The Birth Keepers: Building an empire – episode four

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:32for. Hi, I'm Shirin Kale and I'm Lucy Osborne. You're listening to The Birth Keepers, a new six-part series from The Guardian Investigates. Just before we start, this series contains references to baby loss and maternal harm.

0:56I have a very exciting announcement to make. The official Free Birth Society membership network is now live. We have abandoned mainstream social media and created our own private network, a truly safe space where women can be free to talk about pregnancy, birth, holistic mothering. Within months of the death of Lauren's baby, Journey Moon, and the public backlash against the free birth society that followed, Emily Saldea took the membership private. We are so proud of this new space and we can't wait to welcome you. Come join us in the fun.

1:33Although it was sparked by a terrible tragedy, years later, Emily would tell friends that taking the membership behind a paywall actually strengthened the business. Because it meant that she could now collect fees.

1:55This is the story of how the Free Birth Society became a global, multi-million dollar business empire. And how some claim that the relentless pursuit of profit led to a trail of harm across the world. One that brought Emily and Yolanda to the brink. From The Guardian Investigates, I'm Shirin Kale, and this is The Birth Keepers. Episode 4, Growing an Empire.

2:35I was just like, holy crap, this woman is amazing. you know like wow serendipity day like many other women was drawn to the free birth society by the podcast and in particular by emily saldea you'll remember serendipity from episode one she was showing us one of emily's gold crowns when we visited her at her home in omar nebraska

3:02back in 2020 when she first discovered emily serendipity was a doula providing women with emotional, not medical, support during their births. So when she heard about the FBS private membership filling up with hundreds of newly pregnant women, she thought, hey, maybe this could be an opportunity for me. Initially, one of my main motivations was to find clients. By now, Emily was personally interviewing new FBS applicants. After the interview, like our 40-minute conversation, I was just like I was in love I was just like I can tell I just did something big you know like I can feel the energy of like this is going to change my life

4:01FBS had grown into a multi-platform business. As well as the private membership, currently priced at$499, there was the flagship video course, The Complete Guide to Free Birth, now priced at$399. And Emily and Yolanda had also started to branch out into other revenue streams.

4:29We've had a lot of growth and creation going on over here at Free Birth Society, with launching two more courses this fall, our first ever members retreat, organizing our incredible mother's retreat in Dominican Republic this winter, and our soon-to-be-out magazine. One-on-one coaching sessions for members now priced at$350 an hour. Or Yolanda's course, Through the Veil, where students got to watch her actual birth. Through the Veil also includes the hour-plus-long documentary of my eighth baby's birth. An incredibly loving, incredibly vulnerable, gritty, agonising, naked and beautiful family birth.

5:12And then, just the serendipity was joining FBS. My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak with you about our nation's unprecedented response to the coronavirus outbreak. Governments began to enforce lockdowns and mask mandates. Emily and Yolanda were staunchly anti-COVID restrictions. gathering cell phone location data from telecoms to find out where people are still congregating amid the coronavirus shutdown. So that's just a little bit of state surveillance through our handheld devices. And of course, it's for the greater good. lots of women found fbs during covid some because they were looking to connect with other women who also felt that the reaction to the pandemic had been excessive others felt isolated and they wanted to find community online i don't think that any of this would have happened without COVID.

6:20And I saw like very rapid growth. That growth included their most ambitious product to date. Do you know it's your calling to become an authentic midwife? Do you dream of attending women in birth? Have you felt frustrated trying to be a birth worker in the system? Emily and Yolanda were opening what they were calling an authentic midwifery school. I just want to remind you that neither Emily nor Yolanda are midwives. We are thrilled to announce that enrolment for our radical birth keeper school is now open. Classes begin June 1st, so head over to our website and get the details. The time is now and we need you to join us in this birth revolution.

7:11Emily knew that in many jurisdictions use of the word midwifery without a license is illegal So in order to manoeuvre around these unjust laws I made up the term radical birth keeper many years ago when I first started attending births outside the system I wanted a name to call myself So Emily came up with the term radical birth keeper This is her explaining it to her students.

7:45So to be crystal clear, a radical birth keeper is in practice an authentic midwife. It's simply that we chose to come up with some new terms to navigate the political terrain, given that the word midwife has become criminalized for anyone who isn't sanctioned by the state to use it legally. in the u.s it usually takes three to five years to become a licensed midwife not all midwives in the u.s are licensed some choose not to be or others are in states without licensure but they're usually highly skilled and have apprenticed for many years learning from elder midwives but emily and yolanda were creating something different so-called authentic midwives trained in an online course in three months on Zoom.

8:38Did you think at the end of it, you were going to be effectively an unlicensed midwife? Yes, ma 'am. And that's what Emily kept saying, kept referring to us within the school, within the Radical Birth Keeper School. All they would always say is we are authentic midwives. We are traditional midwives. we are the real midwives this is keely sullivan a former radical birth keeper often abbreviated to rbk from california she borrowed the six thousand dollar course fee from a relative a six thousand dollar loan was not something keely took lightly she's a low-income single mother who until recently was on food stamps like i cried when i got the email saying i was accepted I cried.

