These Names of Virtues with their Precepts were
...
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none, by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty.
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography, written 1771 - 1790
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 8
Why did I become a lawyer? Because I believe in fairness and justice, and because I wanted to work on interesting projects with great people and make a difference. Also because I heard growing up that I could be a doctor or a lawyer, and I figured law would involve fairness and justice, cuter clothes, and less blood. I wasn't exactly following my heart, was I.
Why did I quit the law? Because I didn't find what I thought I would find. Instead, I found misery and misogyny, bullies and boors, disrespect and disillusionment.
I graduated from Harvard College in 1990, and Harvard Law School in 1996, and by 2000 and 2001, I was in a job so bad I don't even list it on my resume. You can read more about it in the previous post; let's wrap up this disastrous job here with a few more disastrous episodes, and yet, as you'll see here too, this law firm came back into my life uninvited even after I quit, stalking me like the individual uninvited stalker I also had and will tell you about. My emotions around this job and around the stalker were similar: disgust, indignation, anger. Law as a career was not providing a supportive environment but a hostile one, and law as the rule of society was not protecting me but was protecting the stalker. In some ways, my boss was a worse bully than the stalker, though I didn't think my boss might murder me. Happily, the stalker didn't murder me either. In both cases, law did not help me, and I took matters into my own hands, walking (running!) away from each situation.
Here is what happened:
Lawyer Job 4: Chicago (continued)
The law firm which I called Ramshackle Misogyny produced low-quality work, when they had work at all, in a negative environment, where I was not a cultural fit.
The job made me physically sick: I developed an eye tic, from stress, I assumed. In fairness, I had been much sicker at my prior firm, from stress, overwork, lack of sleep, and lack of appetite due to stress. The sickness from my prior firm lifted when I quit, and the eye tic arrived when I started at the new firm. This tic was extremely irritating, and I mentioned it to one of the other women associates -- there were two female corporate associates I became friends with and commiserated with at this firm, both very nice people who have also since left not only the firm but the practice of law as I did -- and she said she was afraid she was developing multiple sclerosis. Was the building filled with some type of toxic materials affecting our nerves or muscles, or was stress indeed the cause of our ailments? I did not want to stay long enough for the situation to become worse, whatever the cause.
Beyond the physical torment, the emotional: the head of the corporate department and some of his partners were so rude to me, that I wondered why they had hired me at all. Something about their combination of rude + incompetent, while hurtful and upsetting, made it impossible for me to take them seriously, and this seemed to infuriate the head of the corporate department in particular, who seemed to me to be a particular fraud. Some of his partners were sloppy in behavior, dress, and the quality of the work they did, and did not attempt to cover it up. The head of the corporate department wore a veneer of an upscale professional, while having more in common with the vulgar crew than he wanted people to know. He was two-faced, as the phrase goes. He had fake furniture and a fake rug in his office, fake know-how, a fake smile. Sometimes it seemed to me that he resented the fact that I saw through him, and that by the time I was a 4th-year associate I had developed legal skills, from working at top firms, that he did not have as a partner. Or maybe we just didn't get along. Either way, he behaved like a bully. You saw some episodes from this firm if you saw the previous post, and here are two more, including one from my last day:
The day after the Super Bowl
One Monday, people at the firm were in the corridor discussing the Super Bowl, which had been played the day before. I walked by, said hello, and stepped into my office. As I did so, the head of the corporate department sneered that I probably hadn't even watched the game. Well of course I hadn't. And he probably hadn't watched the Australian Open women's tennis final. But why the taunt and the disrespectful tone of voice? Why would he or anyone think this was an appropriate way to speak with a colleague or employee? I calmly replied that I had indeed not watched the Super Bowl, but that I had seen a Joe Montana commercial once or that maybe it had been Joe Namath. This made the head of the corporate department fume. Our relationship had become sour in this pattern: he would bully me, I would reply in a snappy or sarcastic fashion -- not my normal or preferred method of communicating with people -- as my way of standing up for myself, he would come back and bully me again almost as though he wanted me to snap back at him yet again, and our relationship would continue to degenerate. I hated this, and it reminded me of having to deal with obnoxious kids in high school. I could not accept being bullied, and could not turn the relationship around, and this was not what I envisioned my law career would involve.
Last day
I gave notice, and at last, my last day at the firm arrived! Did the head of the corporate department think he was going to miss bullying me, and is that why he came by my office, to attempt one more round of rudeness by searching my boxes? Yes, this man came by to put his hands on my possessions -- I'm grimacing in disgust even as I write this -- and I suppose to try to humiliate me by searching my things as though I might be a thief. I suppose too he had no pressing billable work to handle or clients to meet, or how did he even have time to walk down the hall and bully an associate who was quitting?
I had packed up two bankers boxes of my belongings, and placed them on the credenza near my office door. The boxes contained what I had arrived with: my diplomas, some books and files, and my dish for holding chocolates (a crucial possession for this lifelong chocolate lover!). One box also had a few pairs of shoes so that I could change pairs and walk home in flats sometimes, or change out of winter boots and into office shoes; almost every woman lawyer, paralegal, or assistant I'd ever met kept shoes at her desk too. (How many pairs are at your desk right now?)
The head of the corporate department walked in, and, turning his back to me, started touching my things, moving my shoes around, and digging in my boxes. This was repulsive to me, and absurd on many levels. For instance, if you were actually going to steal something from your job, would you wait until your last day, and put it in an open box in your office where anyone could see it, instead of smuggling it out before you even gave notice, or removing it electronically, or in some other non-stupid fashion? Moreover, what would I or anyone want to steal from Ramshackle Misogyny? The firm did not have art and antiques like my previous firm, nor did they have valuable trade secrets or the like, and of course I wouldn't have stolen anything even if they had had anything worth stealing. If any thieves had wanted anything from this firm, they could have walked in at 8:00 on any morning, and, undetected, walked back out with it, because no one ever came in that early (see previous post).
Could it be that some lawyers at this firm were known for stealing: partners there occasionally asked me for contract templates from my previous firm -- a place they revered almost too much -- and I would offer instead to draw up a new contract based on their or the client's needs and create a new template for them. They usually said no, and that was the end of that.
In any case, I stood up for myself again and told the head of the corporate department as he was searching my boxes that one box contained feminine hygiene products, and the other contained sensitive firm documents, and he could go through and discover which was which. He paused. Then I told him, no, I was kidding, I had already stolen all the sensitive firm documents last week. Then I told him I was kidding again, and asked him, seriously: what did he think his firm had that I would possibly want? I also told him my prior firm didn't search my belongings. That stopped him in his tracks. He exited my office, I exited his firm, and I never saw him again.
I did have to talk with him on the phone again, however, nine years later.
Deposition day
The word that came to mind when I heard the name of this firm nine years after quitting: yuck. I did not see this coming, yet somehow wasn't surprised:
Nine (9!) years after leaving the ramshackle firm, I received a subpoena in the mail at home, instructing me to appear at a deposition as a witness in a legal matter I had never heard of, involving people I had never heard of, represented by a law firm I had never heard of, which was located in downstate Illinois in a town I had never heard of (I looked it up to find out where it was). I figured they had the wrong Valerie Beck. There was someone else with my name in Chicago who had a dinner reservation at the same restaurant on the same day once, and it was kind of amusing when I arrived for dinner and the restaurant host thought I had just been there, but someone else with my name had just been there. I thought maybe this subpoena was for her.
