Beyond the Headlines podcast: Reporting on the Bradley Survivors

Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of mature themes and brief descriptions of sexual abuse and violence, including crimes involving children. It begins with an overview of the crimes committed by former Delaware pediatrician Earl Bradley. If you or someone you know may be a victim of sexual abuse, confidential support, information and advice are available at the National Sexual Assault Hotline by calling 800-656-4673. Text chat is also available online. Bradley victims seeking to connect with each other are encouraged to email LewesDEHeals@gmail.com.

Yesterday, Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens published a special report, “A decade after Bradley abuse case, survivors still seek help,” as well as a podcast with Margaret Murphy, the mother of two of Earl Bradley’s victims. 

Today, Owens joins the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to share his perspectives on the nearly two-year reporting journey behind the article. He details what led Murphy to trust Spotlight Delaware with this story, the special considerations and care surrounding interviewing survivors of sexual abuse, and his hopes for the conversation that will occur in Delaware as a result of this special report.

The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

I was in Delaware at the time the crimes of Earl Bradley were brought to light, but I was not aware of it. For anyone who may not be familiar with the case, can you just provide an overview of what these original crimes were? 

For those who are unfamiliar, the Earl Bradley case broke in December of 2009. He was a pediatrician based in an office down in Lewes, just north of Rehoboth Beach.

He, at one time, was a physician with Beebe Hospital, and many would tell you that he was the community’s pediatrician. If people came to the Delaware beaches region in the late 90s, early 2000s, and they were looking for a pediatrician, a lot of people said, “Go see Earl.”

He was this large guy with a salt and peppery beard. He had a lot of Disney characters and children’s characters all over his walls and out front of his practice. And unfortunately, through some complaints that started a snowball effect of criminal investigations, they came to find out that he had been raping and molesting and abusing children as young as a few months old for the better part of years at his practice.

Unfortunately, they found a trove of video and photos at his practice and it really shocked the community in many ways. And it was a case that played out for years here in Delaware. At the time, it was the single worst case of child sex abuse that was uncovered with a single perpetrator in U.S. history.

So you are a few years younger than me. Were you aware of this when it was originally happening? 

I was aware and admittedly probably more so than some others because in 2009 I would’ve been just graduating college and was working at a newspaper and therefore was real in tune to the news cycle. I remember reading The News Journal’s coverage day in and day out for months about the Bradley case to see where it was going and what the cops were uncovering. 

Beau Biden, Joe Biden’s son, was the attorney general who prosecuted the case. A lot of the judges and attorneys on that case have gone on to have storied careers here in Delaware. So there were a lot of really big figures connected to the Bradley case one way or another. 

Did you remember anything in particular about The News Journal’s coverage? 

I do recall one thing that has stood out to me all these years, for whatever reason. It was probably around 2010-ish, 2011 maybe.

They had a headline for when they tore down Bradley’s doctor’s office there in Lewes, and the headline was “Razing Hell.” And it was just a clever turn of phrase that, for whatever reason, has stuck with me all these years. 

Your article does not really attempt to rehash the Bradley criminal case. In broad strokes, what is this article about? 

This article is really taking a look at the survivors. They estimated that there are several thousand patients from Earl Bradley’s 15-year-or-so tenure here in Delaware. Of those, they identified several hundred through the videotaped or photographed abuse that they knew were victims. Others they suspected were victims, but maybe couldn’t prove it. 

What I had actually heard was that the settlement that was set up in the wake was not exactly serving in the best interest of those survivors. So we wanted to explore how it was serving them, how advocates and experts thought it should be serving them and what could be done about it.

How and when did Spotlight Delaware learn of the challenges that were being faced by some of the survivors? 

It was a little bit of being in the right place at the right time. We had a mother reach out to us just a couple months after we had launched in 2024. She reached out to us about her experience working with the settlement and some frustrations that she was finding in working with it and asked for our help to help her look into it.

And that was Margo Murphy, who is the main figure in this article. 

