The truth was a mirror in the hands of God.
It fell, and broke into pieces.
Everybody took a piece of it,
and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.
Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th-century Sufi mystic
“Does your mom know Saad outed himself as not a virgin on the podcast?”
It was the very first reaction I got from a friend who messaged me as soon as she heard Episode 1 of Serial, “The Alibi.” I hadn’t yet heard it, but by the time I got around to listening to it I had already gotten dozens of messages from friends and colleagues asking if I was the Rabia Chaudry on the podcast.
I heard from Saad and Yusuf, who also had spent their day fielding dozens of excited messages. After sharing a bit of mortification that Sarah had aired his comment about not being a virgin, Saad quickly shrugged it off. That was minor. What mattered was that this story was finally getting told. The energy from the feedback was positive, everyone sounded pumped, and I couldn’t wait to finally hear the show. Sometime in the evening of October 3, 2014, I finally sat down to listen to the first episode.
The music itself, overlaid with audio from the GlobalTel Link service through which Adnan and other inmates call family and friends, was surprising. It took what was mundane for us, years of waiting for the beep to press “0” to accept his collect call, and transformed it into something magical.
I felt hyper-aware the entire time, my shoulders tense, ears pricked. Hearing Adnan’s voice—from the opening sequence, to explaining his love and respect for Hae, to his helplessness at not being able to prove his every step after school on January 13, 1999—it gutted me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I felt overwhelming sadness, grief, and hope. Finally, here it was, Adnan’s story. His voice, his words. But God, it had taken so long.
And then came Asia. After all, the first episode was “The Alibi.” Here was the one person we believed held Adnan’s freedom in her hands, saying publicly that she still remembered being with him after school at the time Jay said Adnan had killed Hae. I felt vindicated. Asia’s conversation with Sarah made it clear, despite what prosecutor Kevin Urick had testified to, that she was not pressured into making her written statements. After all these years, her memories of that afternoon were exactly the same, and while Sarah had told us long ago about their conversation, it was entirely a different experience to hear it from Asia herself.
The second episode, released simultaneously, documented Adnan and Hae’s doomed Romeo-and-Juliet romance. Sarah read from Hae’s diary and interviewed a number of their mutual friends, seeking clues for whether Adnan was possessive, controlling, any of the things the State alleged. She went over the homecoming dance fiasco. She spoke to Anjali, whom Adnan was dating at the time Hae disappeared. After investigating their relationship, Sarah said she didn’t buy the State’s version of motive. But she didn’t stop with investigating how Adnan acted during and after the relationship; she also went there—to the idea that his religion had something to do with how he felt about and treated Hae.
In “The Breakup,” Sarah says:
Remember the setup for this crime that the State laid out was that Adnan was betraying everything he held dear for this girl. As a good Muslim he was not supposed to be dating and so he was sacrificing his religion and lying to his family all just so he could be with her and it twisted him up inside. And Hae’s diary seems to be where they found some evidence for that. In fact, they had a friend of Hae’s, Debbie Warren, read excerpts from it on the witness stand. “I like him, no I love him.” She read at trial, dated May 15. “It’s just all the things that stand in the middle. His religion and Muslim customs are the main things. It irks me to know that I’m against his religion. He called me a devil a few times. I know he was only joking, but it’s somewhat true.”
So, yeah, anytime someone is writing stuff down like “sin” and “devil” and “religion means life” in reference to their secret relationship, that’s not good. But ask the Muslim in question about it, and it all seems so much smaller.
She had asked Adnan and also Saad and me. We all said the same thing: that it was ridiculous to conclude that Adnan was so serious about his religion that it was his life, but at the same time he was partying, drinking, smoking pot, dating, and having premarital sex.
I appreciated that Sarah made it clear there was no evidence that Adnan was a domineering, dangerous ex-boyfriend, but I was decidedly bothered that she felt uneasy about the religious comments in Hae’s diary. Why did Sarah think it looked bad for Adnan if he had to choose between Hae and his religion? There was no threat in this proposition other than the prospect of a broken heart. Did Sarah think that Adnan was perhaps religious enough to—in accordance with her own internal biases of what a possessive, religious Muslim man was like—kill a woman?
I couldn’t shake this thought, but the first few days after Serial launched I could barely come up for air to think it all through.
The public reaction to the podcast snowballed; within days the dozens of messages turned into hundreds. This American Life had dropped two beautifully produced, narratively seductive, completely intriguing episodes, and the world of podcasting was on fire. People immediately became obsessed with the case.
The media coverage was fast and furious; social media buzzed with millions of Tweets and shared Facebook statuses: Serial was an instant hit, and people could not wait for the following Thursday, when the next episodes would air.
Adnan didn’t yet know any of this. His family, Saad, and I began getting e-mails and calls from media outlets around the world for comment, but we held off. I decided to deal the best way I knew how—by blogging.
* * *
I did not write that very first blog post thinking, “I am totally going to undermine Sarah’s story and control the narrative.” My dinky little blog, hosted on Patheos, an interfaith writers’ site where I mostly railed against Muslim community issues that irritated me, was hardly a platform to rival This American Life. But I had things to say, even as early as the first week. The plan was to fill in the blanks, to broaden the context, and address some of the things that could make people say “hmmmm” (like the homecoming incident) with specificity. I wanted, basically, to explain things from our perspective—the perspective of the community, Adnan’s family, Adnan, myself.
Sarah was taking the listeners on a decidedly ambiguous journey. She presented a fact, a scene, an anecdote, showing us how it could work for Adnan or against him. Sarah had landed on why the story was fascinating—much of it, as she said herself, was spin.
And spin, whichever way you want it to go, does not rise to the level of evidence used to convict someone. There is no “beyond a reasonable doubt” when it comes to spin. There is only doubt. But doubt in the jury’s conviction was not good enough; we needed an overwhelming number of people to believe in Adnan’s actual innocence. And so I took to my blog, SplitTheMoon, and began writing. Every week, with every episode, I wrote. I wanted to add enough to the podcast that listeners would understand why, for all these years, I believed in Adnan’s innocence.
After my first few blog posts, I got an uncomfortable call from Sarah. She was not happy.