I called the attorney listed on the subpoena and told him he had the wrong Valerie Beck. Pause. He asked: did you once work at Ramshackle (he didn't call it that, but we are). My heart sank. Yes, I said with some concern. It seemed that the firm where I had worked had represented a client where I was on the deal, and now a former director was suing other directors, or some other tangle had occurred that the lawyer on the phone couldn't give me a full or coherent statement about. Even if he could have, I had (and still have) no recollection of the client, the substance of the transaction, or any of the people involved. I did a lot of deals as a young associate at various firms. Plus, as a young associate at Ramshackle, and an overdressed one at that (previous post), it would have been unlikely that I would have had any contact with company directors or whoever was arguing about whatever here. Yet, ultimately it didn't surprise me that something connected to this ramshackle firm had gone wrong or that people whose company had hired them had now found themselves with additional problems, whether it was the firm's fault or not.
I wanted nothing to do with any of it, because I didn't see how I could help. I told the attorney on the subpoena that as I honestly had no memory of this deal from nine years prior, I would be a useless witness. He said he couldn't talk with me because he wasn't supposed to talk with witnesses (fine, but it wasn't clear whose witness I was; I only knew I hadn't witnessed anything!), and he suggested I talk with the ramshackle partner who had been on this deal, and he told me who it was. Guess who? You're right! It was the head of the corporate department, someone I never wanted to speak to again.
I called the head of the corporate department, and he went into some small talk for a while -- he still seemed fake to me -- how are you, what's new, what have you been doing for nine years, la la la. I told him I had received a subpoena, called the lawyer listed because I thought he sent it to the wrong Valerie Beck as I didn't recognize any of the names listed, and was told by the lawyer that it had to do with Ramshackle. The head of the corporate department asked if I remembered going to this other particular firm for a closing. I told him yes I did remember going to that other firm, because it was just a couple of buildings down and that building had some interesting architectural details on the facade that I had always noticed. But, I told him, I didn't remember anything about that closing or who or what the deal involved. It was just a quick closing without incident. The head of the corporate department had been at there too, sneering at me when I left the conference room to go to the ladies room, and that was the extent of what I remembered about this. I had come onto that deal toward the end, and basically just helped at the closing; I wasn't involved in much that was substantive. How could I shed any light on a dispute between people I didn't know, concerning a deal I didn't remember, that I worked on for a very short time nine years before and that made no impression on me?
The head of the corporate department said that this lawsuit involved a company on that deal. I grew highly suspicious, remembered when one of his partners had tried to make me a scapegoat on another deal (previous post), and asked him outright if he were "throwing me under the bus," trying to make me take the blame for something someone else had done wrong. He said no. Would you have believed him?
Normally I would not complain about doing my duty and giving a deposition or statement if I could be helpful in this kind of matter, although this kind of matter had certainly never come up before. But I couldn't be helpful here; I knew nothing about any of this. Plus, I had founded and was running a busy successful business by this time, Chicago Chocolate Tours, which I was expanding to Boston and Philadelphia with my growing team!
(Click for a fun and upbeat news montage video of yours truly and Chicago Chocolate Tours, my beloved business that I founded in 2005 and ran until 2014, during which time we grew to a team of 50 people in 4 cities! By the way, you might notice anti-semitic and psycho-seeming comments below the video, which were written by a secretary (not one of mine) at Lawyer Job 3 who cyberstalked me, unrelated to the man who stalked me as described below in this post. The comments get so crazy that someone I don't know commented on one of the cyberstalker's comments, addressing the unbalanced secretary and recommending that she "Please seek help you mentally deranged freak troll." I have never been able to get YouTube or Google to remove the hate speech, and now I see it as a ridiculous reminder that hate speech is illegal and is a terrible kind of bullying, and yet here we have another instance where, improperly, law is not enforced or has gaps, or where, improperly, bullying is tolerated by society. It's also a reminder that the mentally ill need care.)
Back to the deposition: I didn't want to take precious moments out of the day for a deposition where I had no evidence to give. Still, there was no way around it. When deposition day came, in Chicago, I told my team where I was going, and off I went. I felt indignant. I felt that not only had the firm wasted my time and disrespected me while I worked there, they were now managing to do the same thing nine years after I quit! I got to the firm where the deposition was being held, not the firm where I had worked, and announced myself. The court reporter who was there to type what everyone said told me she had been a customer and taken a Chicago Chocolate Tour before! That was nice. The deposition was absurd. The attorney who started asking me questions was apparently the partner on the case, and I had spoken with his associate when I called to say they had the wrong Valerie Beck. The partner was an intense man who asked me question after question about people and items and events I had never heard of, was unaware of, or could not remember.
Even the preliminary questions had an absurdity to them:
The lawyer asked me: Are you a lawyer?
A former lawyer, I replied.
But you are a member of the bar?
No, not anymore.
This seemed to surprise him and throw him off track.
He asked: You mean you don't practice law anymore?
I replied: Correct.
But you keep up your bar admission?
No.
No??
No.
He went on: Did you work at the (Ramshackle) firm?
Yes.
Is this your name on this email sent from the firm?
Yes.
Do you remember sending this email?
No.
Do you deny you sent this email?
No.
But you don't remember sending it?
Correct, I don't remember, it's dated nine years ago.
The court reporter glanced up at this point. Maybe I wasn't the only one who thought it was odd to have a witness who didn't remember something which seemed to be the crux of a matter from nine years ago?
The lawyer continued: But you agree that you sent this email?
Yes, if it says I sent it, I sent it.
And on and on and on and on.
He asked me at one point: Is the reason you no longer work at the firm because you did something wrong on this deal and were fired?
Now I was surprised. I told him no, I couldn't remember the deal and wouldn't have done anything wrong, and that if I had been fired instead of quitting, the firm might owe me some severance pay.
He asked: Why did you leave the firm?
I replied: To take a job in-house.
That shut him down for the moment. A few of the other attorneys present gasped audibly. Any law firm attorney could understand wanting to leave a firm to go in-house, because in general people thought this meant less stress and fewer hours. (Little did they know. More on that when we discuss Lawyer Job 5.) And suddenly I started thinking maybe I should have waited and gotten fired, for not making billable hours when the firm didn't have work, or for wearing pearls when I was told I didn't dress casually enough, or for just not being a fit at Ramshackle Misogyny?
The lawyer gathered his intensity again and asked if I remembered this particular person, or that one, or that one, naming names I did not remember ever hearing or seeing.
I replied no, no, again no.
Finally he asked, almost in exasperation:
Do you remember anything or anyone involved in this dispute?
I replied: No, as I told your colleague on the phone when I called after receiving the subpoena which I was convinced went to the wrong Valerie Beck, I do not remember anything or anyone involved in this matter.
The court reporter looked shocked. This is the kind of legal situation you don't see on TV, right, because it's ludicrous.
The lawyer didn't give up. He asked:
My colleague told you to call the head of the corporate department at Ramshackle, correct?
Yes.
How long did you and the head of the corporate department speak?
A short time, maybe ten minutes.
What did you speak about during that time?
