Opinion | I Love True Crime. Should I Feel Guilty?

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Today on “The Argument,” is it such a crime to love true crime?

It started like any other “Argument” episode, your all-American podcast host, whose voice lights up a microphone, diving into another nuanced debate of issues swirling around the zeitgeist. But this time, something was different. Your host — OK, it’s me, Jane Coaston — would enter a debate that would complicate everything she thought she knew about the most deadly genre in the world — true crime. Those two little words inspire a universe of feelings — obsession, revulsion, guilty pleasure, voyeurism, survivalism, questionable journalistic ethics and standards. But here’s my deep, dark secret. I’m a true crime fanatic. I’ve always been. Other kids snuck episodes of “90210” and “Sex and the City.” I snuck episodes of “Dateline.” My happy place is binging a new grisly podcast or documentary show, and I’ve never had so many options. There’s “Crime Show” and “Crime Junkies” and “Serial Killers” and “Dr. Death” and “The Dating Game Killer” and “The Jinx” and “Conversations With A Killer” and “My Favorite Murder” and “Medical Murders” in “Morbid” and “Tiger King” and… Sorry, fell down a rabbit hole there. Sure, there’s good true crime and bad true crime. But at the end of the day, the genre itself is driven by telling the real stories of horrifying events that ruined or even ended the lives of real people. Sometimes, when I’m listening to a true crime podcast, I feel like I’m crashing a funeral. But the genre is only growing. What is this cultural obsession about? I brought in two people today who can help us think this through. Rabia Chaudry thinks the obsession with true crime is a great thing. She’s a lawyer whose podcast, “Undisclosed,” investigates and seeks to exonerate people who were wrongfully convicted. It’s a great podcast, but even if you haven’t heard it yet, you might recognize her voice as the advocate who brought Sarah Koenig’s attention to Adnan Syed’s case in the first season of “Serial.” On the other side of the debate is Sarah Weinman. Sarah is a true crime writer of books like “The Real Lolita” and the upcoming “Scoundrel.” Sarah argues that true crime has always been ethically thorny, and that’s a good thing. But we need to be aware of the thorns before we go into making and consuming the genre. If true crime is this giant genre, what are its conventions? What is something that true crime has to have? What do you think, Rabia?

I mean, true crime has to have a reporting of at least the bare minimum facts of the case that are publicly available. There’s a victim. There’s an identified perpetrator or suspect or somebody at large. So there’s some mystery involved. There’s a reason that some particular crimes are more interesting than others, and that could involve the kind of victim, the kind of perp, the kind of crime itself. You always start with the body, right? Like, the facts of the crime itself, and then you expand out.

Yeah, and if it’s not just the facts of the case and starting the opening with the body, it’s also trying to figure out who the people were who are involved. So if it’s victim-oriented story, then one tries to build a character study of the person and the life they lived and why their, often, murder is so traumatic, not just in general, but to the family members and other people who knew them and why the impact of the crime deserves to be written about.

Why do you think that true crime, especially over the last 10, 15 years, has become just an obsession for so many people, including me?

I think, first of all, there’s a bit of a skewed perspective on this issue to begin with. And I think that’s because those of us who love true crime or crime fiction, we live in our bubbles where we think everybody in the world loves this stuff. “Serial” put podcasting on the map I think even beyond true crime podcasting. I think it just opened the doors to what is a podcast for so many people. There’s never not been an interest in this kind of stuff — Penny Dreadful’s. Hundreds of years ago, preachers would give sermons on different kinds of crimes and their elements and how to save your souls and all of that. I mean, that was a moral lesson, but it’s always been around. The difference now is, number one, the access is fast, easy, cheap. Number two, we are social creatures. We’re able to share stuff easily and comment on it. We’re able to respond to the content that exists immediately. Everything’s happening in real-time, so we feel like we’re part of the story. But at the same time, I’m going to say I know it feels like it’s everywhere, but I can tell you of my own experience, in my social circle — and I have a fairly large social circle. I have a large family. If I asked one of them, what do you think about the latest whatever true crime podcast happens to be the top of the charts, they’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. Most of the people in my personal space don’t even listen to podcasts, much less true crime podcasts. So we’re just kind of in our own little echo chamber. And then we’re having to constantly defend ourselves for enjoying, for whatever reason we are drawn to it, this genre.

