Serial · Serial Productions & The New York Times

The Idiot - Chapter 5

March 26, 2026·29 min·1 clip

An email from prison name-checks Sean Diddy and asks for birthday wishes from a father who never wants to hear from him again.

The scene begins with family ceremony. A father born on December 25th gathers his children and grandchildren in Cape Cod, the way he has since the family moved to the United States. Everyone gets gifts. The narrator is one of the children in the photograph when Alan emails from prison, and the old story pushes back into the room. Alan has written The Locked-Up Lawyer under a pseudonym. Lena has helped make it visible to friends and family. The book is self-published and obscure, but the back cover says Alan was set up by the FBI and charged with a crime he says he did not commit. O only reads the back. That is enough for a 12-year-old to say his father wrote a book and was set up. Priscilla has spent years trying to manage what the children know. Elle is still small. O has been told with a therapist's help because the internet made silence impossible. Even Alan's letters are filtered. The therapist decides what O can read and when, so the facts have a little room to land. Lena breaks that arrangement. By helping publish and circulate the book, she puts Alan's version where O can find it cold. So the visits stop. More hearings follow, with Lena representing herself and Priscilla watching the situation turn less frightening and more sad. No one gets a clean role. Alan writes like an injured man, Lena carries his story outward, Priscilla protects the children, and the narrator is close enough to see the damage move through the family. The discomfort is the point: a family tries to control what a child knows about his father, while the father keeps finding ways to speak from prison.

As heard by us

A restrained family-side chapter about prison, denial, and a self-published book that leaves a child with more than he can sort through.

Chapter 5 of The Idiot stays close to the family damage around Alan's imprisonment: the birthday gathering, the prison email, the self-published book, and the way one sentence on a back cover lands with a 12-year-old.

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Why you'd press play

You may keep thinking about what a 12-year-old learns from the back cover of his father's prison book.

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