Here she had put in a tremendous amount of work, along with her team, to craft a particular storyline, and instead of letting it unfold without interfering I was mucking things up by blogging. I understood, and the last thing I wanted to do was damage her work. We owed her a tremendous debt for taking on Adnan’s story and telling it to the world. I didn’t want to upset her, but at the same time I knew that the public’s attention to the case would pass as quickly as the podcast. Human nature is fickle. I knew the day Sarah wrapped up this story, people would be ready for season two of Serial. I spoke about it with Adnan and he agreed. I already had experience with writing and public speaking, I had a platform, I knew the case, and there was no one in the family who was up to the task. He not only gave me permission to take the lead on all media, he requested that we keep his family out of the media as much as possible. And he had read the first few transcripts, heard the concern in Yusuf’s voice that there was ambiguity about his innocence in the show. He knew Sarah had to tell the story not only in a way to keep the listeners compelled but also in a way that was authentic to her. But that didn’t necessarily mean that after it was over, anyone would care about the case.
So I made Sarah a promise: I would never trump her story, I would never address anything she had not yet revealed (such as the involvement of the Innocence Project), and I would limit my blogs to the content of her episodes. But I wouldn’t stop writing.
“You have your agenda and I have mine,” I told her. My agenda was to exonerate Adnan and bring him home, and in order to do that I had to tell our side of the story.
* * *
So while I assured her that she had little to worry about, because Serial was reaching millions of people while my blog only reached tens of thousands, I was working on fixing that. I took to social media and put to use what I had learned in the past couple of years of organizing the New America Foundation social media trainings.
Every Thursday Serial would drop a new episode, and I would listen to it as soon as the girls were off to school. I’d let it marinate all day, thinking about the points I wanted to address. At night I would start going through the case files, looking for the documents I needed for the blog. I would write much of the night and aim to post the blog first thing in the morning.
And then it was all about Twitter. I found people tweeting about Serial and would respond to them, posting my blog with a message like “you can read more about the case here.” I did this twenty, thirty, forty times a day in the first few weeks, sharing my post over and over like a slightly unhinged person. I can only imagine how irritating it must have been for the followers I already had—about twelve thousand or so who (I assume) followed me because of my writing and commentary on faith, gender, politics, and national security. And now, all of a sudden, I almost exclusively tweeted about Adnan, Serial, and my blogs. Despite potentially turning off my regular followers, I shared my blogs with an obnoxious frequency until one day the huge digital media outlet Slate ran a piece called “If You Love Serial, You Should Be Reading This.” The “this” was my blog.
My readership shot up into the hundreds of thousands, and after that I shared my blogs a few times when they went live, and it was enough to get the circulation I wanted. Having been part of a number of Twitter campaigns, I knew we couldn’t do without a hashtag, and so #FreeAdnan was born. I tacked it on to the end of almost all my tweets, even to pictures of my cat, Mr. Beans. More than once, #FreeAdnan ended up trending on Twitter globally.
Despite what it may have looked like, there was no organized online campaign for Adnan. It was just me constantly on my smart phone, day and night, in bed, while working, traveling, even on the toilet. I responded to every tweet; I favorited, retweeted, and replied tens of thousands of times in those months.
* * *
Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, People, Time, Good Morning America, MSNBC, the list went on and on and on. From the most prominent publications in the United States, to local news affiliates, to international print and broadcast media, Serial was everywhere. Adnan Syed, who I had once hoped would get some modest media coverage by the likes of Dateline, was sharing headlines with international news.
Serial didn’t just give a global platform to Adnan’s case, it elevated the podcast medium to astronomical heights. Suddenly the podcast was sexy. At least half a dozen podcasts about Serial sprung up, and I found myself listening to all of them (even some absolutely terrible ones where the hosts could barely keep the facts straight), not only to learn what others had to say about Serial but mostly what they thought about Adnan and the case. We, and by “we” I mean “team Adnan”—his family, me and my family—were definitely more sensitive regular listeners to Sarah’s portrayal of the facts and Adnan himself. We often honed in on, obsessed even, whether a given episode made him seem guilty or innocent. But perhaps the most robust, committed, and deeply involved set of strangers anywhere online was found on Reddit, a rabbit hole we were initially only too happy to jump into.
When the Serial podcast “subreddit” popped up with dozens of threads, Saad, Yusuf, Tanveer, and I eagerly joined the fray. I knew about Reddit, had been a lurker long ago, but had not returned in many years. We assumed, with incredible naïveté, that we would be a welcome addition to conversations; we could answer questions, give context, and be part of a supportive community that would help us fight for Adnan’s exoneration. Not completely so. On Reddit was where I first encountered not only challenges to our support for Adnan but direct hostility from strangers who were completely comfortable making the worst assumptions about us all. I never knew until then what it was like to, point-blank, be called a liar. Not just me, but Saad and Adnan’s brothers, and others who supported Adnan. Among the many ridiculous and disgusting allegations were: we know Adnan is guilty but persist in trying to free him; we are milking Serial for fame; Rabia is in love with Adnan, or maybe Sarah is … actually we both are because of his “dairy-cow eyes”; we coerced Asia into her statements, alternatively Rabia paid Asia for her affidavit in 2000; we are racist for pointing out Jay’s lies; Adnan confessed to us or to members of the mosque; mosque members or Adnan’s mother or father killed Hae and Adnan took the fall for it; we are dishonoring or somehow smearing Hae by challenging the conviction.
The real mistake we made was taking any of it seriously. It took some time before we realized we were mostly encountering classic Internet trolls, with multiple fake accounts and nothing to do with their time. But initially their vitriol wore us down. One by one, everyone who actually knew Adnan in person, including his school friends, like Krista Meyers, and his brothers, Saad, and I left subreddit, but only after being through an emotional wringer.
While trolls didn’t matter, what was relevant was the response of the actual, real-life public, especially the Muslim community. Though Adnan had never said a word to any of us about his childhood friends and community abandoning him, Saad, Yusuf, and I carried a lot of anger at the people he had been raised with. Now, with Serial, they were coming forward again. Friends who hadn’t contacted Adnan in over a decade, elders who knew him since childhood but had written him off as a lost cause—they were coming back.