You are very correct in saying that most people are not into true crime. I am married to someone who, when we first started dating, I was like, you can never know that I’m interested in true crime. I was hoping that they’d find out about that around our 15th anniversary, but obviously, they found out sooner because it is, for me, you do find yourself defending it to other people. But you’re finding yourself defending it to yourself, in some ways. And Sarah, I’m curious why those of us who are very, very interested in true crime, why do you think that that popularity has grown, especially in podcasts and documentaries?

To pick up on a point that Rabia made, I was kind of conflating true crime subculture with other sort of extremely online subcultures, especially when you’re the extremely online person and, say, your spouse or partner is not, and you have to explain the latest Twitter drama. And they are just not getting it. And frankly, you don’t even want them to get it.

I always use something called the “mom test.” I’m like, how would I explain this to my mother? And the answer is always I wouldn’t.

Exactly. But I think that also speaks to how true crime really attracts very fervent fandom. And especially since the vast majority of global populations have gone online and spent a lot more time on the internet and then the proliferation of social media, that it’s not just that you’re getting invested in a case. It’s like you’re feeling like you are actively participating. And it’s now been seven years thereabouts since the first season of “Serial.” And since then, social media has only grown and mutated. And people really feel that fandom element. And certainly, in the Adnan Syed case, there were people on Reddit who felt like they needed to become part of the case and were visiting and engaging in behavior that might have seemed unthinkable even five or 10 years before, because they just didn’t have the access or feel like, well, I’m in this amateur sleuth mode. I want to do something. I want to feel like I’m part of it. And to some degree, I think that’s also speaking to increasing distrust in government and society and law enforcement, feeling like people can do an end run around it and come up with solutions and answers that make more sense than the often frustrating lack of information that law enforcement provides, a lot of which I find somewhat troubling.

Right, there is a piece in The Guardian by Amelia Tait. And she wrote that, in some ways, true crime can offer a sense of informal justice. Like, you may not get a conviction in court, but you get people who are riveted by this case or are really focused on it and want to talk about it. But true crime is my favorite genre of content. If I’m not watching a Ken Burns documentary or becoming an amateur immigration attorney or something in preparation for an episode of this show, I am probably listening to a true crime podcast. I was listening to a true crime podcast before this. I will be probably listening to one after this. I’ve been engrossed in true crime for decades. I’ve always just been very interested in whatever the darkest, worst thing people have been doing. And that is something that I wish weren’t true about myself. I feel like it goes against my moral code of being a good person who wants good things to happen for other people, to be so interested in other people getting murdered or grifted or having something else terrible happen to them. I’d love for each of you to state your position and tell me, is our culture’s and our niche, to be clear, our niche’s, true crime obsession doing more harm than good? Rabia?

I don’t think so at all. I even think some of what you just said, Jane, about you don’t want people to know about your obsession, you kind of feel bad. But I feel like you’re internalizing the judgment that others have put upon folks like us. I’m not interested in gore horror —

Nope.

—stuff, right? I’m not—

I hate horror movies. I hate—

Right, I hate horror movies, too.

I don’t like being scared, but I’m like, true crime, I’m like, there’s a mystery.

Right, there are entire genres of — there are people who love mafia stories. There are people who love horror. I know that most true crime consumers happen to be women. And I always wonder, is that the reason we get the most criticism about this genre? Like romance, right? Is it about the consumer and not about the content that’s really the target of the criticism? I don’t know, but I think there’s a net good. I started off with Adnan’s case as just something that was a personal endeavor. Seven years on, me and my team of lawyers have helped to exonerate half a dozen people. And we have half a dozen other cases we’re still working on.

Congratulations. That’s awesome.

That’s amazing.

That’s really impressive.

So I’m not saying it isn’t problematic sometimes, and there aren’t problematic people, even podcasters who make content that I find really offensive and troubling and dark and damaging. But I think it’s a net good.

