The audience for true crime is overwhelmingly female. Women make up the majority of listeners for many of the most popular shows, including Crime Junkie, which regularly tops the podcast charts. A 2019 study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that women are significantly more likely than men to consume true-crime media, particularly stories involving female victims.
People often interpret this as evidence that women are fascinated by violence. That explanation has always felt backwards to me. Women aren’t listening because violence is shocking. We’re listening because it isn’t.
I’ve spent more than a decade in recovery from alcoholism, which means I’ve had a lot of time to study the strange mechanics of my own brain. Addiction is often described as a craving for substances, but over time, you realize the substance is only part of the equation. The deeper engine is the feedback loop—the mind chasing the relief that the next answer, the next hit, the next explanation might finally quiet the chaos.
Lately, I’ve noticed something unsettling. When I binge true-crime podcasts, my brain enters a very familiar state.
Episode after episode, the same analysis begins running quietly in the background. How did it happen? What did she miss? What was the moment when everything went wrong?
The promise embedded in these stories is subtle but powerful. If you listen closely enough—if you study the details—you might learn the pattern. You might understand the mistake. And if you understand the mistake, you might be able to avoid it.
That logic is incredibly seductive. It suggests that violence follows rules. That safety is something you can reverse-engineer.
But there is another tension inside true crime, and it is part of what makes the genre ethically uneasy. These stories can easily slide from witness to spectacle, from honoring the victim to packaging her life as narrative suspense. It becomes exploitative when the woman at the center of the story disappears beneath the machinery of the plot.
That slippery slope is part of what I’m trying to understand about my own listening habits. Why are women drawn to these stories even while many of us feel uneasy about what the genre sometimes does to the people at its center?
At its worst, true crime sensationalizes violence and turns tragedy into entertainment. At its best, it remains victim-centered. It resists easy conclusions and reminds the listener that these stories are not puzzles. They are people.
The longer you listen, the more complicated the narratives become. Many of them involve familiar men—partners, neighbors, coworkers. The danger rarely arrives in the form we imagine when we picture a threat. Instead, it unfolds slowly, inside ordinary relationships, inside moments that once appeared safe.
This is where true crime begins to feel less like entertainment and more like a rehearsal. Women are listening for signals. We’re studying the moments when intuition flickered and was ignored. We’re searching for the point in the timeline where the story might have changed direction.
Not because we believe we can solve the puzzle perfectly. But because the alternative—accepting that some things cannot be predicted—is much harder to live with.
My own relationship with these stories is complicated by another piece of my history: I survived sexual violence in college. In the years afterward, people often tried to comfort me with a strange kind of logic. It could have been worse. You survived.
What they meant was that I should feel lucky.
But surviving something does not erase the realization that the world can tilt without warning. That the person who harms you might be someone you trusted five minutes earlier. Safety, I learned, is often a story we tell ourselves until it isn’t.
True-crime narratives attempt to repair that fracture. They take a senseless act and rebuild it step by step until it resembles a story with logic. They suggest that every tragedy contains a clue.
But the real clue may be something simpler: women’s fear is often treated as paranoia until the moment it becomes evidence.
In my upcoming novel, Both Can Be True, Frankie—who is in recovery herself—tries to explain her fascination with these stories.
“True crime scratches that itch,” she says. “It gives shape to the darkness. It makes the senseless feel—if not understandable, at least real. Like I’m not crazy for being scared all the time. Like the fear has evidence.”
When I wrote that line, I thought I was describing Frankie’s psychology. Later, I realized I was describing something closer to my own.
The brain wants certainty. It wants the reassurance that if we analyze the story carefully enough, the world will reveal its logic. This is the same promise addiction makes: the next answer will settle everything.
But sometimes there is no answer that restores the order we are hoping to find. Sometimes, the only truth available is that terrible things happen for no reason.
The popularity of true crime among women isn’t proof that we are fascinated by violence. It’s evidence that we are trying to make sense of a world that asks us to live with two competing instructions: be careful, but don’t overreact.
Both can be true.
And sometimes the only place those contradictions feel visible—even briefly resolved—is inside a story.