We were getting messages, sometimes sheepish ones, with apologies for being absent but also expressing gratitude for not having forgotten Adnan. Early on, as Serial exploded, I couldn’t help but be snarky online about these friends who suddenly remembered Adnan. I reined it in quickly, though, realizing it was wrong to ostracize those who just wanted to show support now.
But Yusuf in particular finally spilled out the pain his family had held onto for over a decade. In a number of posts he pointed out how people had the nerve to come forward now that Adnan’s case was all over the news, and how most of the community had just let him fade away, like he never even existed.
* * *
“The message you’re sending is really messed up.”
“Why?”
“Basically you’re telling people, people like my kids, that it’s normal for Muslim kids to sleep around, drink, smoke pot. And you’re perpetuating the idea that it’s the only way to prove you’re a cool American, which means the Muslims who don’t do that shouldn’t be trusted. Like if he was actually a religious kid, then maybe he would have had motive. I don’t want my kids to hear this.”
I was a guest at someone else’s home, meeting this man for the first time. It was Thanksgiving, Serial was more than halfway through, and I was not in a good place. I was already sleep deprived and stressed. I had gained twenty pounds in the past two months and had chronic back pain. As I sat there listening to him and then glanced over at his kids, both teenagers, I felt a familiar stabbing pain shoot through my side.
I gave him a piece of my mind.
“So you’re telling me that what upsets you about this story is not the fact that Adnan was locked away for life because they used his religion against him, a kid your son’s age, that his family has been destroyed, and that he could potentially die in prison, rather you’re upset we are ‘airing dirty laundry’ about the lifestyles of Muslim kids.”
“Yeah, but it’s not true. That’s not how Muslim kids live. I never did those things.”
“Neither did I. And I have a teenage daughter and hope to God she doesn’t either because I’d kick her ass. But I know plenty of kids who did and I know kids still do. That’s reality, you don’t have to accept it, you can choose willful ignorance if it makes you feel better.”
“Well, I listened to the first episode and that’s all I needed to hear.”
Before I could bury my foot in his rear end, the friend witnessing the exchange brightly suggested that I take a walk with her.
About eight months later I was at a beautiful Pakistani benefit gala, dressed to the nines, when an excited, glamorous, older lady came over to introduce herself. Tall, slender, impeccably coiffed, and wrapped in many yards of a delicate chiffon sari, she reeked of expensive perfume and the excesses of a life very comfortably lived.
She was a fan, her daughters were fans, they all loved Serial; her relatives back in some posh area of Pakistan loved it too. She thanked me for my tenacity and asked for a photograph together.
She handed her phone to someone else, and we posed and took a quick picture. She grinned and texted the image to her daughter, casually said, “Even though I think he’s guilty, it’s rather wonderful what all you’ve done.”
My smile evaporated.
“Why do you think he’s guilty?”
“Well he was hiding the fact that he was smoking pot from his parents.…”
“Are you saying because he was smoking pot he could be a murderer or are you saying that because he hid his pot-smoking from his parents, which is what any kid who smokes pot would do, that makes him a murderer?”
She looked a bit flustered.
I looked around the room, a room full of very wealthy Pakistani-Americans who might never have known the kind of modest middle-class life Adnan or my family lived.
“I bet this room is full of people and their kids who’ve smoked weed and drink alcohol and had plenty of romances. Lots of Pakistanis drink alcohol, right? Does that mean they could commit murder? You are judging a seventeen-year-old kid for these things? Do you remember being seventeen? And do you find it a bit ironic that the State argued he killed Hae because he was religious, while you’re arguing that he killed her because he clearly wasn’t?”
She capitulated, probably hoping I would just let it go.
“Maybe you’re right, maybe he’s not guilty.”
I turned and took my seat, fuming.
I had dozens of such in-person encounters with Muslims who couldn’t get past their judgment of Adnan for smoking pot and dating. The deep discomfort they felt over hearing about such trespasses was not new. But I had expected that by now, by 2014, we had evolved to the point of being able to see beyond the mildly poor choices of a seventeen-year-old to what should really distress us—that the ugliest stereotypes about his religion, our religion, were used to convict him.
Others asked me to come speak to their Sunday school classes on the dangers of such things, pointing to Adnan’s story as a lesson learned. I should have actually shown up at a few of those Sunday school classes so I could rail against the very premise. “Muslims are human beings too, we will mess up, even God expects that.”
* * *
Ironically, as much as I had worried about this story being told at a time when polls showed that anti-Muslim bias in the United States was at its highest, my concern was unnecessary. The overwhelming public response, as Serial broke all records and hit over a hundred million listeners, was empathy and support for Adnan, with little attention paid to his religion other than disgust at how the State used it against him. It was an incredibly pleasant surprise, given that in the many years since 9/11, Muslim activists and organizations had pretty much failed to turn the tide of public opinion. There simply were no positive American Muslim narratives that had taken firm root in the public discourse. As I explained in the New America Foundation trainings, we had lost the narrative war to Muslim extremists and anti-Muslim bigots. The only meme we had been trying to sell for decades was “Islam is a religion of peace” and, surprise, no one was buying it.
It was one of the unintended consequences, an incredibly positive one, that Serial may have turned this case into the most positive story about a Muslim in America since 9/11. But as wildly popular as the story had become, there was near silence from the most prominent American Muslim figures, probably because supporting Adnan meant supporting something I cared about. And by the time Serial exploded, a lot of American Muslims weren’t very happy with me.
* * *
In the early months of 2013 I got a call from a dear friend, Imam Abdullah Antepli, at that time the Muslim chaplain at Duke University. I knew Abdullah from our time in Connecticut—he was the coordinator of Muslim students at the Hartford Seminary, where my husband began studying in 2006. Abdullah had not only gotten us our first apartment in Connecticut, with a key ready for us the night we moved there, but also introduced us to the local Muslim and interfaith community. Over the years, Abdullah was always a willing mentor and friend and always came through when needed. Not just for me, but for everyone. That’s just who he was and is.
I remember that call because it put me in a bind.
“You are going to Israel with me in May,” he said.
“Uhh. Abdullah, first of all, you know my girls are in school, I can’t take off and even if I could … Israel? No thanks,” was my response.