My position is, I’m coming from the stance of someone who marinated in true crime her whole life, who pursued a forensic science degree in the hope of maybe solving some cases and working on that, and realizing that I was actually much more interested in the bigger picture, and then eventually landing in feature journalism and writing books and editing anthologies. And what I found is that the more that I’ve been in this true crime space, the more sensitized I’ve become to the harm that people actually experience and the sense of injustice that so many people feel. And so, to turn true crime into, essentially, a fandom or almost a gamified, let’s see what we can do, I do feel that that is troubling. But I also feel that sense of being troubled is coming from me wanting to hold the genre to the highest possible standard, in part because there are great examples of true crime content, be it books, podcasts film, television, and other media, that do conform to that higher standard. I mean, what you’re doing, Rabia, is amazing. “Suspect” is an amazing podcast. We could go on. There’s so many wonderful investigative, deeply researched and reported true crime podcasts. Now, is it fair that I’m holding, say, a podcast where two women are talking about their favorite crimes and possibly drinking alcohol to the same standard as an investigative podcast? No, probably not, but I’m going to do it anyway.

That gets into what I’ve been thinking about. And I’m curious for you, Rabia, is there something that separates good true crime from bad true crime? I think for me, the line is, I don’t like true crime that implies that there was something that the victim did wrong. There are podcasts that have t-shirts of, stay sexy, don’t get murdered, which tend to imply that there was something the victim did or something that you could do that would help you evade murder, which I think, in some ways, creates the sense that, one, if anything happens to you, it’s your fault, and, two, this idea that you need to constantly be on guard for something that, for the record, is very unlikely to happen to you. You have people who are like, oh, I always leave hairs in a cab just in case the cab driver murders me so that they have DNA evidence afterwards, which are like, OK, just to be clear, that’s very unlikely to happen. But for you, Rabia, how do you separate kind of the true crime that you’re like, I can see why this is problematic, from true crime where you’re like, this is serving the greater good?

Yeah, the true crime that I find problematic is true crime that is exploitive, salacious, disrespectful of the victim, provides no real insight or education or information about what happened, what went wrong, kind of like gore in audio form type of stuff, you know? I’m troubled by some of the language, like what you talked about, this t-shirt and stuff like that. But I’ll say this. There are those shows in which you have a couple of people discussing a crime. And to me, it’s the difference between a reality show and a good documentary, right? They’re bubblegum. They’re just little Wikipedia nuggets of true crime podcasts. Once in a while, I listen to them, too. The truth is there are times when I’ve listened to shows like that, and I’m like, wow, this sounds really similar to something that I’m thinking about or working on or a case that I heard about from another investigator, and maybe there’s a link here. Maybe I can learn something here. I’ll start digging a little further than the 30 minutes of that show. True crime teaches us how perps operate, how to keep yourself safer. I know some people think that contributes to some kind of panic, but I promise you, as a woman, well before podcasts was ever a thing, I was always aware of my surroundings. I knew how vulnerable I was in certain situations. Women have just lived with that forever. So I know you’re right in that some of the most horrific crimes that we hear about, yeah, the chances are low. But I remember being in college, in orientation — and this is a long time ago. I am old. This is like 1992, ‘93. I was told that one in four women on this campus are going to be victims of sexual assault. It’s just going to happen. That’s the statistic — one in four. I don’t know what the statistic is now. Most men, obviously, are not sexual assaulters or criminals, but most women that I know, including myself, have, at some point, been victimized in some way by a man. So, yes and no, I’m like, I don’t feel like it’s that unlikely that we’ll never be victimized.

