The Trojan Horse Affair · Vanity Fair · Ashley Flowers
Plus: Interesting Scott Peterson movement
the true crime that's worth your time
Though it’s about an eight-year-old event, The Trojan Horse Affair is timely and terrific. Coming into the podcast, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sure, the combined forces of This American Life audio spin-off Serial Productions and the New York Times (which acquired Serial in 2020) seems a given for greatness. But the host for Trojan Horse is Brian Reed, the guy behind maybe my least favorite Serial show, S-Town. So, I was ready for anything.
But what I found was a podcast that included many of the elements that made Serial’s prior productions so engaging, with the kind of added benefits I’m looking for in 2022: a narrative where the host isn’t centering him or herself in the narrative; and a primary voice from an emerging journalist from a historically and systemically marginalized group.
Of course I’m not talking about Reed, here. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a consistent figure in this story, providing mentorship, guidance, and structure for journalism student Hamza Syed, who does much of the heavy lifting to drive the narrative forward — and who also spends a lot of time interrogating the long-accepted tropes of journalism, perhaps unwittingly echoing many of the same complaints we see (or post) on Twitter about, hmmm, institutions like The New York Times.
There’s an argument to be made, in fact, that a lot of this podcast is an effort to subtly needle the Times’s long-accepted practices of both-sidesism paired with general acceptance of the narratives provided by officials. Am I going to make that argument? Not here, because I have already written paragraphs telling you what you already know — that I like inside-journalism-baseball bullshit — without talking about the actual crime and you probably all want to throttle me. But when you listen, if you start developing that theory too, let me know.
And you should listen, especially if, like me, you had no idea what the Birmingham schools scandal of 2014 is. Because y’all, it is wild.
Here’s the deal: in 2014, an anonymous letter sent to a small-time local official (a city council member, seriously) claimed it was leaking a page of correspondence between Muslim conspirators who were working to “take over” the British school system. That single letter, as flimsy as it was, made headlines in every local and national publication as though it was fact, and was enough to destroy multiple educators’ lives and end beneficial programs in multiple schools, underscoring the marginalization of the nation’s Islamic community.
And though the validity of the letter has been debunked (The Guardian has a great piece from 2017 that goes into great detail on what crap the missive was) officials haven’t done much to investigate why this smear campaign took hold. In fact, the podcast reveals, some political power players have actively worked to suppress public meetings intended to continue to clear the names of the wrongly accused, using popular mainstream publications as a platform to perpetuate misinformation. Sound familiar, my American friends?
Reed and Syed have a fantastic chemistry, and the podcast’s pacing is peerless. When it meanders, that doesn’t feel like padding, it feels like scene- and context-building. And there’s a thread of humor throughout the show that strikes just the right tone. Obviously, bigotry is no laughing matter, nor is state-sponsored racism that derails careers and continues to other a nation’s population. But the podcast’s approach dances on that knife blade admirably, bringing in wryness at just the right moment.
(I’m inclined to ascribe a lot of that to iconic Serial host Sarah Koenig, who edited Trojan Horse — in many ways, the moments of lightness echo the ones she conjured on the podcast that remade the genre.)
All eight episodes of The Trojan Horse Affair dropped Thursday, February 3, and are available on all the usual platforms. If you’re looking for a binge this weekend, this is it. — EB
Are you ready for some (more) Epstein? And that’s the last allusion I will make to the Super Bowl, but, sorry, incessant commercials for that orgy of head trauma and advertising have placed that song in my brain for the next few days. I promise to do better.
Two stories broke this week that are interesting meta-looks at how the allegations against Jeffrey Epstein were surfaced in the media. One is a bit of self-reflection from Vanity Fair — a publication that’s never been reluctant to navel-gaze, one should note.
Headlined “Why Didn’t Vanity Fair Break the Jeffrey Epstein Story?,” Isaac Chotiner’s piece attempts to square claims by journalist Vicky Ward that VF killed coverage of allegations against Epstein with then-editor Graydon Carter’s recollections from the time. Here’s the nut graf:
Ward and I spoke on the phone, and I asked her to forward e-mails that could verify some of her claims about Vanity Fair. Many of the things that she told me—and had told her podcast listeners—turned out to be untrue.
All publications, including this one, at times look back on stories and regret not pursuing them further. But Ward’s claim that Vanity Fair prevented her from exposing Epstein misrepresents a more complicated reality.
Carter, who now says that he distrusted Ward as a reporter, has offered conflicting explanations for his magazine’s decision not to run the sisters’ allegations. For her part, Ward has repeatedly misrepresented her reporting on Epstein, changing her story from year to year and at times from day to day, and was a far less heroic actor than she would have her audiences believe.
Based just on that, one might think that this piece is a cover-our-ass bit of VF propaganda. And it might be, a little, but Chotiner also lays out all of Ward’s claims against Carter — like that he made massive changes to her piece that softened its approach to Epstein — and allows them to breathe. In all, it’s an interesting insight into how VF did things nearly 20 years ago, and is also a very accurate (in my experience) depiction of the divide between a passionate reporter who is certain they have an ironclad lock on the truth and a seasoned editor who has made it to the top, in large part, by ruffling only the right feathers. If you’re into that stuff, it’s worth your time.