Small talk, what we had been doing over the past nine years, then whether I remembered going to the other firm for the closing of this deal, and that a lawsuit had arisen between people involved with one of the companies on that deal.
What else?
Nothing else.
But you said you spoke for ten minutes, didn't you?
Yes, maybe ten minutes, a short time.
That couldn't have taken ten minutes, what else did you discuss?
As I said, nothing else.
You must have discussed something else, didn't you?
No, we didn't discuss anything else.
This line of questioning went on and on, with this lawyer seeming to think or hope that we had discussed something more than we did. My perplexity at what he was getting at was surely visible, and I told him that I didn't know what he was getting at, and that I had no motivation to hide anything as I couldn't remember anyone or anything involved with this anyway. Now I was getting exasperated. What on Earth was I supposed to have discussed nine years after leaving the firm, with the head of the corporate department, a man I had hoped never to talk to again? There wasn't much to say about a deal I couldn't remember. Maybe we could have discussed who shot JFK? Or favorite recipes? And what would that man who seemed to hate me have wanted to talk with me about anyway? Moreover, I wasn't a lawyer on the clock anymore, and didn't time the call for billable purposes. Whatever the theory of this lawyer's case, I was certainly not involved in whatever he thought or hoped I was involved in. Finally, he ran out of questions or energy.
Then the attorney for the other side, who had been a cheerful fellow all day, the type of lawyer who talks about golf during breaks and gives the impression that law is just this thing he does when he's not golfing, asked me just one question:
Would you as an associate have sent an email that a partner directed you to send?
Yes.
Finally it was over, and I went back to my own happy office, filled with happy people -- where we did not search each other's possessions, make snide remarks, or bully one another, but where we worked in alignment with the mission I had set of Uplift, meaning that every interaction with a customer, team member, vendor, philanthropy partner, or the general public, should leave the other person feeling better about him or herself and the world. That's Uplift Through Chocolate, chocolate being the vehicle to deliver the uplift. All of the negative examples at all of the firms helped me create a positive business culture. But I am getting ahead of the story.
The deposition was over, but the nine-years-later disaster still wasn't quite over: sometime later I got another subpoena in the mail, instructing me to appear in court in downstate Illinois, in this same matter, apparently to go over at trial everything I couldn't remember, which I had already said in my deposition that I couldn't remember. I believe in justice and fairness, and I hoped that if someone really was wronged in this case, they could get it made right, but I knew that I was in no position to help with that. They might as well have pulled someone random off a street in Shanghai to be a witness, for all the evidence I could give, which was none. And who were these lawyers, running such a case? I was not impressed, I was again indignant. At the last minute, on the eve of the trial as it were, I received word that the case settled, as I'm told cases usually do, so I didn't have to take a day and a train to go to court in a matter I knew nothing about in connection with a law firm where I was sorry I had ever worked.
These memoirs are about why I left the law, and while this next episode isn't about something that happened at one of my jobs as a lawyer, it happened while I worked as a lawyer, and it highlighted a glaring and dangerous gap in the law itself. Practicing law was not making me happy, and the actual law did not protect me when I needed it to. Here is what happened:
Days of a stalker
Twenty years ago, I had a stalker, and twenty years ago, stalking was not a crime. By stalker, I mean a man who tried to get into my apartment on multiple occasions, showed up at other places he thought I might be, followed me, and phoned me dozens of times a day. By not-a-crime, I mean that in the state of Illinois, and in other states, at that time, it was legal for a man (as most stalkers were and are men) to follow, threaten, or intimidate a woman (most stalking victims were and are women), as long as he didn't physically attack or murder her or attempt to murder her. Today, stalking is a crime. Back then, when I reported my stalker to the police, they were very nice and sympathetic, but said they couldn't do anything -- even though I knew the stalker's license plate number and where he lived and worked -- because no crime had been committed. If the stalker had murdered me, then the police could get involved, because murder was a crime. Stalking was not a crime, so the police could do nothing.
Can you believe it? Just as the law seemed to have no place for me as a lawyer and as a female lawyer in particular, it seemed also to offer no protection to me as someone -- a woman -- being stalked. Stalking is a type of bullying, you might say, and as mentioned it is usually against women. As you know, I cannot tolerate bullying or misogyny. The law did not help, so I took matters into my own hands.
But first, how did the stalking start? As with most stalking situations, I knew the stalker. I met him when some friends from Lawyer Job 3 and I went to a young professionals event one evening, one of the very few times I went out at all with the oppressive work schedule I had then. He seemed nice at first: a clean-cut, educated, successful Internet business owner (not a lawyer). But after a few dates he seemed manipulative, so I told him we weren't compatible and moved on. I moved on; he did not. He started phoning me twenty times a day, sometimes leaving messages, sometimes hanging up. He showed up at my apartment at 4:00 in the morning, and said he had been going to a restaurant near where I worked but since I didn't show up he had to come find me at home. That sounded crazy to me. I told him to go away and never come back.
But he did come back, showing up at my apartment frequently at 4:00 am. I learned that this was closing time for many bars, and I surmised he would drink and then show up. The building where I lived at the time did not have much security: a gentle-seeming 19-year-old Moody Bible Institute student would sit at the front desk at night and do homework. The stalker told the student that if he didn't let him up to my apartment, he'd stalk him too. So the student let him up. There was a security camera that allowed residents to watch live footage from the lobby on our TVs. So I could watch the stalker arrive, watch him bully the student at the desk, and watch him walk to the elevator that would take him to my floor and my door. The stalker would bang on my door, I would call the police, and they would come quite quickly, but by the time they arrived he'd be gone. I felt trapped inside my own apartment during these episodes, a strange and vulnerable feeling. The police officers were always kind and concerned, but wouldn't go get the stalker even though I knew the address of the townhouse he owned and the license plate to his Mercedes which he would park in the pay lot across the street from my building, because again, under the law then, stalking was not illegal.
Well, call me a Harvard Law School grad who took a lot of issue-spotter exams, but it seemed to me that the stalker's actions could fit under existing laws at the time, even though there was no specific stalking law then. For example:
But because it was a "jilted boyfriend" type of situation, the police (mostly men) and law (made mostly by men) at that time saw it more as a domestic abuse situation, which were also not well-policed then, or as just "one of those things." But why should women or anyone have to put up with such disrespectful things? If a stranger tried to enter my home, would this have been seen differently? What if the stalker hadn't been a wealthy white man? What if someone had pounded on a police officer's door at 4:00 am throughout the week, or on the police officer's daughter's door, and made twenty calls a day, and showed up near their workplace, and started following or surveilling the person?
Was law going to show me fairness and justice in my personal life, or at work? (Spoiler alert: no.)
I started to feel incredibly stressed, distressed, and paranoid all the time about this. And I got tired of feeling vulnerable. What to do? I researched and read everything online there was about stalking and ways to handle it, though in some ways that only made me more worried, because no one had a solution. I took a self-defense class, but getting into hand-to-hand combat was not my goal. Since conventional solutions weren't working, I decided to think of new ones. I developed Operation Slumber Party: I asked my friends if they wanted to come to an anti-stalker slumber party, and then when the stalker banged on my door at 4:00 am again, a bunch of us would open the door, let him know he couldn't terrorize me, and tell him not to come back. Standing up to a bully, with strength in numbers. And I'd provide the pizza. My friends said yes, until the day came and they got afraid and canceled.