I mean, I think also that true crime as a genre is what I often think of as displacement theory, that women who are the consumers of true crime content, they’re subsuming their legitimate fears about sexual assault and, say, intimate partner violence or being harmed by people most close to them, which is still a subject that we don’t talk about in real meaningful ways the way that we should. So to take that legitimate fear and then subsume it in a story about serial murder, which is still statistically incredibly rare, but the fear about that is understandably palpable. So I think giving some voice to whatever latent fear about what is possible in something that perhaps is less probable, there’s quite a lot of legitimacy to that. But I also think that in order to discuss that, we shouldn’t forget that even discussing victims of intimate partner violence or spousal abuse or victims of serial murder, that they were actual human beings who experienced harm and trauma and were ultimately murdered. And that has lasting impact on the people who love them for the remainder of their lives. That’s what I keep stressing and keep wondering not only in the work that I consume that is great and the work that I consume that is less than great and the work that I am on myself, that there’s always, to me, going to be some degree of moral culpability. So, as long as everyone’s aware of that and go in accordingly, then I think a lot of the ethical thorniness of this genre, it won’t disappear entirely. And frankly, I don’t think that it should. But at least, it can be put in the proper context.

I want to talk a little bit about the role that race plays in true crime. There’s been the phrase attributed to Gwen Ifill, the brilliant journalist, of “missing white woman syndrome,” because while a lot of the crimes that you will hear about in podcasts or in documentaries are crimes against white women committed largely by white men, that’s not what crime actually looks like. Something that I notice in some of the true crime that I’ve listened to and then stopped listening to is that when the victim is a young white woman, it is treated as if it is an anomaly. Like, they were walking down the street. They were just any old all-American girl, which I was like, I don’t even know what that means.

Lit up a room. They lit up a room.

They always lit up a room when they walked in. But when the story is about non-white women, Indigenous women, or Black women, in some way, they are viewed as being culpable for what happened. And that’s something that has really bothered me. I’m very appreciative that I’ve noticed over the last couple of years, either I’ve just stopped listening to trash — I’m working on it. And I think that there’s been a move and a shift away from that kind of content. But I am curious, Sarah, how does race function in these stories, do you think? And have you seen a shift as well?

It’s funny because I did an event recently with my friend Elon Green, who’s the author of “Last Call,” and he also wrote a piece called “The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime.” I remember turning to him during the event and just saying, so is true crime less white now? And we both laughed a little bit nervously because I think the real answer is, it is, but it’s very stubborn, because this genre has upheld whiteness. And certainly, with television shows like “Dateline” or “20/20,” you put on the air what sells. And so it becomes this recursive thing where what sells is what you put on the air, so it’s a feedback loop that you almost can’t get out of. And so it has been heartening to see more pushback, especially in relation to the coverage of the disappearance and murder of Gabby Petito. But even though there’s lip service given to, well, we have to highlight stories of Indigenous women and girls or Black women and men and look at larger societal issues, it’s really going to take a lot more work to make that more prevalent in the culture.

I mean, I think it’s completely reflective of how this country values different bodies differently. I mean, I’ve been watching for 20 years as we have killed hundreds of thousands of people overseas in our war on terror, and those bodies don’t matter. They don’t even count. It’s just a number. And I don’t think it’s particular to this genre. I think that’s the issue of underrepresentation, and overrepresentation exists everywhere. Likewise, you’re not going to find a lot of long-form series and media attention around the murder or disappearance of an elderly person, right? Of a person with disabilities? But it’s just, this is not an issue that’s specific to this genre. This is a much, much broader conversation about who we value, what lives matter in this country.

Ultimately, true crime reflects society. And if society has all these biases and terrible ways of representing people and who they privilege and who they ignore, true crime’s just going to do that and not necessarily intentionally. It’s just because it passively reflects the world that we live in. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Hey, “Argument” listeners. Usually, I ask you what you’ve been arguing about. And nothing gives me more joy than hearing your latest debate. This week, I have a question for you. How do you feel about daylight saving time? If you have strong opinions, share them with me in a voicemail by calling 347-915-4324. And we may play your thoughts in an upcoming episode. And yes, this is your reminder that we fall back an hour on November 7th, except you, Hawaii and Arizona. You do you.

