Convicted former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane is hosting a podcast, the first episode of which will drop next week on Spotify and other platforms.
Kane, 59, who in 2012 became the first woman and first Democrat elected state attorney general, resigned after a Montgomery County jury convicted her in 2016 of leaking secret grand jury information and lying about it to another grand jury. She was later sentenced to 10 to 23 months in prison, serving time at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility from late 2018 until her release in 2019.
The new podcast hosted by Kane is called “Through the HurriKane,” with the first episode releasing Sept. 16. In it, Kane will “explore resilience, healing and finding hope after the storm,” a Spotify description notes.
Title card for Kathleen Kane’s new podcast, Through the HurriKane, set to debut Sept. 16.
“Have you ever looked down and seen the pieces of your life on the floor and wondered what happened?” Kane asks in a recorded promotion for the podcast. “You haven’t just been through a storm, you’ve been through a hurricane. Sometimes we think that we’ll never have joy, we’ll never have love again, we’ll never have a normal life again. But ‘Through the HurriKane’ will teach you that the power of love and resistance and the human mind can do anything. We all experience a hurricane, but the human spirit is indestructible. This is ‘Through the HurriKane.’ Let’s walk through this storm together.”
Efforts to reach Kane were not immediately successful.
A Scranton native, Kane was convicted Aug. 15, 2016, of two counts each of perjury, false swearing, obstructing the administration of law and conspiracy and one count of official oppression.
She was accused of leaking grand jury documents relating to a 2009 case involving the late J. Whyatt Mondesire, a Philadelphia man who was never charged with any crime, to the Philadelphia Daily News, which ran a story June 6, 2014, and of lying to a separate grand jury that investigated the leak.
The prosecution said Kane did so to retaliate against Frank Fina and Marc Costanzo, former state prosecutors who led the Mondesire investigation, whom she blamed for leaking information about her decision not to charge several Philadelphia legislators accused of taking bribes.
Montgomery County Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy sentenced Kane in October 2016, but allowed her to remain free on bail pending the outcome of appeals.
The state Superior Court ultimately upheld Kane’s conviction, rejecting her arguments, including that evidence against her was illegally obtained, that she was the victim of selective prosecution and that she should have been allowed to present evidence about Fina’s and Costanzo’s involvement in a pornographic email scandal within her office.
In June 2018, Kane’s attorneys asked the state Supreme Court to hear an appeal of that decision, but the court has discretion and is not obligated to take cases.
Kane began serving her prison sentence in late 2018, after the state Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal. She was released from prison in 2019 after serving eight months behind bars, her sentence having been reduced by two months for good behavior.
In March 2022, Kane was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving following a minor, two-car crash in Scranton. She was found not guilty of DUI later that year in a nonjury trial.
