Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is A.G. Sulzberger. I'm the publisher of The New York Times. And I'm also a former reporter who's watched with a lot of alarm as our profession has shrunk in recent years. Normally, this is where I'd ask you to subscribe to The Times. But today, I'm encouraging you to support any news organization that's dedicated to original reporting.
Whether that's your local newspaper, a national paper, or the New York Times, what matters most is that you subscribe to a real news organization doing firsthand, fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you.
In the early morning hours of July 28, 2022, when the FBI showed up at my father's house in Cape Cod, they knocked on another door, too. Priscilla's.
So they knock, and when they told me they were FBI, I thought they were there for me.
This is Priscilla.
So I started, like, literally physically shaking. I started thinking in my head, it was just like, you're being deported, you're going to be deported, you know. And I think they saw that I was so scared, and they told me, calm down, we're here about Alan Gessen.
Alan, my cousin, Priscilla's ex.
And they said to me, um, Alan has been arrested. I was like, okay, for what? What happened? And they said he's been arrested for murder for hire. And I'm like, what's that? Like, made no sense to me. And then the girl told me, she's like, this is going to be a bit shocking, but he hired somebody to kill you. You know, it's, You know when you run water through a sieve?
That's how I felt like I was receiving the information. It came in and went out. I didn't understand it. It wasn't like I couldn't put all that information together in one sentence and make it make sense. Alan, murder me?
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Chapter 2: What led Priscilla to recount her experiences with Allen?
The place was a little dark, a little cramped. Sometimes you can tell when a person is used to living in a different kind of space. The furniture was a bit too large. Priscilla herself looked out of place. She's very tall and, well, she's stunning. Whenever I've heard people try to describe her, the word regal comes up. When she walks down the street, people literally turn around to look.
She demanded more room and more light and an audience larger than me and my recording equipment on the couch. Priscilla was 42 at the time of this conversation. She comes from a prominent family in Zimbabwe. Her father was a neighbor of the country's longtime dictator, Robert Mugabe. Priscilla had worked as a fashion model.
She didn't expect to be a single mother with two kids living in semi-hiding in a house with brown carpeting and a refrigerator with a death rattle. Talking to me now, she was still trying to absorb that this was how her fairytale international romance ended. Me? I was trying to puzzle out how it had begun.
So here I was, at Priscilla's safe house, while the kids were at school, asking her to start at the beginning. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I am Em Gessen, and this is The Idiot.
We gave Times employees a preview of Crossplay from New York Times Games. And here's what they had to say. I can finally play with other people. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and coworkers. I have a J for 10 points. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh. As an English as a second language speaker, I like to learn new words.
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I began with the story's first mystery.
So, can you tell me what you saw in Alan when you first met him?
Wow. I think like most people that meet him, the first time you meet him, he's very charismatic.
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Chapter 3: How did Priscilla describe her first impressions of Allen?
Oh, yes. By the way, in his message to me, he wrote to me because there was no hot water at some point there at the house. He was like, oh, we fixed the hot water. So you don't need to worry that it's going to be cold because winter was coming. We fixed the hot water and there is the oven. You will be able to stay warm through the winter.
And by oven, you mean a wood-burning stove that maybe could keep part of that space warm. It's not a winterized house. No. But he is, at the end of June, thinking about you staying there through the winter. Yes. How did that make you feel?
I thought it was absurd because I actually obviously had no idea the lengths or the extent of his plans.
Priscilla scrambled to find a place to live in Moscow. And then, according to lawsuits, police reports, and court testimony, Priscilla became aware of odd things happening with the business that she and Alan shared in Zimbabwe. She learned that she had been removed as director of a company that owned a property there, the property where she and Alan had a house and their businesses.
And now her businesses were being forced out. A neighbor told her the property was recently put up for sale. Soon, Priscilla says, she was struggling to get access to money. Later, in federal court, Alan confirmed he and his business colleagues had Priscilla removed from their company and that he had canceled her debit card.
It is almost a way of... You know when somebody strips you of your humanity, shows you that you're not in control of anything? You've taken my child. You've taken the clothes off my back. You've taken my home. You're... breaking me down completely all in one go. It's insane.
I had thought that this was all about O, about who had control of the schools he went to and the books he read. But now that I was talking to Priscilla, it sounded like Alan was really going after her, punishing her. Priscilla says she knew why. Because she had chosen to end the marriage.