Something that I think Rabia and I might agree is that I think, in some ways, true crime can be very good for listeners. And I’ll tell you why. I have seen time and time and time again, even for myself, that true crime, I think, both affects how justice is distributed and how you perceive it. I think about all of the podcasts that I’ve listened to in which the police bungle the investigation or tell the parents of missing children, oh, wait 48 hours. I’m sure they just ran off with friends. I think that through true crime, we’ve gained more awareness of issues. Talking about stalking and domestic violence, there is a really interesting interview in The New Yorker with a true crime scholar named Jean Murley, who’s at Queensborough Community College. And she said that we’re a nation of crime experts now. We are people who say things like, is there fingerprint evidence? Oh, did you get a DNA sample? She argues and I would say, that makes law enforcement practices, I hope, more transparent. Yes, the suspiciousness is probably psychologically not good. But culturally, I think that having more suspiciousness about our criminal justice system is a really good thing. And she argues that it ups the ante on accountability. There’s a lot of true crime content that makes it clear how the institutions that are failing to get people justice, how they fail in a lot of different ways. So I’m curious, Rabia, what do you think the impact of true crime is on the people who listen to it?

Yeah, look, all of us are, in some way, not just consumers, we’re possible defendants at some point, right?

Right.

In any way, shape, or form, or somebody we know is, right? And I think true crime has been a net positive for future defendants or existing defendants because the system is getting a lot of pressure because of what is being exposed through podcasts and other media, but really, largely, podcasts, I think. There are huge swaths of people, their entire community is people who have very little interaction and engagement with law enforcement in this country, have no idea how it’s been operating all these years. And guess what? They don’t want us to know how it is. The fight is still on in states like Maryland and other places to make trials, taxpayer-funded trials, to make the audio publicly available. What is the public policy reason behind keeping that stuff under seal, right? It’s a trial. So, for a long time, the system has operated to protect itself. We are, I think, at the cusp of when people know enough. They’re like, oh, wait a minute, false confessions are a thing. This is empowering the average citizen to understand more about how things work, which should make them a better juror, but probably also a juror that’s going to get voir dire and cut out, if the prosecutor can help it. As people are becoming more aware of this and what can we do? They’re focused on, what are the laws that protect officers from accountability that basically make the entire system opaque? What are the laws behind cash bail that end up locking people over, like, 50 bucks? So people are really starting to understand what all the little things that the canaries in the coal mine have been telling us for decades, but they never have experienced themselves. Look, we grew up in the era of “Dateline” and all that stuff. It was law enforcement centered. It was the prosecutor and the police were the ones to tell the story. Now you have all the actors telling the story, including victims’ families, victims’ advocates, defenders. That’s what we need to get a whole picture of how all of this works and what needs to be dismantled in all of this. And I think it’s been an incredible education for a lot of people. I know “Undisclosed” listeners can tell you, oh, that’s a Brady violation, right? I mean, I’m glad they know that. There’s so much that people think they know because of the era of “Dateline” and “CSI” and the “CSI” effect, that we are getting a whole new education because of this era of true crime podcasting, is what I think.

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest shift has been that people realize that the criminal justice system doesn’t really deliver justice to very many people at all. And as a result it’s forcing people to really rethink a lot of assumptions about who the system is for, who it’s benefiting, and when it doesn’t work and how across the board, it doesn’t work. I mean, for example, the solve rate for murders just keeps going down. And we have some understanding as to why that is, but it’s also, I think, important to look into that assumption and go, well, why are police officers solving crimes at a lesser rate? Does it mean that when they were claiming to solve crimes in the past, were they, in fact, doing so? One thing about researching a lot of mid-20th century crimes is that I’ve kind of come to the belief that most every conviction pre-Miranda probably should have been reversed on some level, that there was just a lot of bad behavior and brutality that was condoned, and that we’re still not fully rid of. And it’s pernicious, and it’s stubborn. And we need to keep questioning what we’re fed. And I also think about that in terms of when, let’s say, a Black man is killed by a police officer. What is that press release that first is put out? And what information is conveyed? And why are we trusting the police as a reliable source? So I think one thing that has become particularly important is that we see how the actors in the criminal justice system are often unreliable narrators. And if we go in, understanding that all narrators are unreliable to some degree and questioning our own unreliability and the unreliability of everyone around us, that may also help to make true crime a more palatable genre.

