I’m a reporter. I ask questions so I can understand the world, and then I tell other people what I’ve learned. And at difficult times in my life — when all my friends seemed to be getting sick and dying of AIDS or, later, when I faced a difficult medical diagnosis myself — I relied on my skills as a reporter to make sense of what was happening. I asked a lot of people a lot of questions. In July 2022 my cousin Allen was arrested on suspicion of having hired someone to kill his ex-wife, Priscilla, the mother of his two children. (Fortunately, the person he hired was an undercover F.B.I. agent.) There had been three years of drama — a contentious separation, a custody battle, an earlier arrest on kidnapping charges — but this arrest was still a shock that devastated everyone in my family. Even me, and I’d never liked Allen. As I struggled to make sense of what had happened to Allen and Priscilla and to my family in general, I turned again to what I know how to do best: reporting. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the material, though. It clearly wouldn’t be a column, and I had some trouble figuring out how it could become a magazine story. Then my friend Andrey Borzenko — a founder of a Russian-language podcasting studio, Libo-Libo — told me it was a podcast. He was right. I worked with Libo-Libo and Serial Productions to make a five-episode show called “The Idiot.” The story turned out to be convoluted and even darker than I had imagined. At one point, I even found myself feeling deep sympathy for Allen (who talked to me for more than 35 hours for this podcast). At other times, like when I was listening to the undercover recordings, I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh, because those conversations were so ridiculous. The best part of choosing to work in the podcast medium is that you can hear all of that, too — my conversations with Allen and the undercover tapes, as well as interviews with Priscilla and with my dad, who, honestly, is the existential hero of this story. Listen to the podcast here:
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