9:28It was the brightest, shiniest, like prettiest opportunity that I had seen in my life. Perhaps surprisingly, given the course was only three months, around half of it wasn't actually about birth. Remember that self-help book that Emily was into in her 20s. The 10 Commitments of Conscious Leadership? Well, there were modules on that. Hey women, I want to talk about power dynamics and this idea of non-hierarchical sisterhood, support, relationships, and self-responsibility. And sessions on how to build your brand and market yourself online. Or which Instagram birth pages, for example, are attracting the kind of women that you want to be working with.

10:22And those are the spaces where you're going to find women talking. Women talking about their hopes, talking about their dreams, their fears, and talking about their desires when it comes to... Keely thought that the business and self-help stuff was useful. But when it came to the modules on birth, she was shocked. As they stated in their marketing repeatedly, time after time, I thought that I would learn a comprehensive birth education. That wasn't what she thought. They acted like emergencies were not real. And they literally said, they are so rare. Emergencies. As we have already mentioned, there are very few situations during birth that, in my view, represent immediate emergencies.

11:19But there are some. And so it is important, I think, to discuss what that might look like. I also want to say very openly that I have never been in a situation in 20 years of being involved in birth, during which I have been present for a woman when an immediately emergent situation has arisen that has required immediate transfer to a medical facility. I mean, it was just, it was insane, now that I think logically about it.

12:10Only a few modules cover emergencies and birth complications, meaning things like having breech babies or week-long labours or gestational diabetes, things that doctors and midwives would say increase the risks to mothers and babies in birth. But, to FBS, these were what they called variations of normal. This was a line that Yolanda and Emily used all the time to suggest normal, no big deal. The definition of a variation of normal versus a complication versus an emergency is fluid and changeable and highly subjective. We collected a range of FBS advice on pregnancy and birth, and we checked it with a group of experts.

13:05An obstetrician, two leading midwifery professors from the US and the UK, and a home birth midwife, with 25 years of experience. They said some FBS advice is broadly correct, but other parts were wrong. And not just wrong, but dangerous misinformation that could cost lives. like this from Yolanda on newborn babies who are struggling to breathe. In these heavily systematized, standardized realms of medicine, you know, including regulated midwifery, there are like standards that have to be met. If you see chest contractions, you must transfer. If the baby's not, well, like there's all, you know, charts.

13:55And I just, I've seen all of this in lots of situations. And in none of those situations has it been an actual problem.

14:09Just to be clear, a newborn baby that is showing chest contractions needs urgent medical care. One of our experts, an experienced home birth midwife, described this advice as despicable. Another, a Yale midwifery professor, was so disturbed by the FBS-related materials we shared with her that she emailed me to say she hadn't slept for two nights.

14:41Peely finished the 12-week course and now she was an RBK, trained in attending births by Emily and Yolanda. I gave it all that I could and got business cards right away. I did my website immediately, like everything that they told me to do. And I found a client. Keely followed Emily and Yolanda's advice. Never take payments in advance. Instead, after a successful birth, accept gifts of cash between$3 ,000 and$5 ,000. Here's Emily teaching her students about this. So the hard truth is that if anything negative were to occur at the birth, be it a transfer, complications, or something funky with the parents turning on you or blaming you, it's going to be a lot more self-protective to not have a money trail that you charge them directly for any...

15:39Yeah, talk about a red flag, man. Tili's first clients were a young farming couple from her local area who were paying for her services with raw milk. Deep down, Keely said she knew she wasn't qualified. But she went ahead anyway. I didn't think that I could handle any situation. I knew that. I was practising delusional optimism, I guess.

16:10Once labour began, Keely says she couldn't find a heartbeat with her fetuscope. They thought the baby had died, actually. Father was crying and, like, freaking out. And the family transferred to the hospital. We ended up going on the third day, and it was a C-section. Tilly says the baby was transverse, meaning that it was in a sideways position, a potentially dangerous situation for mother and baby. That was something that the RBK told me and taught us would never happen. And it happened on my first birth. FBS materials we've seen don't say a transverse position is impossible, but they describe it as incredibly rare.

17:03Keely never attended another birth again. And she's still paying off the debt for the course.

17:16In 2021, as the money from the RVK school was pouring in, Emily began building what she sometimes called her empire or her queendom. She bought a house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I've seen pictures. It looks beautiful. She spent over$100 ,000 putting a swimming pool and an outdoor kitchen into the backyard. One friend remembers Emily asking how much it costs to get a private jet. As well as the home, Emily also bought the adjoining land. She had a plan. She just told me her vision of like she wants to host retreats and she wants to have a women's festival over the solstice every year where hundreds of women can come with their babies.

