Crime Junkie Hosts Accused of Plagiarism

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Ashley Flowers and Brit, hosts of the popular True Crime series, Crime Junkie are being accused of Plagiarism by a former reporter at The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. 

Cathy Frye accuses the two hosts of pulling details from a series she wrote called “Caught in the Web.” In a post on the Crime Junkie Facebook page, Frye writes, “You relied on my series about Kacie Woody to air on your podcast, which I would assume, profits by the sharing of crime stories. At one point you quoted a portion of my copyrighted story almost verbatim.” 

Frye wrote that she spent months working on that series and the information included in the Crime Junkie podcast could only come from that series. “No other media had access to the details I did. Nor did they get the interviews that I did. Shame on you. Either conduct your own interviews or share with you listeners the source of your information.”

Frye demanded that Crime Junkie episode she was referencing be taken down. She threatened legal action if it was not. We believe that episode has been taken down from the Crime Junkie website. 

Frye says she listened to additional Crime Junkie podcasts and discovered there was no sources cited or credit to any news organizations. Episode show notes on the Crime Junkie website do include sources as you can see HERE. Is having sources in the show notes and not in the audio enough? 

At the end of her Facebook post she wrote, “I am so disgusted.”

The response on Facebook has been mixed. Several fans have pulled their Patreon support for the show while others still support Flowers and Brit. Darren Thorne wondered why Frye couldn’t reach out to Flowers personally to sort the issue out. “Calling them out on Facebook knowing you would get the keyboard warriors going and ruin their show seems equally as shitty.”

We’ve reached out to Flowers for a comment. Here’s Frye’s entire Facebook post:

Comments:

Kayla - Aug 4, 2019

This isn’t completely accurate - the show notes for the Kacie Woody episode does not have any sources cited. Here is a cached version of the page, before it was pulled down: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v75nikxmWxYJ:https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-kacie-woody/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us As you can see, there are NO sources here. It’s not even a question - this is blatant plagiarism. And that they’re deleting pages and not making comments seems like a pretty clear admission of guilt.

Please note that sources were added to the website AFTER the news broke

Has anyone even checked to see if the sources are accurate? They could have just added the first page of Google hits on the case to make it look good.

If you check wayback machine, you’ll see that there were no sources prior to the past month or so.

The response on Facebook is LARGELY in agreement with the accuser, Cathy Frye. Your article seems to be in support of CJ and you yourselves did a poor job researching, if any, the accusations. Many of us did look back to discover that CJ added the sources only recently. And the hosts have been non-responsive to Cathy and the fan base who are questioning their use of others intellectual property.

Kayla, the link doesn’t work. Do you have another copy?

Hi, I’m Cathy Frye, the journalist who called out “Crime Junkie.” Just letting you know that my former newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, announced today that is pursuing legal action against “Crime Junkie.” Also Interesting - take a look at “Crime Junkie’s” most recent Instagram post. It’s pretty much a middle-finger “salute” to journalists. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/aug/29/democrat-gazette-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-cri/?fbclid=IwAR2nl8NX7EMQGhllIg1gJ51zUUnzCeMJCfLXBgpU3tTeX05evdu2l01_-3I