Betrayal: Dirty Secrets True Story — The Joel Kern Internal Affairs File

For most of two decades, Joel Kern was the kind of officer a department puts in front of cameras. He joined the Colorado Springs Police Department in the late 1990s, promoted through sergeant to lieutenant, and by 2019 was working as the department's interim public information officer — the official voice of the CSPD. In the summer of 2020, that was literal: during the George Floyd protests, the voice coming out of the department's long-range acoustic device, ordering crowds to disperse, was Kern's.

What the public didn't know — and what his wife, Karoline Borega, would spend years piecing together — was that the department's spokesman was living a second life. Hulu's Betrayal: Dirty Secrets, released August 4, 2026, tells that story in three episodes. Every major fact in it is real, and much of it comes from a source this channel cares about more than any interview: the internal affairs file.

The record, not the rumor

What separates this case from an ordinary infidelity story is documentation. The Betrayal team — Borega and podcast host Andrea Gunning — obtained internal affairs records and actual IA interview audio through Colorado open-records (CORA) requests, and the Hulu series airs footage from the CSPD's own investigation. The arc the records draw:

• 2019 — the harassment complaint. A female reporter accused Kern of sexual harassment, describing suggestive comments and WhatsApp messages — including remarks about his own marriage — from the officer whose job was talking to the press. The result was not formal discipline; Kern was moved out of the public information role, and the matter ended there.
• 2020 — the protest bruises. Kern came home from the George Floyd protests with bruises and abrasions he attributed to violence on the line. Per the case records, the injuries actually came from an affair with a CSPD employee. It's the series' cleanest illustration of the double life: even the wounds had a cover story.
• 2022 — the patrol car. A woman Kern met on a fetish dating site told investigators the two had sex in the back seat of his patrol car. She described the encounter as consensual — her discomfort, she said, was watching a police officer use a state-issued vehicle that way. It was this investigation that finally broke the pattern, and not because of the act itself.

The lie mattered more than the conduct

Here is the part of the file worth reading twice. When internal affairs interviewed Kern on March 21, 2022, investigators concluded he knowingly made an untruthful statement. In Colorado, that finding is close to professional death: proven dishonesty in an official investigation is a decertifying offense under the state's POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) rules, because an officer whose word can't be trusted can't testify, can't swear affidavits, can't do the job.

So the formal end of Joel Kern's career reads like this: in 2022, while the investigation was still open, he retired — which, under Colorado law, meant he left with no formal discipline on his record and his earned pension intact. In December 2022, the POST Board revoked his peace-officer certification — not for anything that happened in a patrol car, but for what he said in an interview room.

Joel Kern has never been charged with a crime. Nothing in the internal affairs findings, the podcast, or the Hulu series alleges criminal conduct, and no prosecutor has ever filed charges. The entire accountability story in this case played out administratively — which is precisely what makes it worth studying.

The wife who filed the records requests

The series belongs to Karoline Borega. She married Kern, raised children with him, and — when the marriage's collapse exposed the scale of what had been happening — did what most betrayed spouses can't: she went and got the file. The Betrayal podcast's season on Kern ran ten episodes, built on CORA-obtained IA audio and interviews with former officers; the Hulu season compresses it to three, adding interviews with Borega, her daughter Nicole, and one of Kern's former partners. The CSPD, asked to comment on the reporting, declined.

Kern and Borega are now divorced. Kern, per reporting on the case, entered therapy after his suspension, has acknowledged struggling with sex addiction, and has otherwise stayed publicly silent. He reportedly has limited contact with his children.

Why this case file matters

Most of the files on this channel end in a courtroom. This one never got near one — and that's the point. The evidence trail in the Kern case is as documented as any we cover: complaints, interview audio, investigative findings, a decertification order. What it produced was not a verdict but a quiet exit — retirement ahead of discipline, a pension preserved, a certification revoked mostly out of public view.

Betrayal: Dirty Secrets is really a story about where the record goes when no one is prosecuted: into an internal affairs cabinet, until someone with standing and stubbornness files the right open-records request. The footage didn't fail here either. It just needed someone to come get it.

If this file is your lane, our breakdown of how true-crime documentaries use real body-cam and investigative footage covers the genre's evidence problem, and the four verified cases behind Netflix's Worst Neighbor Ever show what these stories look like when they do end in a courtroom.

Case status as of this writing: Joel Kern has never been criminally charged in connection with any conduct described in this article; the findings against him were administrative. He retired from the Colorado Springs Police Department in 2022 and was decertified by Colorado's POST Board in December 2022 for knowingly making an untruthful statement to investigators. This article is based on internal affairs records and audio as reported by the Betrayal podcast and Hulu series, Colorado POST records, and contemporaneous reporting. Photo: official key art for Betrayal: Dirty Secrets, from ABC News' trailer release.