Sarah Corbett Lynch of A Deadly American Marriage Is Finding Her Voice—and Won’t Stop Using It

Sarah Corbett Lynch was working at the pool where she teaches swimming to kids recently when she noticed one of her young charges was struggling.

The young boy is in foster care, and had taken a shining to the 18-year-old teacher. Through conversations with his foster mom, Lynch learned the past few weeks had been particularly tough. So, she went to her locker, where she happened to have a copy of Noodle Loses Dad, the children’s book she wrote at age 13 to help other kids deal with the loss of a parent.

When she later saw the boy, she could tell that having a story about the hard experience he was going through had helped him not feel so alone. For Lynch, this small anecdote highlights what she’s all about.

“I want to help other kids and other young adults who have been through really difficult circumstances and want to see a light at the end of the tunnel,” she tells me over Zoom.

The difficult circumstances that Lynch and her family went through a decade ago are now ones that millions more people know about. In August 2015, Lynch’s stepmother, Molly Martens, and her father, Tom Martens, killed her father, Jason Corbett, in their North Carolina home. The long and shocking court case that followed is now the subject of a new Netflix documentary A Deadly American Marriage, which has rocketed up the streamer’s charts since being released on May 9.

When investigators arrived at the scene following Corbett’s killing, Molly and Tom Martens said the killing had been self-defense. They claimed that Corbett, a native of Ireland who had moved to his wife’s home country a few years prior, had been physically abusing his wife and had attempted to strangle her to death that night, before being found by his father-in-law.

However, doubts were raised at the trial over the brutality of the crime and lies Molly Martens had told about other aspects of their relationship, and in 2017, the pair were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to decades in prison. However, the convictions were overturned on appeal, and in 2023 Molly Martens pleaded no contest and her father pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Ultimately, the pair were released from prison less than a year later.

While Sarah and her older brother Jack, then 8 and 10, initially corroborated Molly Martens’ claims of abuse, they later said they had been coached by their stepmother and she, in fact, had been subjecting them to coercive control and physical and emotional abuse. But while videos of their initial statements were played during the sentencing phase of the Martens’ plea deal in 2023, the siblings never got to refute them in court or share the reality of what they had experienced.

It was this feeling of being silenced that led the siblings to want to participate in the documentary and for Lynch to begin to work on a memoir about her experience. The book, A Time for Truth, was coincidentally released just a few months before the documentary.