But is true crime making me and other people more cynical and distrustful of other people? And is that good or bad?

I still feel that I’m a hopeful person, even having spent as long as I have reporting on crime and writing about crime and all sorts of facets. So I never want to lose that hope, but I also feel like you have to go in with some degree of if not skepticism, but just a sense of every story needs to be checked. Every person’s behavior needs to be corroborated. But by the same token, just because someone is, quote, “not behaving the way that they should,” that doesn’t mean that they did it. There are countless instances where kids go missing, and then the focus turns to, say, the mom just because she didn’t cry. And people assume that because she didn’t display any emotion that she didn’t have any feeling or didn’t have, essentially, a traumatic reaction, because humans process shock very differently. And we shouldn’t judge that behavior just because we think, well, they’re supposed to behave this way. Therefore, they must be guilty. So that’s, I guess, one instance where coming in with some degree of skepticism intermingled with some degree of hope about humanity, these are all the complicated things that I don’t try to think about actively, but they’re all there.

Rabia, you produce a podcast. And I’m curious for you, as someone who’s a content maker, obviously, content isn’t free. How do you sort your feelings about doing something that is based on a really horrifying experience for someone, but being able to make it financially viable? I hope I’m asking that question in the right way, but I’m just —

Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. Here’s the thing. So “Undisclosed” began in response to “Serial,” basically, because we were three lawyers who were like, wow, that 12 episodes missed a lot, got some stuff wrong. And there’s so much more to be said. We did 40 episodes. When we began “Undisclosed,” it was literally three of us in our closets and a mic. And we had somebody volunteering to edit. Within a week or so, we started getting offers for sponsorships. And we were like, what is this? We don’t even understand any of — none of us were thinking about this as a business opportunity. We’re thinking, we just want to talk about this case. But what happened was, we decided, at that time, that all of that money that we were going to get from ad revenue, we were going to put it in Adnan’s legal fund. And all of it, 100 percent of it went to Adnan’s legal fund. None of us got paid. But by the end of that season, we started getting requests from innocence projects and defendants and the families of defendants and other potentially innocent people, saying, hey, can you look at our case? And what we realized was that the amount of time, work, energy, effort it takes to reinvestigate a case, which is actually what it takes to help exonerate somebody, you have to start from the ground up. You’ve got to get all the court documents, which can cost thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars. You have to travel and find witnesses. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to reinvestigate a case. And that’s money that most innocence projects don’t have and our defendants don’t have. We’re able because of our sponsorships to do all of that work without costing them a dime. All of it’s covered. So, as far as I’m concerned, the podcast is a means to an end for what we are trying to achieve, which is to help exonerate people we believe who are — when you talk about somebody that something horrific has happened to, yeah, that defendant has to spend 33 years in prison for a crime he or she didn’t commit. But because of the sponsors, because I’m like, hey, here’s a mattress that’s great, I have the ethical obligation to actually only endorse products that I actually do use or like or whatever, right? I say no to plenty of products, that I’m like, this is not my thing, or I haven’t tried it, so I’m not going to pretend I tried it. This is the way that we’re able to fund the work that these defendants will never have this kind of money. Innocence projects, many times, will not have that kind of money to put towards the case. So I have no qualms about it. I’m thankful to our sponsors who give us the resources to do this work. We couldn’t afford to do it otherwise.

Sarah, I’m curious as to your thoughts about the amount of money that production companies like Netflix or Parcast are willing to put towards stories that are not about advocacy. I think that it’s really worth separating that out, because at a certain point, I think I’ve seen about as much Ted Bundy content as I can personally handle. I’m OK on that.

Oh, yeah.

And there are still more projects coming out. What do you think about the amount of money that you’ve seen production companies putting out to tell stories that are not about exonerating, but really do seem to be about treating a true crime essentially like horror movies?