The next idea: Operation Publicization. In other words, the plan was to let people in the stalker's life know that he was a stalker. In all of the reading I was doing about stalking facts, statistics, how to try to get a restraining order and why sometimes this is a bad idea (there were grisly stories about how restraining orders made some stalkers mad and they changed from non-violent to violent), and more, I came across an article about a woman who was raped and received no justice, so she went to the man's place of work and stood outside with a sign saying he had raped her. Related note: recently, I read about a similar situation in which a woman who was raped and received no justice painted a mural and sign about it on a billboard in Los Angeles. Twenty years later, and we still have to take law into our own hands? Yes, and the #metoo movement is an outpouring of frustration at unfairness, disrespect, and abuse, and at the deep harm inflicted on individuals and on the world when women are kept down. Here is an excellent short article from a global perspective, summing up where we are and where we can go so that women's liberation can help women, men, and our planet: A Buddhist Perspective on Women's Liberation.
Ok, back to the stalker, and what I saw as positive vigilante-ism in the absence of positive law and order: Friends and family and I compiled a list of everything we knew about the stalker, did some additional research, and were able to find many people to whom he was connected, from his mother to his mortgage holder. We called or emailed his gym, his company, his potential investors -- at least one of whom evidently dropped him as a result -- and others, and read off a factual and calmly-worded statement that I had written describing his behavior. When a dear guy-friend of mine called the stalker's mother, who lived in a wealthy Chicago suburb, she paused, sighed, and said: He's doing it again? It seems I was not the first person this stalker had stalked. He wasn't doing anything illegal, right, so evidently he had not faced any consequences. Not yet.
After our barrage of calls and emails, the stalking stopped! For a month. Then the stalker started stalking me again. I was terribly distraught. To give you an idea of how frayed my nerves were: I came home one day and found an unmarked 8 1/2 x 11 envelope, with no To or From address, outside the door to my apartment -- not in my mailbox or in the mailroom, but right outside the door to my unit. Instead of opening it, I left it there, ran inside my apartment, and called the police to report a suspicious package. What if the stalker had left me some anthrax, or a letter bomb? That is what went through my mind. (Today when I receive parcels, I expect there will be chocolate inside.) The police came quickly, a small team with a bomb-sniffing dog. They listened to me explain the situation, and they took some time examining the envelope. They were serious and thorough. They determined that we could open the envelope. We did so, and it turned out not to be a bomb, not to be anthrax, and not to be from the stalker. It turned out to be a job offer from what would become my Lawyer Job 5.
Why did the job send it in an unmarked envelope, and how did it bypass the mailroom or package sign-in? Maybe this should have stood out as some kind of sign of the shadiness and outright criminality that I would see at that job. In a sense, the letter was a bomb in disguise, from a firm that would be involved in one of the most awful corporate scandals in history. More on that mega-disaster to come. The point here is that I was so overwrought, that my first thought upon seeing an envelope outside my door was that it was a murder attempt from my stalker.
Meanwhile, I decided not to wait around and be murdered, but to move. I asked my landlord if I could break my lease, and it turned out he wanted me out, because I was "endangering his doormen," or as I think of them, the poor students who sat in the lobby and let the stalker up to my apartment. I moved rapidly to a very secure apartment building, with a 24-hour doorperson, one of the new wave of amenity-filled rental buildings that started to come onto the scene at that time. I thought of these apartments as vanilla boxes, without any design or style, and loved my apartment that had vintage charm but that lacked effective security features. The only unit available was on a higher floor than I'd wanted -- 51! I'd been on 16 -- and the price was higher than my budget, but I took it for the time being; safety first. The stalking faded away. Maybe part of the fun or the compulsion for the stalker was pounding on my door at 4:00 am, and when he couldn't do that, he found someone to stalk where he could do that again? Or maybe his investors or his mother or someone was able to convince him to stop? Maybe losing an investor finally convinced him to stop? In any case, it wasn't the law or the police who did. I was relieved to get my life back, or what I had of a life with so many law career disasters; still, I was grateful for my life, and outraged at the law.
Terrible lesson: being a lawyer did not protect me from being bullied by my boss, nor did the law protect me from a stalker, or from being bullied in a sense by my past job nine years later.
Positive lesson: I could stand up for myself in creative and authentic ways, and I could walk (run!) away yet again.
But where was my ikigai, my purpose in life combining passion and profession? Maybe in helping get stalking laws passed, or in helping other women implement creative solutions when the law let them down too? Or in art, philanthropy, chocolate?
Today
I looked up the head of the corporate department online while writing this, and he is still practicing law, still at the same firm in its current post-mergers incarnation. He is no longer the head of the corporate department, but co-chair of another department. Maybe we should be glad if he is no longer attempting m&a deals, like the one that reared up nine years after closing? Still, what do you make of the fact the legal profession has a place for him, but not for me? Or of other lawyers at that firm, if you read the previous post? I heard that a young woman who started working at the firm after I left had a terrible time and filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against a partner there. And, I just have to ask: will anyone search the head of the corporate department's boxes when he finally retires?
I haven't looked up the stalker. But several months after he finally stopped stalking me, way back when, after my friends and family and I contacted everyone in his life and told them what he was doing, I ran into him as he was jogging. He looked terrified, and ran away.
We will move on to Lawyer Job 5 in the next post, featuring disasters involving variations of the misery and misogyny that were hallmarks of my disastrous law career, plus new experiences in that particular type of psychopathic-sadistic culture that can fester and grow in corporate America, plus the firm's central role in one of the biggest corporate scandals in corporate history. My role: I refused to break the law, and was punished by my boss for not breaking it.
To come...!
Valerie Beck
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7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none, by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty.
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography, written 1771 - 1790
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 8
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| A good thing in the midst of disaster: I had more free time in Lawyer Job 4, because the corporate department had so little work -- which also meant the partners had extra time for bullying; this was not a happy situation -- so I was able to attend social events such as the charity evening with silent auction where I was generously invited by a friend who was on the junior board, and where I acquired this framed print by Alexander Calder, an artist I have loved since I was 8 years old, for $150. |
Why did I become a lawyer? Because I believe in fairness and justice, and because I wanted to work on interesting projects with great people and make a difference. Also because I heard growing up that I could be a doctor or a lawyer, and I figured law would involve fairness and justice, cuter clothes, and less blood. I wasn't exactly following my heart, was I.
Why did I quit the law? Because I didn't find what I thought I would find. Instead, I found misery and misogyny, bullies and boors, disrespect and disillusionment.
I graduated from Harvard College in 1990, and Harvard Law School in 1996, and by 2000 and 2001, I was in a job so bad I don't even list it on my resume. You can read more about it in the previous post; let's wrap up this disastrous job here with a few more disastrous episodes, and yet, as you'll see here too, this law firm came back into my life uninvited even after I quit, stalking me like the individual uninvited stalker I also had and will tell you about. My emotions around this job and around the stalker were similar: disgust, indignation, anger. Law as a career was not providing a supportive environment but a hostile one, and law as the rule of society was not protecting me but was protecting the stalker. In some ways, my boss was a worse bully than the stalker, though I didn't think my boss might murder me. Happily, the stalker didn't murder me either. In both cases, law did not help me, and I took matters into my own hands, walking (running!) away from each situation.
