Does America’s biggest true crime podcast share true crime’s biggest problems?

By 2017, the true crime podcasting space might have already seemed crowded — but perhaps what it was missing was full body chills. That was the year Ashley Flowers and her pal Brit Prawat launched their true crime podcast Crime Junkie into an arena that already included pioneers like Serial (2014), Generation Why (2012), and My Favorite Murder (2016). The casual way Flowers narrated crimes to her friend, who responded with dramatic gasps and her trademark exclamation (“Full. Body. Chills.”), resonated and their breezy takes on everything from local Indiana cold cases to high-profile murders (they think Scott Peterson’s innocent) drew in legions of listeners — so many, in fact, that Flowers was able to quickly quit her day job and turn her attention to podcasting, full time. Over the years, that dedication has paid endless dividends. Crime Junkie rapidly shot to the top of the podcast charts and never left; last year it was Apple’s second most-popular podcast — beating out Joe Rogan. Its success enabled Flowers to launch her own expanded podcast network, Audiochuck, publish a bestselling thriller novel, and rake in a staggering $45 million a year. Bloomberg recently reported Flowers’s revenue, along with news of an investment of $40 million from the Chernin Group, a venture capital firm that’s funded cultural cornerstones like Tumblr and entertainment projects like Reese Witherspoon’s production company. That likely means the sky’s the limit for Flowers and Audiochuck, which according to Bloomberg was valued at $250 million. But with great opportunity comes great scrutiny — and scrutiny hasn’t always done Crime Junkie many favors. There’s no question that Crime Junkie is a juggernaut. But because it’s a juggernaut, it inevitably plays an outsized role in the broader conversation around true crime itself. So far, it sits uneasily within larger debates about responsible content creation, fan engagement, the rights of victims’ families, and the ultimate question of whether true crime is journalism or entertainment. Ashley Flowers’s route to podcasting was unconventional — but, wow, has it paid off Before 2016, Ashley Flowers wasn’t an investigator — her only interaction with the world of criminal justice was as a volunteer with her local Crime Stoppers branch, where she served on the board of directors. But that year, Flowers, then a 27-year-old startup worker, proposed a true crime radio segment to air on a local Indianapolis station in order to promote the Crime Stoppers organization. After about a year of doing the local segment, Flowers’s lifelong bestie Prawat suggested she listen to Serial. Soon, Flowers had decided to expand her radio gig to a true crime podcast. “It really started as a way to get the Crime Stoppers name out there, and it has grown into so much more and allowed for the platform to bring attention to a lot of really amazing nonprofits,” Flowers said in a 2019 radio interview. That’s a slightly different narrative than the one she gave the New York Times in 2022. In that version, she said, “I never saw this as a hobby.” A telltale sign that she meant business: Instead of signing with an established podcast network, as most true crime podcasters do, Flowers launched Crime Junkie under her own studio, named Audiochuck after her dog. (Every Audiochuck podcast ends with a callout to Chuck, followed by an approving doggie yowl, presumably from the pup himself.) If Flowers was always gunning for success and independence through Crime Junkie, she found it fast. Crime Junkie’s growth from the outset was phenomenal; its listeners had an incredible zeal for the show. For fans of talky “comedy” true crime podcasts like My Favorite Murder, Crime Junkie offered a slightly more serious mode of delivery: Ashley got right down to narrating the story, with Brit chiming in to ask leading questions the way a listener might. Was it highly scripted and occasionally awkward? Sure. Did audiences care? Not a whit. 2022 seemed to be a breakout year. Flowers gained new mass media attention when the New York Times covered the launch of her show The Deck, which she hosts. (The show focuses on the cold cases so far gone that law enforcement puts them on the backs of playing card decks that they distribute to prisons, hoping to find answers among inmates). That year, per the Times, the Crime Junkie fan club had “tens of thousands” of subscribers; that same year, Crime Junkie entered the No. 2 spot among top-ranked podcasts, behind Joe Rogan and ahead of The Daily, and has stayed there ever since, refusing to be dislodged. The show’s massive popularity with women undoubtedly has a hand in its staying power; Edison Research has reported ever since 2022 that Crime Junkie reaches more women than any other podcast. While total listenership is hard to quantify, the stats are staggering: as of this year, Crime Junkie has racked up 500 million streams on Spotify alone, while the Audiochuck network boasts jaw-dropping stats of over 2.6 billion total downloads. Along the way, Flowers has launched multiple additional podcast series, most notably The Deck. She’s also brought multiple series to the network, including three series from journalist Delia D’Ambra and Anatomy of Murder, co-hosted by former prosecutor and Investigation Discovery host Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi. In addition to Flowers writing her debut novel, All Good People Here — a second novel arrives in May — she and Prawat regularly tour the country, performing the show for sold-out audiences. The pair will soon play Radio City. On top of all this, Audiochuck recently announced that it would be moving into film and TV, which gives it the potential to expand an already massive platform even further. But whether that expansion is a net good for true crime itself depends on who you ask. The answer lies in whether Audiochuck is ultimately about serving journalism, entertainment, or an unholy mix of both. For Crime Junkie, accolades and controversies go hand in hand In 2019, journalist Adam Wren put together a longform profile of Flowers for Indianapolis Monthly dubbed “The Problem with Crime Junkie.” In it, he wrote scathingly about a live show performance in which Flowers and Prawat heavily implied the guilt of the victim’s father, even though he was provably innocent. The man who was indicted by a grand jury