Sounding more like a victim than a convicted politician who’d done time, former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane kicked off her podcast, Through the HurriKANE, on Spotify Tuesday.
Kane, 59, who was imprisoned for illegally leaking secret grand jury information and later lying about it, uses Episode 1 to introduce herself as a woman who survived life’s tribulations by following her family motto, immortalized on her refrigerator magnet: “Life is not about waiting out the storms. It’s about learning to dance through them.”
Interviewed by her niece, Alexandra Goffer, Kane draws upon a well-worn podcast trope of revealing a defiant perseverance in the face of cruelties, to demonstrate a resilience that listeners could one day achieve themselves.
What’s left out is a more complex tale of a woman who, according to the judicial system she was once a part of, engineered the misery she now laments.
Kane was the first Democrat and first woman to become Pennsylvania attorney general when she was elected in 2012. Once a rising star in the party, the top state law enforcement official-turned-felon had a tumultuous tenure before her career ended in disgrace.
She was convicted in 2016 of perjury, obstruction of justice, and related crimes for leaking confidential grand jury material in a bid to embarrass a political enemy — then falsely denying that.
She served eight months behind bars before she was released from Montgomery County jail in Eagleville before getting released on five years probation in 2019.
Kane’s political downfall began when she inherited an undercover investigation that caught five legislators from Philadelphia and a Traffic Court judge on tape accepting money or gifts from a cooperating witness. Instead of prosecuting those crimes, Kane secretly shut down the case.
When news of her decision was revealed by The Inquirer in March 2014, she blamed a top state prosecutor, Frank Fina, who had supervised the sting. Kane then leaked confidential grand jury information to the Daily News to fuel a story that she believed would reflect badly on him.
She was criminally charged in August 2015 but did not resign from office until after she was convicted by a jury the following year.
As she stood before a judge at sentencing, Kane wept and pleaded for leniency.
Montgomery County Court Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy was unmoved.
“The case is about ego, ego of a politician consumed by her image from Day One,” she told Kane. “And instead of focusing solely on the business of fighting crime, the focus was battling these perceived enemies … and utilizing and exploiting her position to do it.”
In the first episode, Kane describesgrowing up in a working-class Irish family in the Scranton area. She eventually became a prosecutor, she says, with “a lot of empathy for people.”
Kane shares no details of her fall, but emphasizes that outside forces combined to upend her life.
Kane says she stood firm in the face of the metaphorical squall exhibiting inner resolve:
“I held my head high… . I slept well at night because I knew the truth… . I was already having so much taken away from me… . I wasn’t about to cower in my house.”
As if an innocent bystander in the maelstrom around her, Kane observes, “Your life can change on a dime … from having everything to having nothing.”
How she’ll explain what befell her is fodder for later episodes.
She says her message will be straightforward, though: “I do have a purpose left in life: to share with others what I’ve gone through.”