Serial · Serial Productions & The New York Times

The Idiot - Chapter 2

March 26, 2026·50 min·3 clips

Priscilla discovers Alan was arrested for hiring a hitman to murder her, leaving her in disbelief.

The news lands too neatly. Someone tells Priscilla Alan has been arrested, then adds the part that should stop the room cold: he hired somebody to kill her. Priscilla cannot take it in. The words arrive, disappear, and come back before she can make them mean anything. The narrator's theory starts to change too. What first sounded like a battle over O, over schools, books, and who got to decide, begins to look aimed straight at Priscilla. She has her own read on it. Alan, she says, could not stand that she left and then seemed better off. Her math is harsh because it is simple. She had a home, kids, and a business. Once Alan was gone, the bad part was gone with him. In her telling, he felt thrown away, and that pain hardened into something worse than winning. He wanted her punished for finding relief. Then the story turns into travel and paperwork. After Moscow and Alan's flood of messages, Priscilla has one job in her head: get O back. Even leaving Russia drags on. L's documents take five months, and without them she cannot go. The route still will not straighten out. She and L need visas for the United States, so Zimbabwe becomes the next stop. The narration does not pretend this is tidy. It calls the sequence dizzying, then walks through it anyway, close to Priscilla's fatigue.

As heard by us

A tense, personal chapter about separation, control, and the exhausting fight to get a child back.

Serial's "The Idiot - Chapter 2" opens with the shock of Alan Gessen's arrest after a woman is told he hired someone to kill her, then narrows in on Priscilla's account of what happened after she left him.

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Why you'd press play

He was arrested for murder for hire. She had to ask what that even meant.

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