But he went on for a while, on that call and on a few others during which he finally talked me into agreeing to be part of the very first cohort of what would become an incredibly controversial program—the Muslim Leadership Initiative, or MLI. It was a program that took American Muslim leaders to study in Jerusalem at the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI), one of the most prominent and well-respected Jewish educational establishments in both Israel and the United States. We would be going to study not just Judaism, but the role of the state of Israel in Judaism. In other words, we would be going to study Zionism.
The life cycle of nearly every American Muslim activist begins with the Palestinian struggle; it is where nearly all of us cut our teeth. It is so central to the collective Muslim consciousness that it unites an otherwise diverse global population like no other issue. Being pro-Palestinian is not anti-Semitic. But it is anti-Zionist. This was a line that simply could not be crossed.
I also entered activism in my early twenties as an antiwar and anti-Israel protestor. I joined a small D.C. chapter of Al-Awda, the Palestinian right-of-return organization, led locally by a Palestinian Christian man and an Israeli Jewish woman. It legitimized our cause that neither of the leaders was a Palestinian Muslim—this, after all, was not a religious issue. It was a political and human rights issue.
Over the years I became deeply involved in interfaith work on various social justice issues, yet I knew that many of the Jews I worked with were strong supporters of Israel. Anytime there was unrest in that part of the world, we all retreated to our corners, only to reemerge when the latest conflict flare was over. We broke bread together, we built Habitat for Humanity homes together, we fought against poverty together, we stood against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia together. But the one thing we did not ever, ever do was discuss Israel, Palestine, and the Occupation. Beyond the pragmatics of avoiding such conversations, there was the moral imperative of not giving Zionists oxygen. We do not normalize Zionism; we do not even pretend it has an equal measure of legitimacy as Palestinian self-determination. We do not break “BDS,” the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement against Israel and Israeli institutions and products. This was the rule for people of conscience, no exceptions.
And here was Abdullah asking me to join him, along with almost two dozen other high-profile American Muslims, in Israel, to study Zionism, at an institute that was subject to BDS. He wanted me to break all the rules.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I trusted Abdullah completely, knew his commitment to justice, and understood that nothing he did was without reason, I never would have done it. He had a vision, a mission. We had spent decades working with anti-Zionist Jews on support for Palestine—it got us nowhere. Palestinian suffering, Israeli aggression, polarization, entrenchment, and extremism on both sides only increased. It was time to figure out what this connection to Israel was about for the majority of American Jews, something I never understood. As a Muslim, I understand the attachment to holy places, but not to nation-states. I feel connected to Mecca, but no love for Saudi Arabia necessarily. The seemingly unequivocal American Jewish support of Israel always confused me. MLI was about exploring that, and also about seeing if there was space to agree with this politically influential constituency on how to end an occupation that destroyed the bodies of the occupied, and the souls of the occupiers.
I gave it a lot of thought, spoke to others who were invited, consulted mentors, and prayed about it to work my head and heart through it. And then I went.
Our group went to Jerusalem during the summers of 2013 and 2014, two weeks at a time, to study on-site as Fellows of the Shalom Hartman Institute. In the year between the two summers we met for retreats in the United States and once a month had online courses. Most of our study was centered on Torah, Talmud, and Mishnah, and included an examination of how Jews viewed themselves and the land, that rocky, inhospitable, otherwise unremarkable land, through a religious and historic lens. We visited the West Bank, spent time with Palestinians who lived in Israel proper, and visited the holy sites. Nearly every day we studied as rabbinic students did, in havruta sessions, and almost every day we trekked to the Old City to pray at the Al Aqsa mosque. And although we had gone as students, we ended up inadvertently teaching our teachers about Islam and Muslims. The SHI has brilliant scholars and academics, but the sad irony is that most of them will profess not knowing a single Muslim personally, despite being surrounded by them, or know anything about Islam. We pointed out that their daily lives were serviced by Palestinian workers. The cleaners, cooks, and repair people we saw on the campus were all Palestinian Muslims. And they were thrilled to see us there, in the middle of a Jewish educational institute holding the Muslim prayer in congregation three or four times a day.
The lessons I and other Fellows have learned from this program could fill an entire book; instead, upon returning from Jerusalem in June of 2014, I wrote an article about it for Time magazine titled “Seeking Common Ground in the Holy Land.” The editors changed it to “What an American Muslim Learned from Zionists.”
It came out shortly before Gaza erupted from “Operation Protective Edge,” the Israeli assault that began in July of 2014, lasting nearly two months, including the month of Ramadan, and killing over two thousand Palestinians. As our social media feeds filled with images of dead Palestinian babies and children, my piece about spending a year studying Zionism ignited a heated, raging reaction from American Muslim activists.
We were called Zionist whores, sellouts, Trojan horses, dogs, pigs, blood suckers, traitors, normalizers, the list went on. We received thousands of ugly tweets, messages, and threats. This, despite our collective decades of work serving the Muslim community, and despite our continued public opposition to Israeli aggression. Numerous boycott petitions were launched against us, to prevent us from being invited to speak or write anywhere, and they were signed by the most prolific American Muslim activists and faith leaders.
It was truly the summer of American Muslim discontent. Collective rage had come to a head, and much of it came right at me, thanks to that article. By the time Serial rolled out a couple of months later, I was already exhausted from social media vitriol and had lost the backing of those who had supported my work for years. I felt terrible that Adnan wasn’t getting support from high-profile community leaders because of me; there was radio silence from most of them about the case. It wasn’t that they hated him, they hated me. Part of their collective punishment was that they’d not only totally ignore his case but also ignore the fact that he was humanizing Muslims in a way activists had failed to do for decades.
The stress didn’t just come from dealing with Muslims, Muslim leaders, Reddit and trolls, though; it also came from the content of the podcast itself, and most importantly, from Sarah.
* * *
I got the text from Sarah late one night, around eleven o’clock. She was distressed. Yusuf, as he had a few times in the past, had sent her an angry, belligerent message, accusing her of profiting from his family’s misery. She knew he was fragile and was afraid he might hurt himself. So she texted me to check in on him.
I took a deep breath and gave him a call. No answer. Then I forwarded Sarah’s message to Saad, asking him to check in with Yusuf. Saad was irritated; he didn’t want to deal with this. We had all been through a few bouts of Yusuf’s acting out in the past few months and were losing patience.
