Forum From The Archives: M. Gessen Reckons with Familial Crime and Punishment

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Welcome to Forum.

Mina Kim (1:05)

I'm Mina Kim.

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M.

Mina Kim (1:06)

Gessen is known for their incisive writing on autocracies including Putin's Russia, on political repression and state terror in the US and on violations of rights. But their latest project has been a more personal one, a serial podcast exploring a crime their cousin Allen committed, trying to hire someone to kill his ex-wife and the mother of his children.

Allen is now serving a 10-year prison sentence, and Gessen's podcast series explores how Allen could do 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. And a note, this conversation may have some spoilers. And welcome to Forum.

M. Gessen (2:00)

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Mina Kim (2:01)

I really appreciated the way your podcast explored so, so deeply the very 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 (2:19)

Well, the simple answer is that it happened to my family. And, you know, 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? And you remember that you're waking up into a world in which Allen took out a hit on his ex-wife.

Mina Kim (2:41)

Yeah.

M. Gessen (2:42)

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, and I found it very destabilizing. Yeah.

Mina Kim (3:00)

You say your family, it snapped them or something like that.

M. Gessen (3:03)

It snapped, yeah. I described again, this is the very beginning of the podcast, I described our family as elastic, and this is largely thanks to my father, who has a sort of very expansive idea of family and includes people and really takes them in. And he has kept up relationships with my exes, and all the kids who come into his orbit are his kids. And so when Allen, not quite a spoiler, but when Allen showed up originally in the United States a couple of years before he was arrested with his five-year-old son whom he had taken from Russia without his ex-wife's knowledge or permission, obviously.

My father sort of threw his, you know, he didn't exactly throw his arms around them, but he included my cousin and his son and his mother, who also came with them.

And 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. And I have found that in difficult moments, it helps me to use my professional skills and ask lots of questions of lots of people to make sense of things. And so that's what I did.

Mina Kim (4:25)

Yeah. You say you didn't even really like Allen. Who was Allen to you before the crime?

M. Gessen (4:33)

So Allen, in the podcast, I describe him as a buffoon, as a pompous ass, a clown.

Obviously, yes, no love lost there, although, spoiler alert, at a certain point, once we started talking, when he was already in prison, I really developed empathy for him, which was a surprise to me. But, you know, I thought he was kind of a character, like we know the type. Somebody who calls himself an international businessman and is probably very impressive to a lot of people, not so much to his own family. He was a consultant. At a certain point, he was working with Israeli businesses providing security for minors in Central Africa. I mean, like, all the things that I think are...