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| Don't tread on me: Here I am at age 29 or thereabouts, in my first Chicago apartment, where I lived during Lawyer Jobs 3 and 4. How did I feel about being bullied at work as a lawyer, and by a stalker when the law wouldn't protect me? I could not tolerate it. What did I do about it? Read on! |
Here is what happened:
Lawyer Job 4: Chicago (continued)
The law firm which I called Ramshackle Misogyny produced low-quality work, when they had work at all, in a negative environment, where I was not a cultural fit.
The job made me physically sick: I developed an eye tic, from stress, I assumed. In fairness, I had been much sicker at my prior firm, from stress, overwork, lack of sleep, and lack of appetite due to stress. The sickness from my prior firm lifted when I quit, and the eye tic arrived when I started at the new firm. This tic was extremely irritating, and I mentioned it to one of the other women associates -- there were two female corporate associates I became friends with and commiserated with at this firm, both very nice people who have also since left not only the firm but the practice of law as I did -- and she said she was afraid she was developing multiple sclerosis. Was the building filled with some type of toxic materials affecting our nerves or muscles, or was stress indeed the cause of our ailments? I did not want to stay long enough for the situation to become worse, whatever the cause.
Beyond the physical torment, the emotional: the head of the corporate department and some of his partners were so rude to me, that I wondered why they had hired me at all. Something about their combination of rude + incompetent, while hurtful and upsetting, made it impossible for me to take them seriously, and this seemed to infuriate the head of the corporate department in particular, who seemed to me to be a particular fraud. Some of his partners were sloppy in behavior, dress, and the quality of the work they did, and did not attempt to cover it up. The head of the corporate department wore a veneer of an upscale professional, while having more in common with the vulgar crew than he wanted people to know. He was two-faced, as the phrase goes. He had fake furniture and a fake rug in his office, fake know-how, a fake smile. Sometimes it seemed to me that he resented the fact that I saw through him, and that by the time I was a 4th-year associate I had developed legal skills, from working at top firms, that he did not have as a partner. Or maybe we just didn't get along. Either way, he behaved like a bully. You saw some episodes from this firm if you saw the previous post, and here are two more, including one from my last day:
The day after the Super Bowl
One Monday, people at the firm were in the corridor discussing the Super Bowl, which had been played the day before. I walked by, said hello, and stepped into my office. As I did so, the head of the corporate department sneered that I probably hadn't even watched the game. Well of course I hadn't. And he probably hadn't watched the Australian Open women's tennis final. But why the taunt and the disrespectful tone of voice? Why would he or anyone think this was an appropriate way to speak with a colleague or employee? I calmly replied that I had indeed not watched the Super Bowl, but that I had seen a Joe Montana commercial once or that maybe it had been Joe Namath. This made the head of the corporate department fume. Our relationship had become sour in this pattern: he would bully me, I would reply in a snappy or sarcastic fashion -- not my normal or preferred method of communicating with people -- as my way of standing up for myself, he would come back and bully me again almost as though he wanted me to snap back at him yet again, and our relationship would continue to degenerate. I hated this, and it reminded me of having to deal with obnoxious kids in high school. I could not accept being bullied, and could not turn the relationship around, and this was not what I envisioned my law career would involve.
Last day
I gave notice, and at last, my last day at the firm arrived! Did the head of the corporate department think he was going to miss bullying me, and is that why he came by my office, to attempt one more round of rudeness by searching my boxes? Yes, this man came by to put his hands on my possessions -- I'm grimacing in disgust even as I write this -- and I suppose to try to humiliate me by searching my things as though I might be a thief. I suppose too he had no pressing billable work to handle or clients to meet, or how did he even have time to walk down the hall and bully an associate who was quitting?
I had packed up two bankers boxes of my belongings, and placed them on the credenza near my office door. The boxes contained what I had arrived with: my diplomas, some books and files, and my dish for holding chocolates (a crucial possession for this lifelong chocolate lover!). One box also had a few pairs of shoes so that I could change pairs and walk home in flats sometimes, or change out of winter boots and into office shoes; almost every woman lawyer, paralegal, or assistant I'd ever met kept shoes at her desk too. (How many pairs are at your desk right now?)
The head of the corporate department walked in, and, turning his back to me, started touching my things, moving my shoes around, and digging in my boxes. This was repulsive to me, and absurd on many levels. For instance, if you were actually going to steal something from your job, would you wait until your last day, and put it in an open box in your office where anyone could see it, instead of smuggling it out before you even gave notice, or removing it electronically, or in some other non-stupid fashion? Moreover, what would I or anyone want to steal from Ramshackle Misogyny? The firm did not have art and antiques like my previous firm, nor did they have valuable trade secrets or the like, and of course I wouldn't have stolen anything even if they had had anything worth stealing. If any thieves had wanted anything from this firm, they could have walked in at 8:00 on any morning, and, undetected, walked back out with it, because no one ever came in that early (see previous post).
Could it be that some lawyers at this firm were known for stealing: partners there occasionally asked me for contract templates from my previous firm -- a place they revered almost too much -- and I would offer instead to draw up a new contract based on their or the client's needs and create a new template for them. They usually said no, and that was the end of that.
In any case, I stood up for myself again and told the head of the corporate department as he was searching my boxes that one box contained feminine hygiene products, and the other contained sensitive firm documents, and he could go through and discover which was which. He paused. Then I told him, no, I was kidding, I had already stolen all the sensitive firm documents last week. Then I told him I was kidding again, and asked him, seriously: what did he think his firm had that I would possibly want? I also told him my prior firm didn't search my belongings. That stopped him in his tracks. He exited my office, I exited his firm, and I never saw him again.
I did have to talk with him on the phone again, however, nine years later.
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| Age 8: I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, on a trip to see my aunt who lived in DC at the time -- taking my first solo airplane trip -- and fell instantly and eternally in love with the monumental and untitled Alexander Calder mobile that hangs and sways in the atrium of the East Building. It is 85 feet long and weighs 920 pounds, and to me then and now it is gorgeous and graceful. When I got back home to Chicago, all I could talk about was the Calder mobile, and my mother bought me a miniature toy version, and then one each for my younger sister and brother who caught Calder mania too. I visit my old friend the Calder mobile on every trip to DC. My sister and brother and mother are less enthusiastic about this pilgrimage that I insist on making during our family vacations, but they understand my enthusiasm. |
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| Reunited: Here I am, ecstatically, with my old friend the Calder mobile, at around age 39 (that was my age; the mobile was "born" around 6 years after I was), visiting DC to attend a business conference for women entrepreneurs. This was about the same time that the ramshackle law firm, which I had quit 9 years earlier, seemed to reach a zombie hand from the grave of my disastrous law career, which I had quit entirely by this time, and tried to pull me into another disaster, in the form of a subpoena to testify in a dispute arising out of a deal the firm had (mis?)handled. |
Deposition day
The word that came to mind when I heard the name of this firm nine years after quitting: yuck. I did not see this coming, yet somehow wasn't surprised:
Nine (9!) years after leaving the ramshackle firm, I received a subpoena in the mail at home, instructing me to appear at a deposition as a witness in a legal matter I had never heard of, involving people I had never heard of, represented by a law firm I had never heard of, which was located in downstate Illinois in a town I had never heard of (I looked it up to find out where it was). I figured they had the wrong Valerie Beck. There was someone else with my name in Chicago who had a dinner reservation at the same restaurant on the same day once, and it was kind of amusing when I arrived for dinner and the restaurant host thought I had just been there, but someone else with my name had just been there. I thought maybe this subpoena was for her.