on 22 felony counts, including the murder of another child, is not the little girl’s father. Any armchair detective could tell you that straight away. But these two don’t. Indeed, charges of irresponsible and unethical handling of cases have dogged Crime Junkie ever since its inception. Case in point — the show’s treatment of the Scott Peterson case, which was its second episode (a multi-parter) and among its most popular. “It seems like the sole source for that Crime Junkie episode was them watching the A&E documentary series about the Peterson case, which was heavily biased and left out a lot of incriminating information pointing to his guilt,” Robin Warder, host of long-running podcast The Trail Went Cold, told me. “And they probably did not do any additional research.” Warder also points to the show’s conspiratorial take on the Kendrick Johnson case, a death he explains is generally understood to be a tragic accident. “This can definitely be an issue when your show has a larger audience than anyone.” Still, Warder is quick to acknowledge that many of these concerns are much, much larger than Crime Junkie itself. The true crime podcasting community has long struggled with ethical considerations and questions about how to pay respect to victims and their families while balancing the need for scrutiny of the criminal justice system. Then there’s the fact that, well, this is entertainment. Flowers and Prawat have never identified as journalists, though they have hired and worked with journalists in the past. That lack of journalism training became a major source of controversy for the show fairly early in its run. As Wren reported, Cathy Frye, a journalist formerly of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, inadvertently ran across a Crime Junkie episode in which she claimed Flowers had thoroughly plagiarized her reporting on a 2002 murder. In a since-deleted Facebook comment, Frye alleged that not only did Flowers replicate details, story structure, and fail to give attribution, the podcast cheapened her award-winning reporting, turning it into entertainment. After Frye’s post, multiple podcasters, including Warder, went on to allege that Flowers was routinely stealing their content, without giving them credit nor directing any of her massive listenership toward their shows. This 2019 dust-up wound up not only catching the attention of mainstream media, but prompted a community-wide conversation about plagiarism, both in true crime and podcasting writ large. “The plagiarism scandal was beneficial at helping change the industry and making people recognize the issue,” Warder acknowledged. In the end, Flowers made a habit that continues to this day of extensively listing her sources — though Warder claimed that she never actually apologized to him or other podcasters who accused her of theft. Another major criticism of Flowers involves her podcast, Red Ball, which was meant to be a deep dive into the notorious unsolved Burger Chef murders. Instead, as Wren profiled, a lead investigator on the case wound up being reprimanded for giving Flowers and Crime Junkie unauthorized access to the case files — a move that ultimately led to Red Ball being truncated. Other podcasters have since claimed that the debacle left the Indiana State Police unwilling to work with other media outlets, to the detriment of solving cases. (Audiochuck was unavailable for comment.) Last year, Charlene Shunick, whose sister Mickey was murdered in 2012, blasted Crime Junkie for releasing a paywalled episode about the crime. While Flowers did remove the episode, Shunick told me she wasn’t happy with the response she received from the company. In an email exchange provided to Vox, Shunick reached out to thank the podcast for removing the episode and encourage Crime Junkie producers to undergo ethics training. She also wanted to know why her family’s pleas for privacy in a closed case hadn’t been respected. After a note assuring her that Audiochuck was “taking [her] message to heart,” her next question — about what the company would do differently in the future — received no response. Shunick told me that other victims’ family members had shared similar stories with her about their own interactions with the show. “I don’t think it’s absurd to expect to be asked for permission to tell our life stories,” she said. “In my opinion, it doesn’t really seem like Crime Junkie cares about the family members of the people whose stories they profit off of.” Still, while these criticisms arise, other families have nothing but praise for Flowers and her dedication to advocacy and using her platform to promote actual crime-solving. Crime Junkie has also focused more heavily on unsolved cold cases and missing persons cases as it’s grown more popular, sometimes despite complaints from fans. Flowers herself has donated money to criminal justice groups, DNA testing funds, and other investigative non-profits. She also founded her own cold-case fund, Season of Justice, which has proven to be remarkably effective at creating movement and even solving cases. The organization claims to have generated 20 “SOJ Solves” since its inception. Warder himself is quick to note what a difference Crime Junkie’s massive platform has made in solving cases — both because it’s enabled Flowers’s financial philanthropy and because it’s gotten listeners involved. “Years ago,” he said, “I covered this murder case on The Trail Went Cold, and it wound up being solved and an innocent man was exonerated because the right listener just happened to be listening to a Crime Junkie episode about it and took action.” Warder speculated that Crime Junkie listeners may not explore the community outside of the realm of Audiochuck. While there are ample examples of Crime Junkie listeners asking for and receiving recs for other podcasts, it is true that Crime Junkie, and the Audiochuck network, can seem like its own isolated archipelago in the true crime ocean. Perhaps the bigger question is: Does that matter? If you’re on an island of true crime, who cares if that island is your version of a five-star resort? If all of this is ultimately about entertainment, then by any standard, Crime Junkie is a roaring success. But if true crime strives to enlighten as well as entertain, then Crime Junkie may still have lots of room to grow.

What really matters

Does America’s biggest true crime podcast share true crime’s biggest problems?