I mean, the cynical answer is that the reason why there’s such a proliferation of Ted Bundy content or recognizable serial killers is precisely because they’re recognizable, and it gets to the issue of true crime is intellectual property. It’s IP to be exploited. And so that also gets into really thorny issues of, well, how can we turn people into intellectual property? And why do we keep making the same stories over and over again? It really is a sense of the snake eating its own tail, where it’s easier for production companies and for streaming services and networks to fall back on what’s familiar, because to invest in the unfamiliar might not necessarily lead to good ratings or good outcomes or financial success. And so, breaking away from that paradigm is really important. But I also recognize how hard it is. Speaking only for me in my work, that’s also why I turn off. You don’t want to hear from me about Ted Bundy. I have nothing to say, except the one time that I did when it was a commissioned assignment. But I’m not actively enterprising to work on stories and features and books on recognizable names because I feel like the questions that I have and the stories that I want to tell are best done through lesser known stories and especially the lives of women and girls we might not hear about as much. So that’s really important to me. And I wish that those in the production space shared that. I think some do. But it can be really hard to work against market forces.

It reminds me a couple of years ago, we were pitching to television networks a really fascinating story, which has potentially three or four wrongfully convicted people and two murders that happened in the same night. And the feedback we got from the networks was, we’re kind of tired of innocence cases. Don’t you have a serial killer? [LAUGHS] I said, yeah, that’s not — I mean, maybe somebody does, but we don’t. So but yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s about their bottom line, right? I mean, like Sarah said, it’s market forces.

Right, you think about even the conceit of having a favorite murder. The focus that you put on the crime or on the perpetrator of the crime, to me, is, I was going to use the word unseemly, and then I was like, mm, that’s not strong enough. That gets to something I want to think about, which is about the people in these stories. Something that drives me nuts about all of this serial killer content that people apparently want is that we know the names of these horrifying people. You’re like, oh, you say Night Stalker, and I say which one? There are multiple Night Stalker documentaries. But I want to hear more about the neighborhood that banded together and caught him during the day. I’m really interested to hear your thoughts, Sarah, because I think that the work that you have done, your book on “The Real Lolita,” I’m curious as to how you think about this. And I feel like— I don’t know how I feel about it.

I mean, I think it’s good that you don’t know how to feel about it because there isn’t a binary about this. It should be complicated. It should be messy. This is real life crime. Crime is violent. Crime is traumatic. Crime causes all sorts of lasting ripple effects that we don’t even necessarily comprehend at the time or even decades later. That’s also why I gravitate a lot to the mid-20th centuries because I feel like I don’t have a lot of distance from contemporary cases, that they’re almost — they’re happening too fast, and everything is still too raw. And to look back at a time when we, as humans, engage in a lot of the same behavior, it’s just that the mechanisms and the delivery and the technology has changed. And hopefully, some of our attitudes have improved for the better. And some of them have not. But kind of delving into that and then applying it to, well, what does that mean for now, then I can sort of make a lot more sense of what impact crime has on a particular person.

So often the alleged perpetrators in true crime, they are viewed as just psychopathic evil. If they were arrested, that means they did it. If they confessed, that means they did it. And if they were in prison, they absolutely super did it. We know that that’s not true. How do you think true crime serves the people and can complicate the story of the people who were alleged to have committed acts, and we don’t know if they did?

You’ve narrowed it really specifically to people that we’re not sure are actually culpable for the commission of a crime, in which it’s clear indisputable. I will not reserve judgment. I don’t reserve judgment. I don’t think anybody needs to reserve judgment in cases like that. But look, the system is supposed to have some mechanisms built in. And this was a question that was raised earlier before this conversation about, well, what happens to somebody who has been charged of a crime, has not yet been convicted of it? They have to be tried for this crime, except you have this population of people who just think they know everything about crime and the system and forensics and all this stuff. What does that mean for that particular person? It’s a valid concern, but we have that process in place, the voir dire, which is supposed to make sure that you exclude the kinds of folks who might already come in thinking one way or the other, or who have heard about this case or who is user number IKnowWhoDidIt12345 on Reddit and has written threads about it. Right, that’s what that process is supposed to already have. Sequestration, media lockdowns, all those mechanisms exist to try to protect the integrity of a trial against the defendant. So, yeah, I mean, innocent until proven guilty is where the ideal is. It is, however, really, really hard.

