M. Gessen

My mind was at peace.

In my mind, I had already tried and convicted Alan.

My motivation for attending the trial was to watch the prosecution lay out the case so I could bring it back to my family, so they'd finally set aside their misguided doubts and misplaced sympathies.

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I am M. Gessen, and this is The Idiot.

A jury trial is a play put on for an audience of one dozen people.

In Allen's trial, notably, all three of the lead roles, the judge, the prosecutor, and the public defender, were played by women.

The judge was kind and unusually personable.

She encouraged members of the jury to use the time during breaks to get to know one another and suggested icebreakers.

Maybe that's why, during the jury selection process, people were surprisingly open and detailed telling the stories of their own divorces and custody battles.

The prosecutor, Ilham Hosseini, seemed angry, like she was personally affronted by the details of the crime.

Her star witness was the undercover FBI agent, the man Allen had hired to get rid of Priscilla.

Alan knew him as David, so that his cover wouldn't be blown when David testified, members of the public, me and a couple of local crime reporters, had to leave the courtroom and watch a video feed from an adjoining room.

The camera was trained on the witness box, but in such a way that we couldn't see the agent's face.

By which I mean, we were staring at David's crotch.

Gray pants, the edge of a striped teal tie, projected onto a large screen while the prosecution played clips of surveillance audio.

David testified that the investigation didn't start with Alan.

It started with a different Russian speaker, a man named Alexei Kiselev.

Kiselev was a sometime business partner of Alan's, a schemer in and around Washington, the sort of guy who leverages tenuous connections against imagined projects and very occasionally manages to make a buck.

In 2019, Kiselev caught the FBI's attention.

They suspected he was looking for someone to help launder billions of dollars.