Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

"Danish"

https://twitter.com/fredthedane

Sorry low blow. Interview seems pretty much what I'd expect from a guy whose sense of that day (beyond the obvious consistencies) was/is a bit inconsistent. Wags will of course point to this all as evidence that "omg he's fabricating again", but to me it just seems like he can't totally make sense of how/when everything happened which doesn't strike me as unusual then and less unusual now 15 years later. Answers make it seem like he's not followed the podcast or the attended redditation of it. Not sure if that speaks to a guy comfortable with the truth or indifferent to the spectacle though.

jay is savvy enough to make an immediate point of keeping his distance from hae's body and avoid getting his DNA on anything, but somehow thinks adnan has the power in this situation?? like, if someone says 'be an accessory to murder or i'll tell the cops about your drugs', why wouldn't you turn around and drive straight to the nearest cop station and tell them what just went down? or agree and then in those gaps when you're not with adnan, call the cops and let them know what's going on so they catch him in the act? and adnan took a huge risk, considering how little he knew jay, in assuming that jay wouldn't go to the cops right away. were there more severe penalties for the kind of drug dealing jay was apparently doing (can anyone else corroborate how big his enterprise was?) than accessory to murder? if so, how did jay know? my automatic assumption would be that getting tied up in a murder is way worse than dealing even a shitload of weed.

yeah i mean how much weed could he possibly have been dealing? still idk it's not completely unbelievable for a dumb teenage kid to poss sweat that aspect. i just think more its also a dumb teenage aspect to not do what a sensible adult would do and like just call the cops

and if my gf's best friend/close friend is saying things to me like 'i'm gonna kill that fucking bitch for thinking she can break up with', i'm pretty sure i'd mention it to her right away, bc that is fucking creepy and weird.

xp but that's my point - he wasn't so dumb that he didn't tread v carefully around hae's body and make sure as much as possible he wasn't leaving dna lying around.

i actually think this is p convincing in a way idk tho im not triangulating it against the podcast cuz i think i forgot most of it already

idk like it kindof fits in my mind now (or it fits an afterschool special plot i can picture) - adnan type a "really driven" maybe would flip out & do this & be able to be so sociopathic abt it for 15 yrs. the scene of adnan hi @ cathys party asking 'how do you stop being high?" jibes w him as not smoking much and/or acting more strangely when high and makes that "scene" seem right to me fwiw

interview seems pretty much what I'd expect from a guy whose sense of that day (beyond the obvious consistencies) was/is a bit inconsistent. Wags will of course point to this all as evidence that "omg he's fabricating again", but to me it just seems like he can't totally make sense of how/when everything happened which doesn't strike me as unusual then and less unusual now 15 years later.

i think this is m/l otm. & the degree to which this story fits or at least could fit, to insert that instead a serial killer did it def seems more fantastical than anything to me. id prob think it more marginally probable that jay did it

Those of you who think Jay could have just turned around and threatened to turn Adnan in are forgetting that 1) this is all in the heat of a pretty scary moment and 2) it was probably at least in the back of his mind that he'd be the black weed dealer going against the star student/upstanding citizen. It's also possible that he just didn't have a powerful enough impulse not to help - teenager with limited judgment and moral capacity etc. The interview doesn't make much of anything more or less likely to me. Just like adnan, he's had a long time to turn things over in his mind and that can change the story even of someone who is innocent. I certainly did not get any particular sense of a psycho or pathological liar but who knows.

it was probably at least in the back of his mind that he'd be the black weed dealer going against the star student/upstanding citizen.

^^ i mean establishing this point seems to be the whole purpose of part 1 of the interview, no?

yeah, he made a persausive case that for someone of his background/situation, calling the cops was not really a first option.

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/31/7472965/jays-interview-adnan-serial
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2014/12/ive-posted-25-entriessarah-koenigsserial-podcast-which-deals-withthe-1999-prosecution-of-17-year-old-adnan-syed-for-murderin.html#more

People discussing how Jay's interview has pretty much destroyed the prosecution's case.

I'm pretty much uninterested in getting a murderer sprung because a witness tells a slightly different story 15 years later.

Is that actually going to happen? It's not like Jay recanted a la Thin Blue Line.

Part 2 and 3 of jay's interview are pretty damning if accurate, showing up on his doorstep was such a shitty move - fatal flaw of Serial was how poorly she treated Jay. Could have been a whole different show.

I doubt that Koenig/TAL were leaking documents to Reddit or anything like that, as he suspected, but I would not put it past Rabia Chaudry from what I have read on her blog. She really seems to have it in for Jay.

It's amazing how people so concerned with the reasonable doubt standard have already convicted someone else on even less evidence than there was against Syed.

Chaudry admitted that she gave out Jay's last name on twitter and SK asked her to delete it.

but the reddit weirdos didn't need anyone from Serial to leak them anything

like, if someone says 'be an accessory to murder or i'll tell the cops about your drugs', why wouldn't you turn around and drive straight to the nearest cop station and tell them what just went down?

I hope I'm not being too presumptuous to say that questions like these display the enormous gulf between the worldview of the average NPR listener and the average african american baltimore teen weed dealer.

I don't think anyone from Serial was leaking stuff to Reddit. Just how she dealt with Jay in contrast to how she dealt with Adnan seems insane.

also man alive otm.

this might be the most succinct criticism of Serial I've read:

It's amazing how people so concerned with the reasonable doubt standard have already convicted someone else on even less evidence than there was against Syed.

i haven't read pt3 of the interview but it sounds like she dealt with Jay the way a journalist should, Jay just chose not to go on the record with her

Yeah, I don't think it makes sense comparing it to Adnan at all. She couldn't really turn up at a prison without an appointment and demand that he talk to her ;)

Also, Serial pretty clearly didn't 'convict' anyone. That is not done by podcasts, but by courts ;)

you really don't know how things work in America

"i haven't read pt3 of the interview but it sounds like she dealt with Jay the way a journalist should, Jay just chose not to go on the record with her"

I think it's safe to say that how she handled it lacked courtesy (she admits as much).

