Fiction on Trial: How Wendi Adelson’s Novel Helped Convict Her Mother | 2025 Year in Review
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 908 Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this special episode, Tony Brueski breaks down the unprecedented legal and psychological debate surrounding This Is Our Story, a book written by Donna’s daughter, Wendi Adelson, years before the murder of her ex-husband, Dan Markel. What began as fiction has now been pulled into a courtroom as a possible roadmap to motive.
Prosecutors argue that the story — about a woman desperate to escape her marriage and rebuild her life without her husband — eerily mirrors Wendi’s real-life circumstances before Markel’s death. They claim it exposes family resentment, obsession with control, and the emotional triggers that led to murder. The defense, meanwhile, insists the book is irrelevant, prejudicial, and “a dangerous conflation of art and accusation.”
Tony unpacks the courtroom fight over this bizarre piece of evidence:
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Why the State believes Wendi’s novel matters — and how prosecutors think it reveals intent.
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How Donna’s defense team is trying to block it, calling it an unfair literary witch hunt.
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What the novel actually says — and why its parallels to the Markel-Adelson saga are impossible to ignore.
Could fiction really help convict someone of murder? Or is this a dangerous precedent that blurs the line between imagination and evidence? Either way, the irony is impossible to miss: the Adelsons, who once controlled the narrative, may now be undone by one they wrote themselves.
🎙️ Hidden Killers with Tony Brueski — 2025 Year in Review: The Cases Where Truth Was Stranger Than Fiction.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers Year in Review. |
| 0:02.7 | A look back at the biggest stories of 2025. |
| 0:06.8 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brewski. |
| 0:10.7 | In a courtroom in Leon County this March, something unusual happened. |
| 0:16.6 | Donna Adelson's defense team, return to court. |
| 0:20.3 | Not to argue about evidence found on the phone or wiretaps or any of the expected stuff |
| 0:27.0 | in the murder for hire case that we've become all too familiar with, but to make a renowned |
| 0:32.7 | and renewed plea to keep a novel out of her upcoming trial. |
| 0:39.0 | Yes, a novel, a work of fiction, right? |
| 0:42.7 | Or is it? |
| 0:44.2 | A book called This Is Our Story, written by her daughter, you guessed it, Wendy. |
| 0:51.3 | Wendy Adelson. |
| 0:52.8 | A book that prosecution says paints a picture of not just of Wendy's |
| 0:57.7 | state of mind, but of Donna's own alleged motive in the killing of her former son-in-law, Dan Markell. |
| 1:06.1 | Pretty big allegation right there. It's not every day that a murder case turns into the pages of a novel, |
| 1:14.3 | but here we are. Now, this is our story, isn't some obscure diary or private journal that was |
| 1:25.6 | accidentally uncovered. Now, it was actually published in 2011, |
| 1:29.7 | three years before Markell's 2014 shooting, |
| 1:34.5 | and marketed as a semi-autobiographical debut |
| 1:39.3 | from a young lawyer-turned author, |
| 1:41.5 | who at the time was also Markell's ex-wife. And for the last |
| 1:46.1 | decade, it sat relatively unnoticed. But as prosecutors built out the picture of what they say |
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