I finally got through to Yusuf. He was fine, and he wasn’t going to hurt himself, but he refused to let Sarah get away with using his family. At least a dozen times I had spoken him off this ledge, pointing out that no one had ever spent as much time and energy investigating the case as Sarah. A couple of times he had lashed out at me and Saad, saying we were responsible for not protecting Adnan, that he was a child in 1999 but we were adults and we failed him.
He was right; all the adults had failed Adnan. But because our own nerves were frayed, neither Saad nor I were very tolerant about what were clearly cries of pain from Yusuf. Our response, usually over group text, was somewhere between “You’re right, fine, but we’re doing the best we can now” to “Go to hell, Yusuf, it’s not like you ever even looked at the files sitting in your basement for the past decade.”
We were all clearly on edge. But what pushed Yusuf over the edge and what pushed me over the edge on a few occasions were two different things.
I understood the value in keeping people engaged by playing both sides of the story; what I couldn’t stomach was Serial’s failure to tell the entire story, to leave out things that were important in understanding what really happened. In the episode about the police investigation, Sarah concluded that the cops were good guys, just doing their job the best they knew how.
But these were not just good guys who never got anything wrong.
In the past decade alone, three defendants from Baltimore who were convicted of murder, Ezra Mable, Sabien Burgess, and Rodney Addison, have had their convictions overturned after serving long prison terms. All three were investigated and charged by Detectives MacGillivary and Ritz, and Sargeant Steven Lehman, or a combination thereof. Mable filed such a strong post-conviction petition that the Baltimore City State’s Attorney actually joined it, asking the court for relief, which came in the form of his release. Mable then filed suit against the city (which was dismissed for lack of prosecution), naming Ritz, among others, alleging that the police “resolved to focus entirely on Mr. Mable and did not attempt to determine the actual truth in their investigation or to develop a case based on truthful facts.” Mable maintains that Ritz coerced two witnesses, using high-pressure tactics and threats, to get their cooperation against Mable. One of the witnesses repeatedly maintained that she saw another man commit the crime, not Mable. The other witness, who told cops she never saw who committed the murder, was threatened with having her children taken from her and finally relented, identifying Mable as the culprit. Faced with two eyewitnesses, Mable pled guilty and served ten years before filing his ultimately successful post-conviction appeal.
The Burgess case is even worse. In 1995 Sabien Burgess was charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Michelle Dyson, whom he found shot in the home they shared. A child who had been in the house when the murder took place told detectives that he had seen another man, and not Burgess, commit the crime. But Ritz and Lehman did not report this. According to the federal lawsuit brought by Burgess after his release, he was convicted based on the false testimony of another person involved in Adnan’s case—Daniel Van Gelder of the Baltimore Police Trace Analysis Unit. Van Gelder testified that he had swabbed the webbing of Burgess’s hands and found gunshot residue, which could only be present if Burgess had fired the murder weapon. But Burgess maintains that Van Gelder lied; he had swabbed Burgess’s palms, where such residue would naturally be found because he had touched his girlfriend’s body after finding her. Burgess was convicted after a two-day trial. Two years later, a man by the name of Charles Dorsey wrote repeated letters to Burgess’s attorney confessing to the murder. Ritz went to interview Dorsey a year later and dismissed him, reporting that he didn’t have the kind of details the real killer would have.
In 2013 the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project filed a petition for writ of actual innocence on Burgess’s behalf; after spending nineteen years in prison, he was finally released in 2014.
In Addison’s case, the testimony of a witness was used to charge and convict him of a 1996 murder, though other witnesses gave conflicting testimony that would have exculpated him. The conflicting witness statements were withheld by the State’s Attorney from the defendant and he was convicted, serving nine years before those statements were discovered. In 2005 a court ordered a new trial, at which point the State dismissed charges. The investigating officer in the case was Detective MacGillivary.
In all three cases exculpatory information was withheld and wrongful convictions obtained. Sarah never mentioned any of this in the podcast. Her treatment of Gutierrez was likewise lukewarm, even sympathetic. She mentioned another important case Gutierrez was working on around the same time as Adnan’s, that of Zach Whitman, an adolescent who had been convicted of the brutal murder of his brother. Gutierrez had failed to file his appeal and lied to the parents about it. They felt Gutierrez had lied to get their money. But Sarah had a generous assessment: it could be that Gutierrez didn’t know how sick she was, that she was taking cases she thought she could handle, and that she didn’t understand the “business side of things.” Sarah point-blank disagreed with me on the podcast that Gutierrez may have thrown the case on purpose, something that not only I but Adnan and his family suspected, given her desperation for money.
In both cases, with Gutierrez and the police, I told Sarah how I felt (and blogged about it too)—that if Adnan was her son, brother, loved one, she wouldn’t have gone so easy on either of them. We texted back and forth. She agreed, and I calmed down.
But I wasn’t so calm when I confronted her about the clip she played in Episode 10 of Adnan discussing his relationship with Gutierrez. In it Adnan says he had a great deal of affection for her, that she only showed him compassion, and that he felt like she “had his back.” He says: “The closest thing I can think of is if you combine a doctor, a nurse, a school teacher, a coach, and your parents. If you combine all of that then you may have an idea of how much I trusted Miss Gutierrez in that situation.”
This episode, ironically called “The Best Defense is a Good Defense,” didn’t air a negative word from Adnan about Gutierrez. If all you heard was the podcast and didn’t follow my blog (which was most people), you’d think Adnan was really happy with Gutierrez. I was baffled. I asked Adnan why he had only waxed eloquent about Gutierrez.
He said that he had explained to Sarah that this was how he felt about Gutierrez when she represented him, but not after he learned what she’d done and how badly she had failed him. He didn’t realize Sarah had cut the rest out.
I was livid, and so was he. It wasn’t so much about the public perception on this issue—it was about his having an ongoing ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) claim. I worried that his apparent positivity about Gutierrez on the podcast could be used by the State against his claim that she was ineffective.