Do you think that this era of true crime has gotten better or worse than it was when we were young people watching “20/20” by ourselves in our childhood bedrooms, like some of us may have been? And what would you want to see more of from true crime, both makers and listeners? Rabia, do you want to go first?

1,000%. I mean, the stories that I grew up on, like I said, were all law enforcement centered. And I just believed every little bit of that perspective. So I think it’s gotten so much better in terms of understanding what’s happening actually inside systems and also getting perspective from victims, but defendants as well. And in law school, you’re taught if you’re going to be going to criminal defense, you don’t talk to the media. Your client doesn’t talk to the media. I mean, there’s a very, very slow shift happening on that front. But we do need multiple stories. We need all the stories connected to the single story that we’ve gotten used to from those older shows and stuff. I think true crime has gotten much better. In podcasting, because it doesn’t cost as much as it does to produce a television series, it’s allowed for more people to step in and pick up a story, investigate a story that they might not have been able to afford to, a family certainly couldn’t be able to afford to reinvestigate — didn’t exist before. So what I would like to see going forward, I’d love to see more investigative stories. I’m that person who just, growing up, loving trying to figure out, I never figured it out who did it in the Agatha Christie mysteries ever, ever.

Nope, nope, never. Not once.

Or even Nancy Drew ones, but I like the stories where I’m trying to figure it out as it goes along. And so that’s what I want to see more of. I want to see more really, really deep in-depth journalism. The problem is it just takes a lot more time, energy, effort in producing that.

Do you have any examples you’d like to recommend?

I mean, “In the Dark,” I think, is one of the best investigative storytelling. “In the Dark” is fantastic. I just finished up “Murder in Alliance,” also really interesting.

To your point about has true crime improved, I mean, the fact that I’m here nitpicking podcasts is a testament to how true crime has improved because even 29, 30, or 100 years ago, people who consumed true crime just accepted the word of law enforcement and didn’t want to necessarily unpack larger societal issues and look at the brokenness of systems. There were individual people who did so, but there wasn’t this mass cultural movement that enabled people to let their inner skeptic really come out and do something about it. So whatever my criticisms and whatever my highlighting the problematic nature of the genre, that really, I think, speaks to the growing pains that true crime is still going through. And I do hope that it will reach a better place. And certainly, the stories that I myself am interested in are ones that take a particular case or take a particular life and juxtapose it against much larger and bigger issues. All the podcasts that Rabia mentioned are among my favorites. And another that I’ve just started to listen to that I am really loving is “Through the Cracks,” which is WAMU, and it’s about the disappearance of Relisha Rudd in the DC area and how law enforcement and social workers, how they utterly failed her and what went wrong.

I’m very appreciative of the opportunity to talk to you both. This has been really interesting for me, as I examine something that I love. And also, thank you for making me feel better about this. There’s a lot of criticism that I think it gets because it is women listening to it. And that’s something I hadn’t thought about. And now I’m like, yeah, that’s very true that this is another women-dominated genre that receives a lot of undue criticism, while a lot of genres I think are worse and gross are not. So thank you for that. I feel better.

Good. I’m glad. If you love it, you love it. I mean, embrace it.

That’s true.

Don’t hide it. [LAUGHTER]

Well, Rabia, Sarah, thank you both so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Rabia Chaudry is an attorney, advocate and a co-host of the “Undisclosed” podcast. She’s also the author of the book, “Adnan’s Story, The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial,” and an executive producer on the HBO documentary series, “The Case Against Adnan Syed.” Sarah Weinman is a writer and editor of true crime. She’s the author of the book, “The Real Lolita.” And her next book, “Scoundrel, How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free,” will be out in February, and I can’t wait.

“The Argument” is the production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez and Vishakha Darbha; edited by Alison Bruzek and Sarah Geis; with original music and sound design by Isaac Jones; additional engineering by Sonia Herrero and Carole Sabouraud; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; and audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks this week to Kristin Lin.

Today on The Argument, should I be convicted for loving true crime? That was stupid. Sorry.