She nurtured a relationship with Adnan, fostered by family friends, and recorded hours of interviews with him.
She showed up at Jay's doorstep unannounced and freaked him, his wife, and child out.
She torpedoed any chance of getting his side of the story from word go.
She dealt with Jay like a journalist ticking off the "ask for comment from Jay" box, not like a journalist legitimately trying to get both sides of the story.

Also it's not just about courtesy or professionalism. It's that SK seemed unable to grasp that she might be dealing with TWO liars, TWO outwardly "normal" people capable of being involved with a horrible act. She needed to make Jay a bad guy - even though Adnan is just as likely a bad (or worse) guy - when she was able to treat Adnan with compassion. That fucked up the whole project.

and i figured that's why adnan got all "you don't know me" when she said that she thought he was a nice guy

i feel like her follow-up email to Jay was professional and gracious, maybe the damage was already done from the surprise visit the day prior though

Probably. That was a gamble, that really didn't pay off. From what Jay says, it seems as if Koenig did try to get to Jays family and friends first. Jay calls that 'harassment'. It's a tough situation, and what she did didn't work. But what this interview also shows, is that she was pretty much spot on when she told Jay that he would have been better served by participating, and telling his side of the story.

Except, she would probably have called him on the weaknesses in his latest story, the same way she did to Adnan.

Jay probably thinks it served him better to talk to a journalist who wasn't so in the bag for Adnan

Well, except, how would he have known back then?

He explains in the interview why he thought she was untrustworthy.

Yup, and it's not as Keyes said.

what do you think I'm saying and why are you attaching a strange timeline to it?

notice that I used the word "thinks" which means I'm talking about right-now Jay, not six months ago Jay

SK was offering do resurrect Serial for him a couple of weeks ago, and he chose to go with a journalist who wasn't phone buddies with Adnan

Oh, ok! I thought you were participating in the debate we were having, on the confrontation five months ago, and you were saying something completely unrelated. Sorry, my mistake!

Didn't the visit to his home only occur after the podcast had begun? It seems like she didn't start out with the mindset that his side of things was an essential part of the story, which I just find baffling. As is repeated ad infinitum, Jay WAS the state's case. Why wouldn't you want to do everything you could to make sure you got an interview with him? Forget about comparisons to Adnan, is that how you'd go about trying to get an interview with ANY key person to a story -- just show up unannounced on their doorstep like "hey wondering if you are lying about this murder," unless you already know them to be hostile, and/or you are Geraldo Rivera?

No, the visit was back in august.

August 8th, to be precise.

Well, regardless, point stands.

she was pretty much spot on when she told Jay that he would have been better served by participating, and telling his side of the story.

― Frederik B, Monday, January 5, 2015 2:35 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Jay probably thinks it served him better to talk to a journalist who wasn't so in the bag for Adnan

― ancient texts, things that can't be pre-dated (President Keyes), Monday, January 5, 2015 2:42 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, what I wrote was completely unrelated

x-post: And is it really that unusual? I saw a doc on a newspaper a few months back, and the jounalists did exactly this thing over and over. Especially if they had the idea that the person probably rather wouldn't speak with them. Still shitty, though. Shitty newspaper, also.

Yeah maybe it's not such a bad way to do it actually, sometimes seeing a face creates more trust than a phone call or letter.

tbh though I'm not really sure Jay was best served talking to anyone. I mean it's a tough call -- he's already told inconsistent stories, so anything he says is going to be scrutinized and is inevitably going to contradict something he's said in the past. There's the risk of exposing past perjury, there's the fact that people who suspect him will latch onto anything they can find. I mean honestly I thought he came off as a pretty normal guy, a family man living a quiet life (but not eerily quiet or anything), and I thought that would help him, yet people in the comments are like "SEE, HE'S SO SHADY, I KNEW IT!" And it's more attention and more clicks and more fuel to the fire.

Also, Serial pretty clearly didn't 'convict' anyone. That is not done by podcasts, but by courts ;)

― Frederik B, Monday, January 5, 2015 1:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bingo! And guess what, the courts convicted someone already -- see, you can't have that point both ways. Adnan is not subject to the reasonable doubt standard anymore, he's passed that point already, if you want to talk purely in terms of legal procedure. What I'm talking about is reddit sleuths (not to mention Rabia Chaudry) publicly stating that another particular man is really the murderer, using "convict" idiomatically, if you will.

xposts

It's one tactic, sure. Just seems like an incredibly dumb one to use on the guy given the circumstances, especially as her very first contact with him.
It seems like showing up on the doorstep is something you do as a last resort, after more friendly approaches have not worked.

But yes - sure - if it was the only way to get him to talk, why not? I don't think it was, and the fact that he eventually did go on the record with another journalist supports that to a degree anyway.

But to me, if she's going to level that kind of aggressiveness at Jay - showing up in front of the wife and kid is kind of a "shock and awe" move - she should have gone really hard on Adnan in the last interview. Asked him to respond to the list of "bad luck" that Dana Chivis lays out in the final episode, for example.

Again - it's not that showing up on a doorstep is in itself a terrible move as a journalist - it's just the level of empathy and the willingness to believe Adnan compared to how she treated Jay that just seems way out of sync.