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Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.
M. Gessen is known for their incisive writing on autocracies, including Putin’s Russia, political repression and state terror in the U.S., and violations of rights. But their latest project is a more personal one: a serialized podcast exploring a crime their cousin Allen committed—trying to hire someone to kill his ex-wife, the mother of his children.
Allen is now serving a 10-year prison sentence, and Gessen’s podcast series explores how he could commit such an unthinkable act, as well as the range of reactions from their family members—and their own capacity for empathy and compassion.
Listeners, have you had a relative do a terrible thing? What effect did it have on you and your family?
Gessen’s podcast is called The Idiot. And M. Gessen joins me now. A note: this conversation may contain spoilers. Em, welcome to Forum.
M. Gessen: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Mina Kim: I really appreciated the way your podcast explores, so deeply, the complicated, rippling effects of a terrible act by a family member. What made you want to turn your reporter’s lens and practice on this particular incident in your family?
M. Gessen: Well, the simple answer is that it happened to my family. And when something like that happens, it’s one of those events where you wake up in the morning, and for a second you don’t remember—and then you remember. Right? You remember that you’re waking up into a world in which Allen took out a hit on his ex-wife.
It’s a really hard thing to come to terms with, even though—as I make clear in the very first episode of the podcast—I never even liked Allen. Right?
And yet, the effect of that happening in the family was really profound. I found it very destabilizing.
Mina Kim: Yeah. And you say your family—it “snapped,” something like that?
M. Gessen: It snapped, yeah. At the very beginning of the podcast, I describe our family as elastic. And this is largely thanks to my father, who has a very expansive idea of family—he includes people, really takes them in.
He’s kept up relationships with my exes, and all the kids who come into his orbit are like his kids. So when Allen—this isn’t quite a spoiler—showed up in the United States a couple of years before his arrest, with his 5-year-old son, whom he had taken from Russia without his ex-wife’s knowledge or permission, my father didn’t exactly throw his arms around them, but he included them—my cousin, his son, and Allen’s mother, who also came with them.
For a couple of years, they were very much a part of the family. And then it snapped.
And going back to your question: I’m a journalist. That’s what I know how to do. I’ve found that in difficult moments, it helps me to use my professional skills—to ask lots of questions of lots of people—to make sense of things. So that’s what I did.
Mina Kim: Yeah. You say you didn’t even really like Allen. Who was he to you before the crime?
M. Gessen: In the podcast, I describe him as a buffoon—a pompous ass, a clown. Not much love lost there.
Although, spoiler alert, once we started talking—when he was already in prison—I developed empathy for him, which surprised me.
But before that, I saw him as a certain type: someone who calls himself an “international businessman,” probably very impressive to some people, but not so much to his own family.
At one point, he worked as a consultant with Israeli businesses providing security for mines in Central Africa—working with former Israeli soldiers. Basically, all the things I think are terrible in the world, kind of concentrated in one place and associated with my cousin Allen. That’s how I saw him.
Mina Kim: Yeah. And then in 2022, he’s arrested for taking out a hit on his ex-wife. And the person he tried to hire ended up being an undercover FBI agent?
M. Gessen: Hence the title of the series—The Idiot. But also, thank God, right? Thank God he hired an undercover FBI agent and not an actual killer. Everybody is alive to tell the tale.
Mina Kim: Yeah. I actually have a clip of Allen’s ex-wife, the mother of his two children, Priscilla, describing her reaction to learning she was the target of a hit. Let’s hear it.
Priscilla (clip): And then the girl told me—she was 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. I couldn’t put all that information together in one sentence and make it make sense: Allen, murder, me.
Mina Kim: That’s a clip from the podcast The Idiot by my guest, M. Gessen, an opinion columnist for The New York Times. When I heard that moment, it really stayed with me—it was such a vivid description of shock.
M. Gessen: Yeah, I love that image—water running through a sieve. I think we’ve all experienced that moment when you’re receiving information and you just can’t absorb it.
Mina Kim: Yes.
M. Gessen: And imagine—when she says “the girl,” she’s referring to an FBI agent who came to her apartment at 6:30 in the morning and said, “Your ex-husband was just arrested.”
Mina Kim: Yeah. For Allen’s mother, the initial reaction sounds like it was denial.
M. Gessen: That’s a complicated topic. I think she was in denial—and I think she still is. She maintains that he was framed by the FBI.
It’s not entirely wrong—he was technically, I would say, entrapped. But the thing about entrapment is that it’s not always a sound legal defense, and it’s certainly not a moral defense.
The undercover agent may have offered him the solution, but Allen very happily embraced it. When I went to the trial in San Francisco—he was arrested in Massachusetts, but the trial was in San Francisco because the FBI agent was based there—I didn’t expect to hear evidence that was so overwhelmingly convincing.
He was on tape saying yes over and over again. The agent had to make it clear it wasn’t a misunderstanding, that Allen had multiple opportunities to back out. And eight or nine times, he says, “Yes, I really want this done.”
Mina Kim: And it was striking for you to hear that—was that because it’s a family member, or because of your own skepticism about the criminal justice system and the FBI?
M. Gessen: Both. By the time of the trial—almost a year after his arrest—I think many in my family were hoping something might emerge that would make it seem less bad. Not that he was innocent, but maybe not quite so guilty.
I don’t know that I personally held onto that hope, but I felt my father’s heartbreak at realizing how decisively guilty he was.
And yes, I am skeptical of the FBI. I wrote a book about the Boston Marathon bombing and attended those trials. I’m familiar with how the FBI investigates terrorism and how common entrapment can be.
I’ve heard recordings where agents clearly coax people into actions they might never have taken. But this wasn’t like that. This was clearly something Allen wanted.
At one point, when the prosecutor was questioning him—Allen had the bad sense to take the stand—I found myself rooting for the prosecutor, thinking, “You go, girl.” And that’s not a position I usually find myself in.
Mina Kim: Do you think part of that was anger—that he was family?
M. Gessen: Oh, absolutely. My dislike of him played a role. I couldn’t access the kind of empathy I usually bring into a courtroom.
Normally, I’d think: this person probably has a complicated history—trauma, abuse, something that shaped them. Those things are often true.
But I didn’t have that instinct here. It actually took talking to Allen to understand what was going on with him—not to justify it, but to understand it.
Mina Kim: We’re talking about a new podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen called The Idiot, which tells the story of Gessen’s cousin Allen, now in prison for trying to have his ex-wife killed.
Listeners, have you had a family member do something terrible that changed you, your family, or the way you see the world? What reactions did your family have? Have you stayed connected with them while they were incarcerated?
You can email forum@kqed.org, find us on social media, or call 866-733-6786.
More after the break. I’m Mina Kim.
