St. Louis–area woman subject of new podcast from ‘Dr. Death’ creator

In April 2019, a St. Louis–area woman, Sarah Delashmit, appeared on the TV show Dr. Phil to talk about lies she had told. But these weren’t run-of-the-mill fibs. For years, she had told people—friends, coworkers, charities—that she had illnesses such as cancer and muscular dystrophy. A counselor at a camp for adults with disabilities that Delashmit attended—using a wheelchair—appeared on the talk show to discuss the violation of trust that occurred when she discovered Delashmit could walk. Another couple came on to talk about how Delashmit had told them she had terminal cancer, a stalker, and had been caught in a shoot-out. “There are more people who do this kind of thing than you can imagine,” host Phil McGraw said at one point. 

That might be true, but medical journalist Laura Beil, the host of the hit podcast Dr. Death, recognized something extraordinary in Delashmit’s story, which is now the subject of Beil’s new six-part iHeartRadio podcast, Sympathy Pains. For one, it was clear that Delashmit, who is from Highland, Illinois, had been pulling this off for quite some time. Other lies included that she was in abusive relationships and suffered the loss of a child. It was also apparent that money wasn’t her motivation. In October 2020, Delashmit pleaded guilty to charges of fraud after receiving donated items and money while she posed as a sick person. She was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in January 2021 and released in March. “Even the prosecutors in the case said that money … wasn’t really her motivator,” Beil says. Attention? That didn’t seem quite right, either.  

Beil was also drawn to the story after thinking about the tension in telling the tale of someone who had conned people around her but seemingly had mental health challenges herself. “That’s what kind of made it appealing to me—the challenge of telling that story and maybe sparking a different kind of discussion, because the system failed her as well,” Beil says. (And she felt more comfortable exploring Delashmit’s story because Delashmit had already voluntarily gone on national television to talk about it.)

The first half of Sympathy Pains explores what Delashmit did, and the effects it had on those around her, but the second half dives into how we can understand it and how to talk about it. Beil goes to great lengths to not portray Delashmit as a “two-dimensional villain,” to try and understand what she did. She hired a disability consultant to read scripts not only on behalf of the disabled community but also to be an advocate for Delashmit.

Because Delashmit declined to be interviewed by Beil, listeners will never get a nice, neat answer to the question of why? A bigger question for Beil is: After Delashmit realized the level of harm she was causing, why did she continue? We might never know, but Sympathy Pains still offers a fascinating story of broken trust, told from the perspective of those Delashmit deceived. Episode 5 has another St. Louis connection: the story of an area schoolteacher whom Delashmit lied to. 

Last week, Sympathy Pains hit number 1 on  iTunes. Its popularity begs the question: What is resonating with listeners? Beil hopes that it’s the unusual quality of the story that people are drawn to. It could also be that we’ve all been duped, that we can somewhat see ourselves in the story. “‘That could have been me,’” Beil imagines listeners thinking. “‘If that happened to me, I wouldn’t say, Are you really disabled?’ I think that’s part of it. The people that she trapped in all these lies? They were just normal people.”