I didn’t immediately say anything to Sarah, but a few weeks later she sent me a message; she was upset about something I had posted on my blog. I had e-mailed her to ask if her team had identified Hae’s pager number, because I certainly couldn’t find it in any of the files, and she responded with no, they didn’t know it. I thought that was odd, considering she mentioned in the podcast that Adnan never reached out to Hae after the day she disappeared. His response to her questions about this was initially that he didn’t remember. When Sarah told him his records show that he didn’t page her after January 13, he tried to explain it, saying he may not have reached out because every day at school the kids were discussing it and he was getting updates from her other friends. But if Sarah was now telling me they didn’t know Hae’s pager number, how could they say whether or not Adnan had paged her? Did she challenge him, effectively cornering him without actually knowing whether or not he had paged her? So I took to my blog and posted about our exchange, which really pissed her off.
She called me immediately to correct her e-mail, saying that she was mistaken and they did in fact have Hae’s pager number, that she was upset I shared a private e-mail, and lastly, because my blog made them seem incompetent.
But I was already angry about the Gutierrez episode and not exactly in the mood to entertain her hurt feelings at being made to look bad.
“You know who looks bad? Adnan, who looks like an idiot for saying wonderful things about Gutierrez when he’s got a claim in court against her. He told me that he made it very clear to you that he had no idea how badly she was screwing up his case, and that after he found out he was upset. But all you aired was him saying lovely things about her, and that could hurt his IAC claim!”
Sarah told me that it was their editorial discretion to use his clips however they wanted, meaning yes, they had cut out the other parts of his statements, and that the IAC claim wasn’t their problem, it was Adnan’s lawyer’s problem. I wasn’t about to stand for that.
A full-on shouting match ensued. It is embarrassing, looking back on it now, but it was also a necessary purge. Having gotten our agitation with each other out of our system, we both somewhat lukewarmly apologized. I apologized for putting her private e-mail message on my blog, and she apologized for not representing Adnan’s sentiments about Gutierrez fully. We called it a draw and moved on, knowing that neither of us could afford to undermine the relationship.
Negotiating this relationship was always a challenge for me and Adnan’s family. We felt constantly torn between undying gratitude to Sarah and bitterness that she didn’t go completely to bat for Adnan. Having such a prolonged and personal interaction with a journalist will blur lines. It makes you forget why that journalist is there and what their mission is. But it was hardest for Adnan.
My heart broke a little the first time Adnan told me how conflicted he was.
He was upset about Episode 11, “Rumors,” in which Sarah gave airtime to two anonymous men who had been bugging her for weeks. They wanted to challenge the good-guy image that the rest of the community had so far painted of him. Try as Sarah would, person after person said the same thing about Adnan: he was cordial, kind, easy-going, affectionate, and just nice to everyone. But the anonymous men, who alleged that they were childhood friends of Adnan, claimed that he had a side that no one knew about. Finally Sarah capitulated, perhaps not wanting to be called biased.
* * *
Listening to “Rumors,” I realized what Adnan had recognized years earlier: that many of the people he grew up with believed in the process, the system that convicted him, over their own experience of knowing him. “Ali” in the podcast was in fact Imran Hasnuddin, a friend of Adnan’s growing up, who had nothing bad to say about him but was basically not allowed by his parents to publicly get involved in the case at all. Even as a thirty-three-year-old man, Imran was afraid to be interviewed with his real name and voice.
A different voice sheepishly offered as evidence of Adnan’s dark side that he stole from the mosque collection box in middle school. He alleged a ridiculous figure, thousands of dollars every week, and then threw in that he himself also stole from the same collection boxes. He ended by agreeing that Adnan was a good person.
Sarah spoke to the mosque president, who said it was impossible that thousands were ever stolen. They don’t even collect that much. It was an embarrassing and irrelevant sideshow. Adnan readily admitted to Sarah that he stole twenty, forty bucks here and there from the Friday collection box when he was a kid. He then got caught by his mother and stopped doing it.
If there was ever a straw that broke Adnan’s back in this process, it was this episode. He didn’t hide his irritation when Sarah asked him about the petty theft, and you could hear it in the podcast. The way Sarah framed it, there were only two possibilities ultimately: that either Adnan was a liar or Jay was. And if that was the case, then exploring them both in depth was only fair. Yet she gave airtime to Adnan’s middle school collection-plate petty thefts while never mentioning Jay’s criminal record.
Since 1999, Jay’s Maryland criminal record has included assault, theft, trespassing, and domestic violence charges. This is public information easily available online, as are all Maryland criminal records. We thought Sarah would at least mention this in her commentary on Jay, especially since any of these charges should have violated the conditions of his probation, which he was on after pleading guilty to being an accessory to Hae’s murder, and it was highly suspicious that they didn’t. But Sarah never mentioned them. If anything, her portrayal of Jay was sympathetic and kind. She said she saw his appeal, as a person, a friend, and a witness. Which was all fine and good; after all, she said the same thing about Adnan repeatedly, that he was likeable, charming, kind, just a nice guy. But the difference between Adnan and Jay was this: Adnan’s personality was and is consistent, whereas the Jay she met was not the Jay who called her late one night.
She had interviewed Jay before the podcast began, and what we heard on Serial was from that meeting. She had given him her contact information in case he wanted to talk further (or rather she hoped he wanted to talk more, and on tape). One night, as the podcast was well under way, she finally heard from Jay in the most unexpected way. She then called me, a little freaked out.
It was late in the evening on the East Coast when her cell phone rang. An agitated, angry man railed on for a few minutes, threatening Sarah to back off, to stop reporting on the case, cursing profanities and screaming. Then he hung up. Sarah was stunned. She knew the voice, and the man had failed to block the number he called from. So she called him back, immediately.
A calm voice answered the phone, saying “hello?”
Sarah asked, “Jay?”
He responded in the affirmative, yes, it’s Jay.
Sarah asked him if he had just called her and hung up. He said no. She said that she got the call from his number, literally minutes ago. He still insisted, no, it wasn’t him. His tone was even.
Sarah wasn’t about to let it go so easily, of course, and then the calm, collected Jay who insisted that he hadn’t called began to raise his voice. After a few minutes he was essentially using the same exact language as in the previous call, including threatening her, while at the same time maintaining that he was not the one who called.