18:05Sevendipity Day again, who by now is working for Emily, being paid to lead some of the community calls that are included in the FBS private membership fee. She was planning the festival and she was marketing the festival before she had closed on the land. Gosh, wow. Yeah. Okay, so for anyone who doesn't know, we did it. We moved to the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina and our family bought over 60 acres of really some of the most special, rich, sacred land I've ever walked. And I want to share it with you. It's been a longstanding dream of mine to host a women's festival just for us.

18:45And what could be a better time than this coming summer solstice?

18:53The first Matriarch Rising Festival took place in the summer of 2021. It had long been part of Emily's vision to have a Burning Man-style festival only in the South. A five-day women's-only event. On the website, tickets are now advertised for$2 ,000. Singing around the fire, laughing, crying and hugging for four days straight. There were lots of women from Free Birth Society, many of which who had gone through radical birthkeeper school, who were also there as like volunteer helpers. This is Paola Williams, herself a former RBK student. You're surrounded with other women. You're in a beautiful meadow.

19:39The sun is shining. There's dragonflies flying around. You're surrounded by trees. It's very calm and relaxing to just be in your skin. The festival, which ran for five years, had yoga sessions and singing circles and live DJ sets featuring Emily as DJ Matriarch One.

20:094 p.m on a Tuesday radical birth keeping with Emily Saldea what would that have been um so that was just an opportunity for her to like talk about herself talk about her you know credentials and all of the birth work that she's done she wore a crown to it and she um sat um like in a shaded meadow area and all of these women were like gathered around her with their notebooks just like taking down every single word that she said and she'd do all that whilst wearing a crown for many of the women we interviewed matriarch advising was a beautiful and true expression of the values that FBS stood for.

20:55Health. Community. Sisterhood. One of my favorite moments of my life, actually, was that first day that the festival started. We were all so hopeful and proud of being a part of something that we really thought was going to change the world.

21:30There were many women like Paola and Serendipity who upended their lives to be part of Emily's movement. They saw her as a champion of women. That's how Caitlin Pearl Codhill saw her too. She's like a powerhouse. That's how it felt at that time. Caitlin had had an amazing experience free birthing her third child after finding FBS. It changed my life because I'd never felt that much power in my body before. And because of that, she wanted to work with Emily to help other women to have the same. She is such a force to be reckoned with. She's fearless. She's not afraid to speak up for women. I wanted to support that movement.

22:10But eventually, Caitlin and the others begin to see that Emily behind the scenes did not always embody the values she publicly celebrated. She really didn't like or respect women, and she only really cared about herself. Very catty, very judgy, very bitchy, making rude comments, dismissive. Over time, I was like, oh, like, this is who she is. Everything else is a total facade.

22:56Coming up, inside Emily's inner circle.

23:09Before I tell you about the FBS inner circle, I want to say that the interviewees you are about to hear from have all had disagreements with Emily. Paola and Emily ended up in a legal dispute, which was settled out of court. We interviewed many people for our reporting who didn't go on the record, and we learned that Emily often fell out with her inner circle. There's even a term for them that FBS insiders use, her fallen soldiers. As Emily didn't provide a substantive response to our requests for comment, including to these allegations, you're only going to hear their accounts.

23:56So, people who know Emily say she's a really hard-working businesswoman and she values people who can bring skills to her team. Like I was really good at the time of being able to make like headline clickbait phrases. And so I think that she saw that in me and she would ask me for like post titles all the time. She's like, okay, this is, you know, the copy, like help me come up with a post title. And I was doing that for free because I loved it. I was like, yeah, I am really good at this, like, yay. From the inside, Sevendipity could see how it all worked. She saw how Emily curated the comments on FBS social media and the remarkable frequency with which she would simply kick out people who didn't agree with her.

24:46I never had the desire to ever inquire about anyone that she was booting from the group because I knew that that would make me look bad. She is constantly looking at the comments on Instagram and bitching about them and complaining about them. At first, Paola thought that the way Emily would talk about other people was just her having a bad day.

25:18Oh, she just must be like venting, you know. I didn't think much of it because I was like, oh, you know, whatever. like can't be like a thing forever um but it was it was consistent it was very much who she was what was she saying about the people on instagram people that were commenting oh they have no life how lame what low number of followers they have she would often make a comment about a woman in my radical birth keeper cohort and just oh she's you know it's really sad to think about she's saying like oh this person is just so insecure like I can't stand how insecure she was she was doing like personal coaching sessions with this person and so she would be like oh my god I just she was basically saying like I get the ick every time I just like try to coach her

26:16Caitlin Powell Coddhill who had got a job doing the social media for Emily remembers one time when some RBK students were complaining that Emily was trying to charge them extra money to keep the recordings of the online classes. And she called them whiny entitled bitches on a staff call. And it just became clear all she would talk about was money, follower count growth, business growth, and it was just like running a business. she didn't talk about birth at all like i got into this as a movement to talk about birth and what that means for the world she was trying to use this movement as a way to make money