That’s right. Margo reached out, actually, to our founder, Allison Taylor Levine, first and said that she needed a journalist’s help to get some kind of assistance from the latent injury trust fund through the Bradley settlement.

And then Allison turned it over to me, and said, “Look into this for me.” So we did, and it started quite a long process. 

Spotlight Delaware had only been around for two months at that point. Why do you think Margo decided to trust Spotlight Delaware with this?

She told me that she had spoken with a couple different reporters over the years, and she didn’t get a great feeling that they would be careful stewards of her family story. When she saw the news about our launch, saw that we were a nonprofit so we wouldn’t be worried about the powers that be, and that we were independent and investigatively focused, she was interested to talk with us, to learn a little bit more about our model, and how it could assist her in her story. And so I went down to Lewes and met with her, and we had a really productive chat.

February 2024 to November 2025 is about 22 months. What took so long? In seriousness, why was this such a long process for an article? 

There were a couple iterations of the story. It initially started because Margo was looking for assistance with the fund. She’s just a mom, like any other mom in this state, and is not an expert of the court system and is not a lawyer and didn’t have a lot of legal help. So she was having trouble understanding – navigating – some of the processes that she was being asked to go through. So we did that part first and didn’t quite get the resolution she was looking for.

She thought she was maybe eligible for this latent injury trust fund. And I went to the courthouse and read a couple hundred pages of court records and was able to determine that I didn’t think she was really eligible from the start because essentially she wasn’t a member of the original class settlement.

For anyone who hasn’t read the article, there were two funds established, right? And the first one had a very short signup window.

The first one was just a few months to sign up as a member of the class. In that, you would receive compensation benefit payments for the trauma you endured. If you did not sign up for that class, you had the ability to sign up for what they called the latent injury trust fund. If you determined at a later point you developed latent trauma, and you came to realize your trauma, you could get assistance for mental health and psychiatric treatment from that point forward. 

So she thought that maybe they’d be eligible for that. But per my reading, that window had closed. But Margo and I continued talking, and then she showed me conversations that her family had been having with the law firm that essentially administers the trust. 

I saw in these messages that they were making her jump through a lot of hoops and giving her a lot of hope that she’d be approved for this funding that she was seeking – not to buy her daughters a house – just to put her daughters through rehab, was essentially what she was asking them to do. Ultimately, after months of getting the right records and getting the right signoffs and jumping through hoops, she got a very short letter that basically said, “We deny your claim.”

It raised questions to me about how we treat victims. In most large scale sexual abuse cases, when you think of something like the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts or Larry Nassar, when you think about the victims in those cases, they’re almost always 40, 50 years on. You’re talking about grown adults that are coming to terms with their trauma.

In this case, we were asking children who may have been a few months old to grapple with this by the time they were 12 and to not have assistance anymore. The very young age of the victims raised some questions in my mind and raised questions in the minds of some advocates about how we treat latent trauma, especially in very young victims.

I thought it was worth exploring more. So, Margo and I and many others have been having conversations for the better part of a year and a half ever since. 

In addition to Margo, you also interviewed both of her daughters, Bailey and Aja. Were there other survivors that you attempted to try to reach out to and include into the story? 

I also talked to Jenna Haynes, who’s one of the few publicly known survivors out there. She, I guess famously, went on to become a beauty pageant winner and has been very open about her story and dealing with trauma. A lot of credit to her, to really carry that mantle all these years. 

One of the things that’s difficult about child abuse cases in general, and in particular the Bradley case, is that they’re all John and Jane Doe in the court records. All court records are sealed when it comes to minors who are victims.

So there’s no real hard and fast way for us to find other survivors and be able to get their stories. We had to rely a lot on Margaret’s connections in the community to put us in touch with people. We ultimately did have conversations with two other families that I think is fair to say shared some of the sentiments that the story provides, but they weren’t ready to speak openly about their experience for one reason or another.

In this 22 month process, was there ever a point where you thought, actually, maybe this isn’t an article, maybe nothing’s going to happen here? 

