillbirth.

Nelson, 24, had stopped working as a doula, but she was immediately drawn in by Braun’s story: Nelson is queer (something she mentioned in her business profile) and Braun made her feel like she was the only person who could help. But Nelson wouldn’t be able to support Braun on her own. She was in Stratford, Ont., an hour away from Brantford. Plus, she had a full-time job. She had grown accustomed to working with clients over the phone and online, a trend that had accelerated during the pandemic, so she tagged in Amy Perry, a fellow doula she was friendly with. Soon after, Braun sent a text: “What does a contraction feel like?”

After Braun supposedly went into labour, Nelson and Perry started providing round-the-clock virtual care. The pair were either on the phone with or texting Braun, coaching her through a painful labour to the familiar hospital soundtrack of beeps and garbled announcements. Braun said she touched her baby’s head as she was crowning and tearfully reported that it was the most beautiful experience of her life.

The process went as smoothly as possible for a traumatic event. But 45 minutes later, Braun told Perry that her placenta wasn’t coming out and she was still bleeding. She had to be transferred to a different ward to undergo a D&C. Things escalated rapidly from there, with Braun sharing the distressing news that she now needed a hysterectomy—a devastating development. “Over the phone, we processed losing her uterus to her rapist’s dead baby three days before her 24th birthday,” says Perry, 33. Perry was surprised that the hospital allowed Braun to stay on the phone while she was being prepped for major surgery, but she figured they were making an exception because Braun was alone and the circumstances were awful.

But the hysterectomy didn’t stop the bleeding. Braun described in detail passing massive blood clots; she was crashing and said the nurses and doctors around her made no attempt to mask their concern. They were discussing transferring Braun to another hospital for emergency surgery. At Braun’s request, Perry stayed on the phone with her until her transfer to the new hospital, where Braun would then be whisked into surgery.

The following day, Braun was in good spirits. She reported that the surgery had gone well, flooding the doula team with relief. But that feeling was short-lived. The bleeding that the surgery was intended to curb had started again. Now, Braun was to be airlifted to a third hospital to undergo a battery of tests. That’s when things took another brutal turn: Braun told a doctor that she was being triggered by a physical exam and that she was withdrawing her consent. But he persisted, demanding she get on all fours and touching her clitoris before penetrating her even as she grew hysterical, screaming at him to stop.

There was more. Test results revealed the cause of Braun’s bleeding: stage four pelvic cancer. Braun told the doulas that the doctors had given her three months to live and she was being transferred to a fourth hospital for palliative care. She sent screenshots from the funeral-home website of the urn and matching necklace she had picked out for the baby’s ashes, and Nelson offered to pick them up for her.

But things did not de-escalate: Braun said the same doctor who had assaulted her before showed up and attacked her again. He was caught by a nurse, who reported him, and Braun said that the police had come to collect a statement. Perry and Nelson were on the phone when Braun vividly narrated the experience of having a rape kit done.

At this point, Perry and Nelson had been mostly awake and on the phone with Braun for almost eight days. They had gone through a dramatic cycle of concern, coaching, pleading and consoling. The sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion were taking a toll. But when a friend of Perry’s gently suggested that it was a little hard to believe that every worst-case scenario was happening to the same young woman, something clicked.

Hoping to verify, Perry asked Braun if she could speak directly to one of her nurses, but she refused. Perry asked for the names of the police officers who visited, but Braun said she couldn’t remember and that they didn’t leave a card. Nelson, increasingly skeptical, reverse-image-searched the pictures that Braun had sent of her tumour. They were from Wikipedia. She found the picture of Braun’s stillborn baby in a Google search. When Perry called the hospital to ask if they had a patient named Kaitlyn Braun, the receptionist said no. She tried again the next morning, hoping there might have been a mix-up; there wasn’t. “I was done,” says Perry. “I stopped responding to her.”

