My traumatic ordeal inspired an episode of Law & Order: SVU… here is what REALLY happened
Last month, Katie Nelson had settled in to watch some TV when she thought that a story eerily similar to her own was airing on an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Nelson, 27, was working as a pregnancy doula when she fell victim to Kaitlyn Braun, a woman who duped over 50 doulas by faking her pregnancy and claimed her baby was conceived through rape.
Nearly three years after her encounter with Braun, Nelson believes her experience inspired a fictionalized version of events in an episode of the long-running crime series, starring Mariska Hargitay.
A disclaimer shown before every Law & Order episode states that the story is fictional and ‘does not depict an actual person, entity or event.’
Despite this, Southern Ontario-based Nelson said it felt ‘so surreal’ watching the episode due to its similarities to her own story.
‘I kind of forgot that actually happened to me,’ she told the Daily Mail.
Titled Feed the Craving, the Law & Order episode, which aired on October 23, told the story of a woman who faked her pregnancy and manipulated doulas.
Aside from a few minor details, the doula-turned-wedding-photographer said the episode was very similar to what she herself had experienced.
Nelson said it was a ‘mix’ of feelings – both anxiety and relief – when she thought what seemed like a version of what happened to her was being told on screen.
‘I was really kind of hesitant [before I watched the episode],’ Nelson said. ‘As doulas, we’re very used to the media kind of portraying our job inaccurately, unfortunately.’
While she was shocked to see the episode on TV, Nelson was pleasantly surprised at how that kind of encounter was portrayed as a whole.
She pointed out there were some details that were different from her own experience in the fictional version, but felt overall, doulas were well represented.
Braun, who is currently serving a three-year jail sentence, had reached out to Nelson via social media in November 2022.
Nelson said she was initially hesitant about taking on Braun as she was transitioning to a career as a wedding photographer but decided to assist her anyway.
‘I was only doing primarily lost infant loss and termination support at that point,’ Ontario-based Nelson told the Daily Mail.
Nelson explained she was working with Braun virtually, which was ‘pretty standard’ at the time as many medical centers still had COVID-19 restrictions in place.
‘There were a couple of days of supporting her through early labor and going back and forth on needing support going through contractions and kind of processing the emotions of anticipating having a stillbirth,’ she recalled.
‘She started having a lot of medical complications afterwards, and we ended up supporting her for almost 10 days.’
Nelson said she started spotted red flags, noticing she had been sending variations of the same photo to the doulas, admitting she began to get suspicious when Braun experienced ‘every complication you could possibly experience’ postpartum which led to her looking into her history.
‘I reverse image searched some of the things that she had sent us. Like, there was a photo of a stillborn baby that she had pulled from Google Images,’ she said.
Braun, who is currently serving jail time, had enlisted more than 50 professional doulas to help her with traumatic, emergent and sometimes tragic pregnancy journeys.
The 25-year-old was faking primarily stillbirths and was having people support her through very traumatic labors, births, and postpartum care. Since 2006, she’s visited a hospital more than 200 times, often without any ailment.
Unfortunately, Nelson said, she really got off on the traumatizing element.
‘We don’t really fully still understand why she committed the crimes this way, or kind of what the motivation was,’ she continued. ‘But it was very shocking to see that our story made it to a platform like SVU.’
While Nelson never met Braun in person, she, along with other doulas, had been in constant contact with the woman as her ‘pregnancy’ progressed.
‘Unfortunately, now we know that that’s kind of what she does with each doula, is really customize the story to pull on your heartstrings as much as possible, based on things that either we’ve mentioned ourselves, or kind of different personality traits,’ she said.
She added that it was actually ‘little bit healing’ to hear Hargitay’s character, Olivia Benson, saying all the things she wished the police would have said to her.
Braun pleaded guilty in December 2023 to 21 charges of fraud, indecent acts, false pretenses and mischief, for seeking the help of doulas in fake pregnancies and stillbirths from June 2022 through February 2023.
She was sentenced to two years of house arrest and three years of probation in February 2024.
According to CBC News, Braun broke the conditions of her house arrest around two months she was sentenced, in April 2024, after she contacted two more support workers falsely claiming to be pregnant and using fake names.
In June, 2025, she was sentenced to three years in prison, and was also ordered to spend the remainder of her house arrest behind bars, bringing her total time incarcerated to three years and eight months.