New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Branford native hosts podcast on Russian ‘spy’
For a short period in the late summer months of 2018, it was nearly impossible to avoid images of Maria Butina.
The photogenic Russian gun advocate — her American boyfriend, Yale graduate Paul Erickson, was a well-connected GOP operative — was seemingly everywhere, instantly recognizable from her fiery red hair, nononsense look, assault weapon slung over her shoulder and — later — her orange prison jumpsuit.
Butina’s story is now the subject of a six-part Wondery truecrime podcast called “Spy Affair,” produced and narrated by documentary filmmaker Celia Aniskovich, who was raised in Branford.
Liz Yale Marsh, Aniskovich’s close friend and a fellow filmmaker, initially sent her an article about Butina. Aniskovich was immediately sold on the story.
“I thought: how fascinating,” Aniskovich said. “Here we are, two young women who represent the two stakeholders in the story,
Russia and America. How is it that a woman who is just a couple of years older than me ends up in prison at the center of an international scandal?”
In 2018, Butina was convicted of conspiring to act as a foreign agent within the United States.
But the podcast begins years earlier: at Freedom Fest 2015 in Las Vegas, an overflowing, archconservative conference in the heart of Sin City.
“It was [Erickson’s] idea to go there,” Butina says at the beginning of the first episode. “He showed me the American political world. Paul was my guide in this world, so he brought me to Freedom Fest.”
Weeks earlier, Donald Trump had announced his candidacy for president; at Freedom Fest, he was a last-minute addition to the speaker’s list. “Suddenly, I see the people are moving in… people like bees, you know, they started buzzing there,” Butina says.
“The American Dream is dead,” Trump told the Freedom Fest crowd, “but I’m going to make it bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”
During the Q&A that followed, Butina asked Trump a question: what do you think of the economic sanctions the Obama administration had imposed on Russia?
“I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin,” Trump said to Butina. “Putin has no respect for President Obama. Big problem, big problem. I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin.”
Minutes later, from a bathroom stall, Butina called a senior Russian official — a conversation she later referred to as her “best report.” Three years later, Butina was arrested.
That all takes place in the first four minutes of “Spy Affair.”
Aniskovich spent dozens of hours interviewing Butina in an Alexandria, Virginia prison, and over Zoom and phone calls to Moscow. There was nothing glamorous about it: multiple prisonallotted 20-minute sessions with a pale, thin, scared young woman trapped in a harsh environment.
At the first session, Aniskovicha and Butina just talked. “I got to know a little bit about her. I got to know what books she was reading in prison, what things she liked, how she was missing her parents,” she said. “We talked like I'd talk to any other woman my age.”
They stayed in touch; Butina was eventually moved to a prison with email and video-chat capabilities.
Aniskovich, who currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., co-produced the 2020 Netflix series “How to Fix a Drug Scandal.” Her father, William Aniskovich, was a Republican state senator in Connecticut from 1991 to 2005.
For “Spy Affair,” Aniskovich said she was mostly interested in telling Butina’s story from the Russian woman’s perspective.
“One of the things that Maria says is ‘don't believe me, don't believe the media, don't believe anybody but think about it,’” Aniskovich said. “‘Think critically and don't think black and white. Try to understand people as human beings.’ I think that is really what fascinated me.”
Listeners can tune into the first two episodes of “Spy Affair” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon or Wondery.
Even after production wrapped on the podcast, Aniskovich found herself questioning the details of Butina’s story.
“The facts and the truth are hard to come by,” Aniskovich said “The question that I've thought a lot about: is there a sort of capital ‘T’ truth here, and what does that mean? Will we ever know all of the information? Will we be able to have all of the truth? I think probably the answer is no.”