When I first started looking into the case, one of the things that was a bit confusing is that there were many different iterations of the agreements that came into place. And there were certain points where I read some of these documents and I thought to myself maybe they really weren’t ever eligible. 

But in the end, we started reading what became the final versions of the trust agreement and it started to raise more red flags and questions for me, and that’s when we ultimately went back and looked at the larger framework and whether it warranted additional discussion. 

I’m glad we did because even going back and talking to lawyers who were involved with the case and advocates who were involved with the survivors, this is a question that others have been raising for years and just not raising very loudly or at least very publicly.

It’s a question, always, of what does the community owe these victims? So, I’m glad that we continued down this path and reached the point of publishing something.

In your mind, is this article solely about Margo and her daughters, Bailey and Aja? Or is it bigger than that? 

It was always my goal, and it’s part of the reason why it’s taken so long, to make sure it’s not a story about one woman in one family. I didn’t want readers to be able to quickly discount the reporting to say, “Well, this is just one family that’s upset at the system.”

I wanted to try to examine and poke holes and be skeptical about the settlement. To say, “Is Margo’s experience, and her family’s experience, indicative of the experience of others?” I don’t hope that we find that others have had the same experience, but I certainly expect that we will find that.

And, if so, it only gives us more of a reason to try to seek some kind of solution. 

If anyone is listening to this who was impacted and would like to talk, is that something you’re open to? 

I am certainly open to talk to anybody that would like to talk about their experience. 

[Contact Jake at jowens@spotlightdelaware.org.]

I would also share that Margo is in the process of setting up an email that will serve as a gathering place for people connected to this case that want to be able to share and talk about their trauma. At some day in the near future, we may try to set up some kind of support group for them to have more of a physical space to be able to talk through things.

For the survivors, obviously what they went through originally was beyond traumatizing. Revisiting what happened to them and what they’re dealing with now clearly had the possibility to be retraumatizing for them. As the reporter shepherding this process, what steps did you take to try to surround them with as much care as possible during your interviews and communications? 

Anytime you approach somebody that’s been through a traumatic experience or especially an abuse survivor, you really want to approach it with a lot of compassion and empathy. You don’t want to come in and say “Hi, I’m a reporter. Tell me about your trauma.” 

I started every conversation with explaining who I was and what I brought to the process and making sure that I met them at a place where they were comfortable. Are you most comfortable talking at your home? Are you most comfortable not meeting at your home?  Meeting at a coffee shop? 

There’s always a gauge of getting to know somebody before you have to talk about the difficult things. You want to make sure that you’re getting what you need so that you’re able to fact check and make sure that you’re doing your due diligence, but there’s also a certain degree of sensitivity to the approach.

I think we’ve done a good job. And that’s also part of what sometimes moves more slowly than you’d like as a journalist because you want somebody to be in the right frame of mind as you have this kind of discussion with them. So we had a lot of rescheduled conversations over the months that also helped drag out the timeline a little bit.

Is there a sense as well of navigating what their hopes are once this article is published versus what may be realistic in your head? 

Especially when you’re talking to somebody that’s already experienced trauma, we want to do our best to be honest with them about level setting what we think the reaction would be.

I certainly hope it sparks conversation in our state to at least rethink. We failed these very young children in many ways as a state and as a system. But we have the opportunity to do right by them now. And so I want to make sure that we’re having that conversation. It’s not a terribly expensive conversation to have. It’s more effort that we have to put in.

I tried to impart that to the families I talked to: I can’t promise that your individual case will be different, but I can promise that we’ll do our best to raise the conversation.

Were there also any sensitivities just around word choice? 

There was. I learned a lesson quickly. For instance, when I was meeting with Margo and I called him Dr. Bradley. She was quick to correct me and say, “We don’t call him doctor. You know, he’s not somebody worthy of anyone’s trust. And so, you know, we don’t call him Dr. Bradley.” 

And luckily, he was also disbarred. So that helps some of the AP style concerns on the back end. But, that was one.

We try to focus on them as survivors and not them as victims because they’re still here, they’re still living their lives and seeking the best life possible. We want to think of the people in our story as survivors and not victims.