I can’t recall how the second call ended, but Sarah immediately contacted me to let me know about this exchange. Not in a gossipy way, but to give me a heads-up to be careful and be safe, because I was unequivocal in my disgust for Jay online, holding him responsible for ruining Adnan’s life while protecting his own rear end. The hashtag #JayDidIt was already circulating on Twitter and the public momentum for him to come clean was building. Sarah was worried he might lash out at me.
But she was no less amazed at how easily he lied to her. It made us both wonder if he suffered from some delusional disorder—maybe he really believed his lie? Maybe he didn’t remember making the call?
Either way, his ability to lie so easily and then indignantly and unflinchingly stand by his lies impressed us both.
Of course, Sarah had to keep the lines of communication open with Jay in the hopes that he would be willing to talk more. At a minimum I hoped that his behavior would impact her reporting on the case.
But she didn’t say anything publicly, and neither did we. I just mildly seethed as she explored Adnan’s middle school misdeeds.
Adnan didn’t seethe, though; he wrestled with the relationship. Sarah and he had developed a friendship, or at least to him it was a friendship. She didn’t just interview him about the case—she asked him about his life, she shared her personal stories, he learned about her family, spoke to her kids over the phone. Isn’t that what friends do? But then there were these weekly shows, her public doubts, not just about his innocence, but even about his character.
Was Adnan a psychopath? Was he manipulative? These were serious considerations Sarah undertook as she tried to unravel the truth. So what was Adnan to do, cut her off? Continue to be friendly, though in reality no reasonable person could sincerely be friends with someone who publicly wondered if they were a psychopathic killer?
Serial shattered Adnan’s self-contained world. He had built a life full of people who trusted him, loved him, believed him, in which he would never be accused of being manipulative again.
I always raged a bit on the inside at Judge Heard’s pronouncement at sentencing that Adnan was manipulative, and I had not carefully considered the profound emotional and psychological impact it must have had on him. Here he stood, barely out of childhood, in a room packed with his community, loved ones, Hae’s family, and media, with no way to fight back against the woman sitting high above us in black robes. It was official, recorded for posterity, that he was a manipulator. It broke him nearly as much as did the verdict itself.
Having been through all that, letting Sarah into his controlled emotional environment was a significant emotional risk for him.
But like any risk, this one had a shot of paying off big.
* * *
As Serial exploded, Adnan’s mailbox filled up. I had posted his address on my blog, where some folks got it while others were enterprising enough to dig it up on their own. Adnan was deluged with letters, notes, pictures, and prayers. Some were short messages of support, others were pages and pages of personal divulgences. Adnan was stunned at the sometimes very intimate nature of the letters, people pouring out their pain and tribulations to a stranger. He realized it was sometimes easier for people to share their deepest sorrows with a stranger than with people they knew. I told him that’s how the Internet mostly works.
Students who had been assigned to listen to Serial wrote to him. People doing their master’s or PhD thesis on some aspect of the case wrote. Supporters tried to send money, music CDs, and books, all of which the prison sent back. Women infatuated with him wrote letters, sometimes proposing marriage or love, and some sent pictures of themselves, half-dressed or not dressed at all; these pictures he mailed back, feeling a bit embarrassed.
Initially he tried to respond to every letter, that was his intention. He made a stack of letters to respond to, attempting to write a couple of responses daily. The stack grew and grew, his hand began to wear down after a couple of months of painstaking writing, and eventually he gave up. He owns an ancient word processor, a machine he’s had for years, which he affectionately calls his wife. The word processor, however, required reams of inked tape, and he couldn’t afford to type out responses to all these letters. So he decided he would only respond to letters from kids, not wanting to disappoint them, and hope the grown-ups would understand.
There was no way the prison staff and other inmates could miss all the attention he was getting. His mail was in bundles, newspapers and magazines coming into the prison covered stories about Serial and his case, and local and national stations gave regular updates. More than once friends and fellow prisoners came to show him an article with his picture, and more than once he would catch updates from television. They joked and nicknamed him “Hollywood.” Numerous times guards told him they were listening to the podcast; a few told him that they always knew he didn’t belong in prison and now they knew why.
While Adnan could definitely tell that his case had global attention, he still had no idea of the extent of the madness. One day he said to me, “I mean, I know it’s big, but it’s not like as big as the West Memphis Three case, right?”
Wrong.
After Adnan was convicted he mostly lost his community, but now they were back. As word got out about the podcast, and news outlets across the globe reported on his case every week, people at the mosque began saying his name again. Women who hadn’t mentioned her son in over a decade came to Aunty Shamim, telling her they supported Adnan; random people at the mosque would hug Yusuf and tell him they always knew his brother was innocent. Dozens and dozens reached out to the family to ask how they could help. Though relations were still strained, Tanveer began communicating with the family, speaking up online in support of Adnan. After all these years, they finally felt free to talk about him.
But there were also those who still kept a distance. I heard second- and third-hand whispers that so-and-so, who knew Adnan as a kid, thought he could do it. This was new.
I realized I needed to prove that Adnan had been framed. I had to figure out how the State did it. Sarah had copied all the case files onto a thumb drive and sent them to me a few weeks after the podcast started. I began not very efficiently to review the files, documents I hadn’t seen in fourteen years. There were thousands and thousands of them. Every day I reviewed a few hundred superficially, just to remind myself of what was there. Other than that, I barely had time to breathe. The three months or so that Serial ran, which in hindsight felt like three years, brought with it hundreds and hundreds of interview requests, article submission requests, and speaking requests. I was still blogging, working, and trying to manage the family.
Adnan had asked me to handle the public advocacy to the best of my ability—no pressure from him. But I was afraid to say no to anything while people were still interested.
I was being invited to speak at law schools that I would never have had a chance to get into, like Stanford and Yale, and law firms that would never have hired me. The legal community, from bar associations to law schools to firms, was captivated. Serial had taken what seemed like a routine state-level homicide case and made it something mythical, magical. The question kept coming up: why was this case so special?
“You tell me,” I’d say.
One day, among the thousands of e-mails, Facebook messages, and tweets I was getting every week, I got one from a professor of digital writing and media arts named Pete Rorabaugh at the Southern Polytechnic State University.
Pete had been following my blogs and online commentary about Serial. He wondered if I had ever given thought about doing a discussion about the meta questions.
