Split The Moon, Rabia Chaudry’s blog
As fellow Serial obsessives know—and there are more than 5 million of us now—Rabia Chaudry is the family friend of Adnan Syed who initially brought this case to Sarah Koenig at This American Life. She’s been blogging as the episodes air, providing a complementary resource to Sarah Koenig’s captivating presentation of Adnan’s case. Chaudry is up front in her full belief that Syed is innocent, and though she doesn’t express an opinion as to who’s responsible for Hae Min Lee’s murder in 1999, she’s a lawyer herself and has had 15 years to think about the case. Her blog provides meat where Koenig only gives bones, whether that’s about what it was like to grow up Muslim in Baltimore or the specific results of Mr. S’ two polygraph tests. She also goes head-to-head with Serial’s fact-checking, which if nothing else is a good reminder of the human bias and error present on every side of this story. But Chaudry’s personal and legal opinions are both worth the read: She calls Syed’s legal defense “a disaster,” something she’s promised to elaborate on (and presumably Koenig and the Serial crew will devote some air time to this, too), and contends that “the prosecution used every negative stereotype about Muslims and Islam and threw it at Adnan.” Chaudry’s blog doesn’t just scratch the itch for more Serial, it also reminds us that the story that Koenig is unspooling, even though it’s 15 years old, is about real people, and that there are real repercussions to telling this story. [Laura M. Browning]