You talked about needing to be honest with the implications and impact of an article when you start building a relationship with the sources. Are you structuring your reporting in any way to drive that particular impact? 

I would say it’s rare that we have a particular impact in mind as we’re writing a story. Most of what Spotlight really likes to do is ask the thorniest question that maybe others are too afraid to ask, or aren’t thinking to ask. We don’t shy away from difficult questions. 

So in this case, the assessment report spelled out a few years after the case that there were three or four or five instances along the path in which people dropped the ball and maybe could have prevented, if not all, hundreds if not thousands of abuse cases. If somebody had just stayed on what was out there.

I think we owe the survivors, in lieu of that, to say, “What can we do to make sure that they’re supported?” We’re not saying that they need millions of dollars. We’re saying fund detox treatment, fund mental health counseling, fund support groups. 

It’s not an endless pile of money, and many of them are not from families of great means that have exorbitant amounts of money to fund these things. Many of them are struggling to treat addiction issues and mental health issues that are known to arise out of traumatic experiences.

I think we owe it to them. I wanted to raise the question so that we, as a state and a community, can grapple with: are we doing enough? 

And if we are, then fine. But if we’re not, then what can we do about it? 

You are a human being as well. Reporters are human beings as well. You are a dad of two. I would have to imagine that in at least some way you were personally impacted by hearing about these struggles. How does that filter into the writing of the article? And is there anything that you, as a reporter, are trying to stay on guard about in your own personal involvement and engagement with the story?

Thank you. I am a human. At the end of the day, you know, I’m a dad. I’ve got an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old daughter, and they’re my life. 

It was not lost on me that they are really prime ages for what would’ve been victims in this case. As I read several hundred pages of affidavits in police reports and settlement terms and reporting on this case, there were many days where I had to just walk away because it’s just difficult to believe that such a horror could exist in our state.

In terms of potentially being objective or impartial, I think if I was writing about Bradley’s criminal case, perhaps that would be a concern, and maybe you wouldn’t want a reporter with two young children writing that story. But, luckily for me, in this case, it was covering the lives and the support for survivors. 

And in many ways I look at these people and say, they’re somebody’s daughters, too. Somebody’s sons, too. And how can we, as a community, make sure we’re doing what we can to support them in recovering from these horrors? 

You’ve been working on this article for almost 24 months. As you are starting to bring it to a conclusion, is there any just human moment from your time with Margo or Bailey or Aja that is staying with you? 

There are a couple that stick out to me.

One in particular that stood out to me is I finally got a chance to talk with Patty Dailey Lewis, who was the deputy attorney general who prosecuted the Bradley case along with the late Beau Biden. She had actually stayed on and worked on the civil case a little bit as well.

When I talked to her about what I was looking at and the experience of the family I’ve been talking to, she got quiet for a second, and she said, “You know, I’ve been waiting for this phone call for 10 years.” And she said, “I warned them this would happen.” 

And that really, really stuck out to me to say there were others in the room at the time that noticed this was not going to be a perfect solution. 

Some of the other ones that stuck out to me were that I was talking to Aja Tenerovich, who’s the middle daughter of Margo. She was in sixth grade when all of this came out, and she knew that her mom was really gonna struggle.

There’s a lot of guilt – a lot of shame – knowing that you had taken your children to this person who had done such horrible things. And she knew that her older sister was going to be at an age where she was really going to struggle with it. She remembers being a sixth grader and being the adult in the family and really leading her older sister and her mother through the days, those early days, because it was just so emotionally draining on them. And that stuck with me. 

There was just a real strength in her that I could tell. But she said, “I don’t begrudge my mother at all.” And she recognized that she’s grown from the experience, as terrible as it was. 

So there’s a lot of strength in the survivor stories that I hope shows through a little bit in the reporting. And it’s a reminder that they deserve our support as much as possible. 

Thank you for your time today, Jake. And thank you for the care and dignity that you gave to your reporting on this. 

Appreciate it. Anytime, David. Thanks.