I called the attorney listed on the subpoena and told him he had the wrong Valerie Beck. Pause. He asked: did you once work at Ramshackle (he didn't call it that, but we are). My heart sank. Yes, I said with some concern. It seemed that the firm where I had worked had represented a client where I was on the deal, and now a former director was suing other directors, or some other tangle had occurred that the lawyer on the phone couldn't give me a full or coherent statement about. Even if he could have, I had (and still have) no recollection of the client, the substance of the transaction, or any of the people involved. I did a lot of deals as a young associate at various firms. Plus, as a young associate at Ramshackle, and an overdressed one at that (previous post), it would have been unlikely that I would have had any contact with company directors or whoever was arguing about whatever here. Yet, ultimately it didn't surprise me that something connected to this ramshackle firm had gone wrong or that people whose company had hired them had now found themselves with additional problems, whether it was the firm's fault or not.
I wanted nothing to do with any of it, because I didn't see how I could help. I told the attorney on the subpoena that as I honestly had no memory of this deal from nine years prior, I would be a useless witness. He said he couldn't talk with me because he wasn't supposed to talk with witnesses (fine, but it wasn't clear whose witness I was; I only knew I hadn't witnessed anything!), and he suggested I talk with the ramshackle partner who had been on this deal, and he told me who it was. Guess who? You're right! It was the head of the corporate department, someone I never wanted to speak to again.
I called the head of the corporate department, and he went into some small talk for a while -- he still seemed fake to me -- how are you, what's new, what have you been doing for nine years, la la la. I told him I had received a subpoena, called the lawyer listed because I thought he sent it to the wrong Valerie Beck as I didn't recognize any of the names listed, and was told by the lawyer that it had to do with Ramshackle. The head of the corporate department asked if I remembered going to this other particular firm for a closing. I told him yes I did remember going to that other firm, because it was just a couple of buildings down and that building had some interesting architectural details on the facade that I had always noticed. But, I told him, I didn't remember anything about that closing or who or what the deal involved. It was just a quick closing without incident. The head of the corporate department had been at there too, sneering at me when I left the conference room to go to the ladies room, and that was the extent of what I remembered about this. I had come onto that deal toward the end, and basically just helped at the closing; I wasn't involved in much that was substantive. How could I shed any light on a dispute between people I didn't know, concerning a deal I didn't remember, that I worked on for a very short time nine years before and that made no impression on me?
The head of the corporate department said that this lawsuit involved a company on that deal. I grew highly suspicious, remembered when one of his partners had tried to make me a scapegoat on another deal (previous post), and asked him outright if he were "throwing me under the bus," trying to make me take the blame for something someone else had done wrong. He said no. Would you have believed him?
Normally I would not complain about doing my duty and giving a deposition or statement if I could be helpful in this kind of matter, although this kind of matter had certainly never come up before. But I couldn't be helpful here; I knew nothing about any of this. Plus, I had founded and was running a busy successful business by this time, Chicago Chocolate Tours, which I was expanding to Boston and Philadelphia with my growing team!
(Click for a fun and upbeat news montage video of yours truly and Chicago Chocolate Tours, my beloved business that I founded in 2005 and ran until 2014, during which time we grew to a team of 50 people in 4 cities! By the way, you might notice anti-semitic and psycho-seeming comments below the video, which were written by a secretary (not one of mine) at Lawyer Job 3 who cyberstalked me, unrelated to the man who stalked me as described below in this post. The comments get so crazy that someone I don't know commented on one of the cyberstalker's comments, addressing the unbalanced secretary and recommending that she "Please seek help you mentally deranged freak troll." I have never been able to get YouTube or Google to remove the hate speech, and now I see it as a ridiculous reminder that hate speech is illegal and is a terrible kind of bullying, and yet here we have another instance where, improperly, law is not enforced or has gaps, or where, improperly, bullying is tolerated by society. It's also a reminder that the mentally ill need care.)
Back to the deposition: I didn't want to take precious moments out of the day for a deposition where I had no evidence to give. Still, there was no way around it. When deposition day came, in Chicago, I told my team where I was going, and off I went. I felt indignant. I felt that not only had the firm wasted my time and disrespected me while I worked there, they were now managing to do the same thing nine years after I quit! I got to the firm where the deposition was being held, not the firm where I had worked, and announced myself. The court reporter who was there to type what everyone said told me she had been a customer and taken a Chicago Chocolate Tour before! That was nice. The deposition was absurd. The attorney who started asking me questions was apparently the partner on the case, and I had spoken with his associate when I called to say they had the wrong Valerie Beck. The partner was an intense man who asked me question after question about people and items and events I had never heard of, was unaware of, or could not remember.
Even the preliminary questions had an absurdity to them:
The lawyer asked me: Are you a lawyer?
A former lawyer, I replied.
But you are a member of the bar?
No, not anymore.
This seemed to surprise him and throw him off track.
He asked: You mean you don't practice law anymore?
I replied: Correct.
But you keep up your bar admission?
No.
No??
No.
He went on: Did you work at the (Ramshackle) firm?
Yes.
Is this your name on this email sent from the firm?
Yes.
Do you remember sending this email?
No.
Do you deny you sent this email?
No.
But you don't remember sending it?
Correct, I don't remember, it's dated nine years ago.
The court reporter glanced up at this point. Maybe I wasn't the only one who thought it was odd to have a witness who didn't remember something which seemed to be the crux of a matter from nine years ago?
The lawyer continued: But you agree that you sent this email?
Yes, if it says I sent it, I sent it.
And on and on and on and on.
He asked me at one point: Is the reason you no longer work at the firm because you did something wrong on this deal and were fired?
Now I was surprised. I told him no, I couldn't remember the deal and wouldn't have done anything wrong, and that if I had been fired instead of quitting, the firm might owe me some severance pay.
He asked: Why did you leave the firm?
I replied: To take a job in-house.
That shut him down for the moment. A few of the other attorneys present gasped audibly. Any law firm attorney could understand wanting to leave a firm to go in-house, because in general people thought this meant less stress and fewer hours. (Little did they know. More on that when we discuss Lawyer Job 5.) And suddenly I started thinking maybe I should have waited and gotten fired, for not making billable hours when the firm didn't have work, or for wearing pearls when I was told I didn't dress casually enough, or for just not being a fit at Ramshackle Misogyny?
The lawyer gathered his intensity again and asked if I remembered this particular person, or that one, or that one, naming names I did not remember ever hearing or seeing.
I replied no, no, again no.
Finally he asked, almost in exasperation:
Do you remember anything or anyone involved in this dispute?
I replied: No, as I told your colleague on the phone when I called after receiving the subpoena which I was convinced went to the wrong Valerie Beck, I do not remember anything or anyone involved in this matter.
The court reporter looked shocked. This is the kind of legal situation you don't see on TV, right, because it's ludicrous.
The lawyer didn't give up. He asked:
My colleague told you to call the head of the corporate department at Ramshackle, correct?
Yes.
How long did you and the head of the corporate department speak?
