Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

it's about ethics in games podcast journalism

Whoa!

Slim Wilds
38 mins · Edited ·
For the followers of the serial podcast produced by Sarah Koenig: I will make my self available for one interview : 1st, to answer the question of the the people who I hope are concerned with the death of Hae Min Lee (the person who's paid the ultimate price for Entertainment). 2nd, to out this so called reporter for who she truly is.

I can't imagine any circumstance where Jay comes out of this not wanting to defend himself from 12 hours of speculation about his guilt.

i buried a chick in a park AMA

yup, although it might be a no-win for him. Especially since holes have already been poked in his story. But IDK what he can do, he probably now has thousands of people digging through his personal life and past, concocting theories about him, etc. Rabia posted something to her fb page I thought was pretty shitty, an alternate reading of the phone records titled "Here's How Jay Did It" and it was so wildly speculative but she accepted it as though true and so did a lot of her followers, it seemed.

I also listened to Sarah Koenig on Fresh Air, fwiw, and I felt a little less mad at the show, because it seemed like she took her responsibilities so seriously and maybe tripped some wires she hadn't realized she could trip and felt pretty bad about it.

Aren't the "holes" in Jay's story the same ones that were known in 99? I can't imagine a reddit AMA is more terrifying than being key witness in a 1st degree murder trial.

This can't end well.

apparently this offer/threat/promise (?!) has already been removed from his page

2nd, to out this so called reporter for who she truly is.

http://greghowley.com/images/blog_pics/790_v.jpg

The reason I see the holes being a problem is that he may feel a need to explain them, which may put him in the position of admitting or implying he perjured himself.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/29/exclusive-interview-jay-wilds-star-witness-adnan-syed-serial-case-pt-1/

Ugh he's changing his story AGAIN

Cue everyone being outraged that this interview not being conducted by Raymond Burr.

x-post: And his latest story still doesn't match cellphone records...

"story"

"interview"

"outraged"

"Burr"

"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.