Episode 5: The Devil in Delaney

The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall

CBC

True Crime

4.6 • 751 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As women increasingly spoke out about the abuse they suffered under the patriarchy, many still struggled to be heard. And the new field of recovered memory therapy became a vehicle for both legitimizing women's trauma and exploiting it.

Delaney is a housewife and mother of three, living in Manitoba in the 1980s. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she seeks out counselors and psychiatrists and then… she begins to remember. Years later, her son Matt describes growing up during the Satanic Panic, with a mother trying to work through her trauma. We hear from Delaney herself through a biographical manuscript she wrote before she died, exploring her experiences of childhood abuse, her eventual belief that Satanists were involved, and how she came to terms with all of it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listen, friend, if you don't have time to watch the Grammy Awards this year, do not worry because commotion can catch you up on everything that you need to know.
0:08.0	I'm Elamene Abdu Mahmoud, and this week on the show, we are bringing together the group chat to talk about the big winners, the surprises that no one saw coming, and the snubs that people are upset about.
0:18.4	Find and follow Commotion with Elamine Abdul Mahmood on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:28.2	This is a CBC podcast.
0:31.2	Just a heads up that this episode contains discussions about sexual abuse and domestic abuse, including some explicit mentions.
0:39.3	Please take care while listening.
0:44.4	So I can remember even when I was very young, she'd be sitting and having a cup of tea
0:50.8	with some honey and some cream, and she would invite me to try it.
0:54.1	And it was, I can still remember, like, being young and having tea for the first time with her
1:00.4	while we were, uh, while we were living in British Columbia. Hi, my name's Matt. I live in
1:07.4	Winnipeg in Manitoba in Canada.
1:13.5	Matt's telling us about his mother, Delaney.
1:16.2	She passed away in 2022.
1:26.9	She had kind of big, curly, light brown hair, really big smile, crinkly corners of her eyes and whatnot.
1:29.3	She had a really lovely smile. Matt is a child of the 80s and the baby of his family.
1:33.3	Delaney often found herself parenting solo throughout his childhood.
1:38.3	She was, I mean, very much so a housewife, trying to do her best, I think, in an impossible situation.
1:48.6	Like, she had these three young boys. We were constantly moving around the country due to my dad's work.
1:57.8	This would naturally be stressful for any woman in her position, but there was something larger looming over Delaney during these years.
2:06.3	She was getting overwhelmed by starting to remember her past.
2:15.7	When she was in her 30s, Delaney began experiencing strange dreams and seeing flashes of images,
2:23.3	which often pushed her into dark moods.
	...

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