A short time, maybe ten minutes.
What did you speak about during that time?
Small talk, what we had been doing over the past nine years, then whether I remembered going to the other firm for the closing of this deal, and that a lawsuit had arisen between people involved with one of the companies on that deal.
What else?
Nothing else.
But you said you spoke for ten minutes, didn't you?
Yes, maybe ten minutes, a short time.
That couldn't have taken ten minutes, what else did you discuss?
As I said, nothing else.
You must have discussed something else, didn't you?
No, we didn't discuss anything else.
This line of questioning went on and on, with this lawyer seeming to think or hope that we had discussed something more than we did. My perplexity at what he was getting at was surely visible, and I told him that I didn't know what he was getting at, and that I had no motivation to hide anything as I couldn't remember anyone or anything involved with this anyway. Now I was getting exasperated. What on Earth was I supposed to have discussed nine years after leaving the firm, with the head of the corporate department, a man I had hoped never to talk to again? There wasn't much to say about a deal I couldn't remember. Maybe we could have discussed who shot JFK? Or favorite recipes? And what would that man who seemed to hate me have wanted to talk with me about anyway? Moreover, I wasn't a lawyer on the clock anymore, and didn't time the call for billable purposes. Whatever the theory of this lawyer's case, I was certainly not involved in whatever he thought or hoped I was involved in. Finally, he ran out of questions or energy.
Then the attorney for the other side, who had been a cheerful fellow all day, the type of lawyer who talks about golf during breaks and gives the impression that law is just this thing he does when he's not golfing, asked me just one question:
Would you as an associate have sent an email that a partner directed you to send?
Yes.
Finally it was over, and I went back to my own happy office, filled with happy people -- where we did not search each other's possessions, make snide remarks, or bully one another, but where we worked in alignment with the mission I had set of Uplift, meaning that every interaction with a customer, team member, vendor, philanthropy partner, or the general public, should leave the other person feeling better about him or herself and the world. That's Uplift Through Chocolate, chocolate being the vehicle to deliver the uplift. All of the negative examples at all of the firms helped me create a positive business culture. But I am getting ahead of the story.
The deposition was over, but the nine-years-later disaster still wasn't quite over: sometime later I got another subpoena in the mail, instructing me to appear in court in downstate Illinois, in this same matter, apparently to go over at trial everything I couldn't remember, which I had already said in my deposition that I couldn't remember. I believe in justice and fairness, and I hoped that if someone really was wronged in this case, they could get it made right, but I knew that I was in no position to help with that. They might as well have pulled someone random off a street in Shanghai to be a witness, for all the evidence I could give, which was none. And who were these lawyers, running such a case? I was not impressed, I was again indignant. At the last minute, on the eve of the trial as it were, I received word that the case settled, as I'm told cases usually do, so I didn't have to take a day and a train to go to court in a matter I knew nothing about in connection with a law firm where I was sorry I had ever worked.
These memoirs are about why I left the law, and while this next episode isn't about something that happened at one of my jobs as a lawyer, it happened while I worked as a lawyer, and it highlighted a glaring and dangerous gap in the law itself. Practicing law was not making me happy, and the actual law did not protect me when I needed it to. Here is what happened:
Days of a stalker
Twenty years ago, I had a stalker, and twenty years ago, stalking was not a crime. By stalker, I mean a man who tried to get into my apartment on multiple occasions, showed up at other places he thought I might be, followed me, and phoned me dozens of times a day. By not-a-crime, I mean that in the state of Illinois, and in other states, at that time, it was legal for a man (as most stalkers were and are men) to follow, threaten, or intimidate a woman (most stalking victims were and are women), as long as he didn't physically attack or murder her or attempt to murder her. Today, stalking is a crime. Back then, when I reported my stalker to the police, they were very nice and sympathetic, but said they couldn't do anything -- even though I knew the stalker's license plate number and where he lived and worked -- because no crime had been committed. If the stalker had murdered me, then the police could get involved, because murder was a crime. Stalking was not a crime, so the police could do nothing.
Can you believe it? Just as the law seemed to have no place for me as a lawyer and as a female lawyer in particular, it seemed also to offer no protection to me as someone -- a woman -- being stalked. Stalking is a type of bullying, you might say, and as mentioned it is usually against women. As you know, I cannot tolerate bullying or misogyny. The law did not help, so I took matters into my own hands.
But first, how did the stalking start? As with most stalking situations, I knew the stalker. I met him when some friends from Lawyer Job 3 and I went to a young professionals event one evening, one of the very few times I went out at all with the oppressive work schedule I had then. He seemed nice at first: a clean-cut, educated, successful Internet business owner (not a lawyer). But after a few dates he seemed manipulative, so I told him we weren't compatible and moved on. I moved on; he did not. He started phoning me twenty times a day, sometimes leaving messages, sometimes hanging up. He showed up at my apartment at 4:00 in the morning, and said he had been going to a restaurant near where I worked but since I didn't show up he had to come find me at home. That sounded crazy to me. I told him to go away and never come back.
But he did come back, showing up at my apartment frequently at 4:00 am. I learned that this was closing time for many bars, and I surmised he would drink and then show up. The building where I lived at the time did not have much security: a gentle-seeming 19-year-old Moody Bible Institute student would sit at the front desk at night and do homework. The stalker told the student that if he didn't let him up to my apartment, he'd stalk him too. So the student let him up. There was a security camera that allowed residents to watch live footage from the lobby on our TVs. So I could watch the stalker arrive, watch him bully the student at the desk, and watch him walk to the elevator that would take him to my floor and my door. The stalker would bang on my door, I would call the police, and they would come quite quickly, but by the time they arrived he'd be gone. I felt trapped inside my own apartment during these episodes, a strange and vulnerable feeling. The police officers were always kind and concerned, but wouldn't go get the stalker even though I knew the address of the townhouse he owned and the license plate to his Mercedes which he would park in the pay lot across the street from my building, because again, under the law then, stalking was not illegal.
Well, call me a Harvard Law School grad who took a lot of issue-spotter exams, but it seemed to me that the stalker's actions could fit under existing laws at the time, even though there was no specific stalking law then. For example:
- attempted breaking and entering
- illegal trespass
- assault in the sense of threatening to cause harm
- making harassing telephone calls
- disorderly conduct by showing up drunk at a private residence at 4:00 in the morning
- driving under the influence
- other?
But because it was a "jilted boyfriend" type of situation, the police (mostly men) and law (made mostly by men) at that time saw it more as a domestic abuse situation, which were also not well-policed then, or as just "one of those things." But why should women or anyone have to put up with such disrespectful things? If a stranger tried to enter my home, would this have been seen differently? What if the stalker hadn't been a wealthy white man? What if someone had pounded on a police officer's door at 4:00 am throughout the week, or on the police officer's daughter's door, and made twenty calls a day, and showed up near their workplace, and started following or surveilling the person?
Was law going to show me fairness and justice in my personal life, or at work? (Spoiler alert: no.)
