A new podcast series with St. Louis roots shares an intimate and moving story about what it means to live with a secret, and how one woman’s life changed when hers was revealed.
In “Held: A Podcast Mini-Series,” Karri Offstein Rosenthal guides listeners through the unraveling of a 35-year-old secret kept by her sister-in-law, Angie Offstein, who gave birth to a son while still in high school, put him up for adoption, and did her best to hide the news from everyone—even the child’s father. Over the course of six documentary-style episodes, Rosenthal traces the shocking turn of events that eventually brought Offstein’s secret to light.
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“Karri and I go back a really long way, separate from my husband and I having a relationship,” Offstein says. “We’ve always had this closeness and shared certain things with each other. If I was going to share with anybody, my truest, deepest, darkest thoughts, then it would be [with] Karri.”
As a student at Ladue Horton Watkins High School, Offstein didn’t tell a soul—not even her boyfriend—when she realized she was pregnant, deciding instead to bear the immense burden on her own. By the time she did tell her parents, the only option she had that late into her pregnancy was to deliver the baby and plead with her parents to help keep it a secret. Just a few days after she delivered her baby and placed it up for adoption, Offstein returned to school. Her teachers, friends, and classmates had no idea she had just survived the most difficult nine months of her life.
The podcast series begins 35 years later with Zac searching for information about his birth family. He connected through 23andMe with a half-sibling and his birth father, Michael, who was Offstein’s high school boyfriend. What follows is a series of interviews with members of the three different families touched by this complicated, yet fulfilling story.
About a year after Offstein had her own initial phone call with her son, she decided she wanted to tell the full story. Rosenthal, who had experience doing podcasts, jumped at the chance to help Offstein document this story. Zac, Michael, and everyone else were immediately open to sharing their own experiences.
“She has been there for me in spades,” Rosenthal says. “This was the first time that I can really remember where she ever asked anything of me, and I was so happy to reciprocate in any way that I could. And, I think it’s worth saying, I’m a very nosy person.”
The process of creating the podcast was a collaborative one that took place over hours of phone calls and Facetimes between Offstein, who now lives in Colorado, and Rosenthal, who now lives in Illinois. In the end, Rosenthal had between 20 and 30 hours of raw audio from interviews that the two of them edited to form a cohesive narrative.
“To me, the gift of the story is that it’s not about politics, and it’s not about what side of this or that you’re on,” Rosenthal says. “It’s really about looking at what forgiveness can do for people both internally and externally.”
“And what a secret can do to people,” Offstein adds. “And what love can do to people, and an open heart, and mental illness, and women’s struggles. I really do think that [the story] just leads to a lot of good conversation. It certainly has opened up whole different sides of every relationship that I have.”
Listen to “Held: A Podcast Mini-Series” on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Two bonus episodes were released on those platforms last week.