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THE SPECTACULAR DEGREE of manipulation and method acting required to pull off this kind of fraud is shocking. But it’s par for the course for people who fabricate illnesses or crises—including pregnancy—for emotional gratification. Braun thrived on the compassion she gained from weaving a traumatic tale, implicating others in her invented suffering. “[Braun] seems to have had a compulsive or addictive quality to her behaviour,” says Marc Feldman, a psychiatrist based in Birmingham, Ala., and the author of Dying to Be Ill: True Stories of Medical Deception. “That’s something a lot of posers [do]. They’re so needy and the payoff is so great. They seem unable to resist.”

Braun was ruthless when it came to fast-tracking intimacy. She would pick an aspect of a doula’s identity—say, queerness or family dysfunction—and weave it into her narrative. Several doulas I spoke to were convinced Braun had researched their social media, homing in on potential vulnerabilities. Nelson says that Braun attempted to bond with her over being raised religious and walking away from those traditions as an adult. Christian doulas say that Braun bonded with them over shared faith.

Randi, a 36-year-old doula who asked that we not use her last name, was helping Braun labour over the phone in early March 2023 when Braun said she suffered a cervical tear, a placental abruption, hysterectomy and clotting issues. Then she went into multi-system organ failure and was put on life support. “I was thinking, ‘Oh God, she’s done,’” says Randi. “‘My client is dead.’”

Randi realizes now that Braun hit each of her personal triggers, all of which she’d discussed on social media. “My sister was on life support when I was four, and she passed away,” she says. “I’ve had multiple losses. I’m an assault survivor. I had a hysterectomy last year. This could’ve been a fluke, but I don’t think it was.”

After her experience in November 2022, Perry called the Brantford Police. While the detective could not provide details, he implied that police were aware of Braun’s fake pregnancies. He encouraged her to spread the word: If she wanted Braun to stop, she had to tell others.

So, she turned to social media. The affected doulas found each other and formed a Facebook group that grew to over 50 members. They discovered Braun’s sunny social media posts, where a perpetually grinning Braun posed for selfies and with friends from university. They learned that she grew up in Port Perry, Ont., she has a brother and a sister and her parents are divorced. They tracked down Braun’s mother, who knew about the fake pregnancies but said nothing would make her stop. I reached out to Braun’s friends and family, most of whom didn’t respond. Braun’s stepmother would only say that Braun has long been sick: “If the police had done something years ago, this never would have happened.”

Perry says that she and the other doulas encouraged Braun to get help. At times, she seemed to accept responsibility—she told Seanna she was seeing a therapist—but her behaviour didn’t stop. The doulas were further alarmed when they recalled one of the reasons they had trusted her in the first place: Braun was a registered social worker assisting under-served communities. Several doulas reported her to the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers. (Last March, her licence was suspended.)

Desperate, the doulas told their stories on social media using the hashtag #doulascam. Their posts went viral in March 2023. Soon after, Braun was charged with multiple counts of fraud, harassment and sexual assault (in relation to the massage and other touching solicited while she faked labour). In a plea deal struck by the Crown and Braun’s lawyer last December, many of those charges were dropped. In February, after almost a year in pre-sentence custody, Braun told the court she had used her time in jail for self-improvement and felt “a strong sense of shame” about her actions. She was sentenced to two years of house arrest, to be served at home with her mother, followed by three years of probation.

Doulas are often hired by people who fear or distrust the conventional medical system, have been gaslit in hospital rooms, are grappling with the aftermath of assault or have lost family support. Braun expertly tapped into these vulnerable spots to take advantage of doulas’ compassion. Some of the doulas remain angry that police didn’t understand the magnitude of harm done from being targeted, manipulated and exploited in this way. “The charges don’t really add up with how we’re feeling,” says Perry.

Others are trying to find a way to forgive—even if they’re certain they’ll never forget. “You can’t undo the harm that was done,” says Randi. “[But] I feel like our systems failed. Her actions were her choice, but what led her to that place wasn’t her fault.”

In court, there was much discussion of the likelihood that Braun would reoffend and the paucity of mental-health care available to her. In May, about two months after her release, Braun was arrested again on charges of falsely soliciting support for pregnancy and childbirth while serving her conditional sentence. She remains in custody.

Sarah Treleaven’s CBC/BBC podcast about Kaitlyn Braun is out now.