No, she used the distortion to decode the specific subcarrier that holds the RDS information. This had nothing to do with the decryption, as the data decoded at this step would include regular RDS/RDBS data along with the _encrypted_ TMS data.

The decryption is performed in a second step. The reason she had to do it this way is because most radios do not provide a convenient way to get at the subcarrier data.