In one of their fights, Alan had told her that it wasn't fair, that if they broke up, her life would get better and his would get worse. Priscilla didn't disagree exactly. Her calculations showed the same thing.
I had a home. I had kids. I had a business. Everything was going well. The only negative was him. So when I got rid of him, I essentially got rid of the only negative that I had in my life, which would mean that my life would now improve. I was happy. I was stress-free. But for him... because he was not ready to give up this relationship or to let go of everything, he felt discarded.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Priscilla face during her relationship with Allen?
Please feel free to call or write with any inquiries. Kind regards, Alan. Wow.
Would you like to interpret this?
Remember those stories that I told you he's so excellent at weaving? This is another, this is a classical example of that story. If you're an outsider reading this, it sounds plausible, right? It sounds actually very logical. If you have no idea of the facts, you'd say, okay, wow, this woman must be awful. This man is trying to save his child.
And it all seems to make so much sense without the facts.
What struck me about this letter is that Alan, who has a law degree, is acknowledging the existence of a court order, but seems to assume he can convince a police detective it's okay to violate it. It seemed so stupid, so ham-fisted, so delusional, that the only logical explanation I could think of for this illogical approach is that Alan actually believed that he didn't kidnap Owen.
Maybe he, for one, believed himself. To Priscilla, the most frightening thing about the letter was that Alan clearly had no intention of coming back anytime soon. After the frenzy of trying to get the court order and reach Alan, and after this email, she could only wait. Christmas came and went, then New Year's, and still they were gone.
It turns out that Lena and Alan, and Elle, spent a couple of weeks vacationing in Canada, staying at a fancy hotel, skiing. Then they headed to the Montreal airport. They had tickets to London. From the time the three of them entered the Trudeau International Airport, law enforcement were tracking them. When Al and Lena and O tried to board, the agent told them to wait by the gate.
They sat down, and pretty soon a group of officers appeared. From what I can gather, there were eight or more of them, seemingly out of nowhere. One officer came up from behind and lifted O up in the air, straight out of his seat and over the back. Another got in front of Lena, blocking her access to Alan and O. And the rest of them slammed Alan on the ground and handcuffed him.
There was a lot of yelling. On the ground, on the ground, was what O remembered hearing. Then the officers led O away. His dad was lying on the ground face down. His grandma was screaming too and trying to hand him things. The officers let him take the violin. Now, whenever the subject of Canada comes up, O says that he had a wonderful vacation there and loved the snow.
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Chapter 5: How did Priscilla's life change after moving to Moscow?
For the first time in two and a half years, no one is coming between Priscilla and her son. In fact, after Alan has so grossly violated their temporary custody agreement, Priscilla now has full legal and physical custody of O. And I'm trying to imagine, what would I do in this situation? What would you do? Would you eviscerate the bastard?
Or would you say that he was taking a time out because he'd broken the rules, like in school? I suppose Priscilla expected Alan to be in the kids' lives after this, despite all he'd done. But then, six months later, when Alan was arrested for hiring someone to murder her, she continued taking uncanny care with the way she talked to the kids about him.
She said that he was arrested because he broke the rules again. And almost a year later, when we were talking in her little house, she still hadn't told the kids that Alan had tried to have her killed. Part of it was that she hadn't figured out a way to talk about it that wouldn't scare the kids. But that wasn't all of it. Priscilla told me that she wasn't only protecting the kids.
The one thing that you also need to know is I don't hate Alan. So I'm not motivated to say, oh, he's like this, he's like that. I don't hate him. I feel sorry for him for some reason. It's an odd feeling.
Like I feel sorry for him because I feel like it takes a certain level of sadness or deep, like very, very, very deep unhappiness with yourself or with who you are to allow yourself to do certain things. To care so little about the outcome of, or like, for you to be evil, you cannot think very highly of yourself.
And I think you probably suffer more as an evil person knowing who you are and the things that you are capable of and having to live with that in your mind every day.
That is some unattainable level of big for me.
It's so hard to explain. It is so hard to explain, but this is how I genuinely feel.
I've tried to understand how she can feel that way towards someone who tried to have her killed. I thought maybe she still loved him. She did tell me that she still felt something for him. And that part of her was hoping that what he had done wasn't true. That some explanation would emerge that would make her feel a little saner and safer.
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