Her reporting partner, Liz Farrell, felt so unsafe that she left the state. Matney’s mental health took a battering – which she shared with her listeners. She was on antidepressants, not sleeping and would not go anywhere without her husband for more than a year. All the while, she was inundated with messages castigating her appearance and voice (she had to Google the term “vocal fry”, described by the Science journal as a trend in which “young women end sentences with a gravelly buzz”).
Then, the rest of America’s media moved on to her turf. “And I would get so disappointed when anybody beat me to any scoop. The story was consuming my life.”
She had been triggered to start the podcast by online chatter that reframed the victims of the boat crash, “basically making them suspects” in the Murdaugh double killing, “and that was making me really angry”.
By episode nine of her efforts, it was number one on Apple’s rankings, and police officers and lawyers began contacting her to help. In 2022, Matney and Farrell set out on their own, with their company Luna Shark Media. It produces the original podcast – now rebranded True Sunlight – and Cup of Justice, with episodes helping listeners to “hold public agencies and officials accountable”.
They spend tens of thousands of dollars just on Freedom of Information requests, funded by ads and 4,000 loyal members who pay for special access to case files and the hosts.
The ultimate vindication, at the end of the 2023 trial that had seen a portrait of Alex’s grandfather having to be removed from the courtroom, came with Alex Murdaugh’s two life sentences for murder, plus another 27 years for financial crimes. But perhaps the most satisfying validation arrives now with Brittany Snow – a Hollywood actress Matney has watched since she was a teenager, and a Murdaugh Murders listener – playing her on screen in Death in the Family (Arquette and Clarke portray Maggie and Alex).