And from The Daily Beast, we have “Miami Herald Journalist Julie Brown Sued by Epstein Victims.” Brown, as we all know, has been fighting for justice for Epstein’s victims as long as anyone, so what’s all this about?
In a stunning lawsuit, [Epstein victims Courtney Wild and Haley Robson] say Brown published “false and defamatory statements” in her 2021 book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, despite allegedly knowing the information wasn’t correct, and therefore “re-victimized” them.
“In particular, Brown falsely stated that Ms. Wild was raped by Epstein and then had sex with Epstein multiple times after the rape. Neither is true,” the complaint, filed in Miami-Dade County, states. “More egregiously, when Robson refused to sit for an interview for the book, Brown threatened her, saying her refusal would be the ‘biggest mistake of your life.’”
Brown had dedicated PoJ to Wild and other victims, so she clearly thought they were all on the same side at the time of publication, and her reporting on both of them is largely based on police records. But the suit claims that “Brown knew the statements about Wild and Robson ‘were false and defamatory’ because of her prior interviews with them,” suggesting that the frustration stems from Brown’s decision to report both the official account of the incidents and details gleaned from the interviews with Wild and Robson.
If Brown has responded to the claim, it didn’t make it into TDB’s or the Miami Herald’s reports on the suit — the two places most likely (she works at the Herald) to get her side. — EB
“Juror No. 7” would be a great name for a podcast, wouldn’t it? That’s Richelle Nice, the juror in the Scott Peterson case who allegedly failed to disclose her past as a domestic violence victim. She’s maintained that her experiences didn’t inform her verdict in the case, but Peterson’s attorneys disagree (as you’d expect), and say that her omission meant the convicted killer didn’t get a fair trial.
“I don’t think you can make a cogent argument that somebody who is pregnant and has been the victim of violence can go into a trial and at the very least not feel some bias towards a circumstance where a victim is a pregnant woman who basically had violence occur,” Peterson defense attorney Pat Harris argued this week, adding that “she can be held in contempt and you can actually go to jail” if Nice doesn’t participate in a hearing scheduled for later this month, reports the Bay Area News Group.
To guarantee her participation, the Stanislaus County DA’s office has granted Nice immunity, so she has no reason not to participate now. If a judge determines that Nice’s omission is enough to merit a new trial, Harris thinks that Peterson might fare better this time than he did in 2004.
“I know that there is still a wide swath of the public that believes he’s guilty, but I don’t think you have the hysteria you had last time,” Harris told BANG. “I think the chances of getting a fair trial are much greater.” Gotta love it when an attorney uses gendered terms like hysteria when it comes to domestic violence cases; gotta love it even more when the implication seems to be that we’re way chiller about alleged intimate partner homicide in 2022 than we were 18 years ago. — EB
I need you to read this New York Times piece on Ashley Flowers and tell me if it’s shade. We don’t cover Flowers and her podcast empire that much here because we have significant ethical qualms about its reporting (plagiarism allegations, unrepentant copaganda), and also because we think her products aren’t that great and life is too short, you know?
The piece is focused more on Flowers as an empire builder/cottage industry than on the actual quality of her work. It addresses the plagiarism claims against Flowers, then kind of dismisses them, and doesn’t appear to get into — not even a bit — how Flowers’s shows benefit from her very tight relationship with pro-police groups and many officers themselves.
But it also implies (or maybe I’m just inferring?) that rigor isn’t a factor for her listeners, in a slightly snobby way:
“Her stuff is high quality and captivating without being highbrow for the sake of being highbrow,” Ms. Harman said of Ms. Flowers. “She is giving people what they want, not what the cultural elite tells them they should want.”
“Crime Junkie” remains Audiochuck’s juggernaut and has built a community of avid listeners. They abide by the Crime Junkie Life Rules, among them “never get into a white van, EVER!” and “always get a lawyer.” The show has one million followers on Instagram. Its fan club has tens of thousands of members (Ms. Flowers wouldn’t give an exact number) who pay between $5 and $20 a month for the privilege to text the hosts and to gain access to exclusive “CJ” merch, including a ringtone version of the show’s theme music (a real bop, courtesy of Justin Daniel Prawat, Ms. Prawat’s husband).
A lot is made of the fact that Flowers does her show in Indianapolis, a place that seems to perplex the Times more than a little bit. (Folks, it’s a big city like any other, with billion-dollar industries and an arts community, chain restaurants and folks from a variety of incomes. It has the same population as San Francisco; it’s not a 500-person burg in the middle of the desert.)
Overall, I’m dissatisfied by the piece, which neither tackles the real issues of a wildly popular podcast that pushes unquestioning acceptance of police accounts, nor fully embraces the true wonder that a homegrown podcast by someone who liked Serial has grown into a massive, massive business. Maybe I shouldn’t be asking you to read it, given that I don’t think the story is particularly well-composed. But I’m just trying to figure out why the Times felt it needed to offer this superficial take on the Flowers phenomenon, and I was thinking that maybe y’all might have some thoughts. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: Paid subscribers will get Sarah’s wise words on Monday — on cons and Damon Runyon, among other things — and after that we’ve got Amityville, Elizabeth Holmes, and The Doodler.
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