“The what?” I asked.
He explained. Unlike the rest of the world, Pete was interested in understanding almost everything but the case—he wanted to discuss the broader issues at play, the media dynamics, the storytelling frameworks and platforms. To be frank, I still wasn’t sure what he was getting at. But I said ok.
We decided it would be best to have live conversations every Monday to parse the previous week’s episode. That would give me time to do my blog, catch my breath over the weekend, think through the questions he sent me, and be prepared for another hour or more of his very thorough and thoughtful interviews.
I had thought I was being rather clever in my social media usage, but Pete forced me to take a step back and see the entire enterprise as one of storytelling. I was not fighting a case. I was attempting to shape a story, wrestling it from Sarah, from Serial.
Over the next couple of months we did a total of nine Hangouts, including one with a Reddit moderator, and one with an entire panel of Adnan’s childhood friends. Sometimes I cried in the Hangouts—at any given moment my emotions could break free. Mondays weren’t that far from Thursdays, and I often spent the weekend watching online conversations and having intense exchanges with Saad and Yusuf. Many Monday mornings I was still unsettled, raw, still processing the past few days.
And of course there was plenty happening behind the scenes. In the spirit of my pact with Sarah I hadn’t uttered a peep about the Innocence Project taking Adnan’s case. In early November, when the episode featuring Deirdre Enright and her team finally aired, I felt relieved and vindicated.
I kept getting asked why I believed in Adnan’s innocence with such unmoving faith, but I realized my answers were colored by my personal attachment to him. Skeptics dismissed my certainty in his innocence the way atheists dismiss faith. But in Deirdre I had an unbiased expert, who by looking at just the documents could tell that something had gone very wrong.
It was a small mercy to have that information public; it provided some respite from the cynics who still pummeled me with all sorts of questions and attacks, trying hard to plant some doubt in my mind.
Still, I had a lot of bad moments when I realized there was no smoking gun that proved his innocence, and that nearly any piece of information could be interpreted in diametrically opposite ways. That Adnan never accused Jay of the crime was seen by some as proof of his innocence, that it meant he had no idea what really happened, and by others as proof of his guilt, an acquiescence to Jay’s statements. That his friends saw him cry after Hae’s body was found was seen by some as remorse, others as grief. That Asia never showed up at the PCR hearing to some meant that her alibi was contrived bullshit and Adnan knew it, and to others it meant that he wasn’t methodical or manipulative enough to plan for an alibi.
The Asia argument, and my confusion over what had happened with her, was put to rest late one night in mid-November when I got a call from Justin Brown.
“Ok, you can’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”
“Ok, I won’t.”
“No, I mean it. No posting it online or writing about it.”
“Ok, I won’t blog it, what is it?”
“No tweeting it.”
“Oh my God, Justin, ok, I won’t tweet ANYTHING.”
“And … you can’t tell Sarah I told you.”
Deep breath.
“Ooookayyyyy, what the hell is going on?”
“Asia called Sarah. She’s back in. She wants to give us a new affidavit and will testify that she remembers being with Adnan after school that day.”
“What. What? What?!!!”
After a paralyzed “what the hell” moment, I began jumping up and down. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I ran a few times around my dining room table, flailing my arms. Then, unsurprisingly, I began crying even before he could explain.
After calming me down, he finally did.
Asia McClain, who hadn’t contacted Sarah since the one taped interview we heard on the very first episode, had listened to the podcast. She had heard the audio recording from the PCR hearing where Urick talked about getting a call from Asia, stating, “She was concerned, because she was being asked questions about an affidavit she’d written back at the time of the trial. She told me that she’d only written it because she was getting pressure from the family, and she basically wrote it to please them and get them off her back.”
According to Asia, she had panicked a bit when Justin’s PI showed up to talk to her about the case, and when she spoke to Urick he reassured her that Adnan had been convicted on sound evidence. After listening to Serial, not only did she realize how shaky the case was, and that Urick had lied to her about the veracity of the evidence against Adnan, but he had also lied to the court about their conversation. Asia had never told him she had been pressured to write her letters or affidavit, or that she had written them to get the family “off her back.” And finally, Urick had all but told her not to testify, saying it was an open-and-shut case.
Late one night in November she called Sarah and told her that Urick’s testimony was a lie. Sarah did something that I will always deeply respect—she immediately got in touch with Justin and put the two in contact. More importantly, she agreed with Justin’s request not to report this development on the podcast.
Imagine the integrity it takes to refrain from (1) reporting a major development at the core of your story and (2) ever even hinting at your role in the development. By the time it became news a couple of months later, Serial had ended.
For now, Sarah was concerned about preserving Asia’s current statements and realized how significantly this could impact the case. She cared about getting justice in a court of law for Adnan. It meant a tremendous amount to Adnan and all of us, then and now.
Justin had one last mini-bomb to drop on me about Asia about a month later. She had gotten her own lawyer and was going to do a new affidavit, refuting Urick’s testimony and confirming her recollection of January 13, 1999. But she had one request, perhaps even a condition. The first news outlet to report this development, her new affidavit that Justin would file with the court, would have to be Glenn Beck’s Web site, TheBlaze.
I thought I heard him wrong so I made him repeat it.
“She’s a big fan of Beck, it is what it is.”
The irony didn’t escape me, that the one person who could save Adnan’s appeal of the PCR denial was a fan of a media personality with a proven track record of anti-Muslim animosity.
But it proved something to me—it may be that Asia didn’t care for Muslims, and maybe she even shared Beck’s deeply troubling views on Islam, but she cared more about the truth. Asia wasn’t even concerned about whether Adnan was innocent or guilty—that wasn’t her business. Her business, regardless of his faith or culpability, was to make the truth known. This raised the value of her testimony exponentially.
It was a precarious situation, though. What if the prosecution got to her again? What if it was too late? Would the Court of Special Appeals now find credible a witness who failed to appear the first time?
Adnan, always more cautious, always aware of the thousands of ways things could go wrong (because for him, they mostly did), was less optimistic.
He said, “Look Rabia, it’s a shot, but a long shot. And at this point probably our only shot.”
That sobered me up. I agreed with him.
Turned out we were both wrong.