I started to feel incredibly stressed, distressed, and paranoid all the time about this. And I got tired of feeling vulnerable. What to do? I researched and read everything online there was about stalking and ways to handle it, though in some ways that only made me more worried, because no one had a solution. I took a self-defense class, but getting into hand-to-hand combat was not my goal. Since conventional solutions weren't working, I decided to think of new ones. I developed Operation Slumber Party: I asked my friends if they wanted to come to an anti-stalker slumber party, and then when the stalker banged on my door at 4:00 am again, a bunch of us would open the door, let him know he couldn't terrorize me, and tell him not to come back. Standing up to a bully, with strength in numbers. And I'd provide the pizza. My friends said yes, until the day came and they got afraid and canceled.
The next idea: Operation Publicization. In other words, the plan was to let people in the stalker's life know that he was a stalker. In all of the reading I was doing about stalking facts, statistics, how to try to get a restraining order and why sometimes this is a bad idea (there were grisly stories about how restraining orders made some stalkers mad and they changed from non-violent to violent), and more, I came across an article about a woman who was raped and received no justice, so she went to the man's place of work and stood outside with a sign saying he had raped her. Related note: recently, I read about a similar situation in which a woman who was raped and received no justice painted a mural and sign about it on a billboard in Los Angeles. Twenty years later, and we still have to take law into our own hands? Yes, and the #metoo movement is an outpouring of frustration at unfairness, disrespect, and abuse, and at the deep harm inflicted on individuals and on the world when women are kept down. Here is an excellent short article from a global perspective, summing up where we are and where we can go so that women's liberation can help women, men, and our planet: A Buddhist Perspective on Women's Liberation.
Ok, back to the stalker, and what I saw as positive vigilante-ism in the absence of positive law and order: Friends and family and I compiled a list of everything we knew about the stalker, did some additional research, and were able to find many people to whom he was connected, from his mother to his mortgage holder. We called or emailed his gym, his company, his potential investors -- at least one of whom evidently dropped him as a result -- and others, and read off a factual and calmly-worded statement that I had written describing his behavior. When a dear guy-friend of mine called the stalker's mother, who lived in a wealthy Chicago suburb, she paused, sighed, and said: He's doing it again? It seems I was not the first person this stalker had stalked. He wasn't doing anything illegal, right, so evidently he had not faced any consequences. Not yet.
After our barrage of calls and emails, the stalking stopped! For a month. Then the stalker started stalking me again. I was terribly distraught. To give you an idea of how frayed my nerves were: I came home one day and found an unmarked 8 1/2 x 11 envelope, with no To or From address, outside the door to my apartment -- not in my mailbox or in the mailroom, but right outside the door to my unit. Instead of opening it, I left it there, ran inside my apartment, and called the police to report a suspicious package. What if the stalker had left me some anthrax, or a letter bomb? That is what went through my mind. (Today when I receive parcels, I expect there will be chocolate inside.) The police came quickly, a small team with a bomb-sniffing dog. They listened to me explain the situation, and they took some time examining the envelope. They were serious and thorough. They determined that we could open the envelope. We did so, and it turned out not to be a bomb, not to be anthrax, and not to be from the stalker. It turned out to be a job offer from what would become my Lawyer Job 5.
Why did the job send it in an unmarked envelope, and how did it bypass the mailroom or package sign-in? Maybe this should have stood out as some kind of sign of the shadiness and outright criminality that I would see at that job. In a sense, the letter was a bomb in disguise, from a firm that would be involved in one of the most awful corporate scandals in history. More on that mega-disaster to come. The point here is that I was so overwrought, that my first thought upon seeing an envelope outside my door was that it was a murder attempt from my stalker.
Meanwhile, I decided not to wait around and be murdered, but to move. I asked my landlord if I could break my lease, and it turned out he wanted me out, because I was "endangering his doormen," or as I think of them, the poor students who sat in the lobby and let the stalker up to my apartment. I moved rapidly to a very secure apartment building, with a 24-hour doorperson, one of the new wave of amenity-filled rental buildings that started to come onto the scene at that time. I thought of these apartments as vanilla boxes, without any design or style, and loved my apartment that had vintage charm but that lacked effective security features. The only unit available was on a higher floor than I'd wanted -- 51! I'd been on 16 -- and the price was higher than my budget, but I took it for the time being; safety first. The stalking faded away. Maybe part of the fun or the compulsion for the stalker was pounding on my door at 4:00 am, and when he couldn't do that, he found someone to stalk where he could do that again? Or maybe his investors or his mother or someone was able to convince him to stop? Maybe losing an investor finally convinced him to stop? In any case, it wasn't the law or the police who did. I was relieved to get my life back, or what I had of a life with so many law career disasters; still, I was grateful for my life, and outraged at the law.
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| I was going to miss my first apartment in Chicago, a vintage charmer with built-in bookshelf and beautiful details in a lovely art deco building from 1929, which I decided to move out of because it had no security against a man who was stalking me. Sadly, the law also gave me no protection against the stalker. In this photo, I was 29 or thereabouts. |
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| If you'll indulge me, here are a few more scenes of the beloved Chicago apartment I had decided to leave as an anti-stalker maneuver. Here, you can see the area near the door on which the stalker would pound at 4:00 in the morning. You can also see an antique desk that came back with me after I lived in Germany, and a chair from Langdell Library at Harvard Law School; when the Law School administration decided to start re-doing the library as I was graduating in 1996 -- adding air conditioning and women's restrooms for example -- they sold what I considered priceless historical library furniture to anyone who could carry it away, including this chair which I carried away after paying $40 for it. |
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| I bought this chinoiserie end table and its twin at an auction in Chicago for $80 for the pair. I got the navy blue velvet sofa at the famous old Marshall Field's department store. |
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Mementos, books, art, Lake Michigan.
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| From vintage charm to vanilla box: the 24-hour doorman was a big selling point in choosing my next apartment. The white walls, bland carpeting, and popcorn ceilings were not. But: paint! I've always loved interior decoration, even taking classes at night after very long days at Lawyer Job 3 at one point, when I thought I might exit law altogether by becoming an interior designer! I couldn't make the time to finish the program while still working as a lawyer, and the design school had recently been bought by a for-profit educational company that proved problematic at best or really quite shady in some of their dealings with me. I quit the classes, but kept the love of decor that I'd always had, and met a great friend in class with whom I enjoyed discussing ideas and inspiration to take my new place in a new and fun direction. Guess what color I painted the new living room? Hint: most people would say it's a decor-don't for a small space, but I wanted something bold and different, and I got it! External expression of internal rage? Or just very Diana Vreeland? I'll show you in the next installment of these memoirs! |
Terrible lesson: being a lawyer did not protect me from being bullied by my boss, nor did the law protect me from a stalker, or from being bullied in a sense by my past job nine years later.
Positive lesson: I could stand up for myself in creative and authentic ways, and I could walk (run!) away yet again.
But where was my ikigai, my purpose in life combining passion and profession? Maybe in helping get stalking laws passed, or in helping other women implement creative solutions when the law let them down too? Or in art, philanthropy, chocolate?
Today
I looked up the head of the corporate department online while writing this, and he is still practicing law, still at the same firm in its current post-mergers incarnation. He is no longer the head of the corporate department, but co-chair of another department. Maybe we should be glad if he is no longer attempting m&a deals, like the one that reared up nine years after closing? Still, what do you make of the fact the legal profession has a place for him, but not for me? Or of other lawyers at that firm, if you read the previous post? I heard that a young woman who started working at the firm after I left had a terrible time and filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against a partner there. And, I just have to ask: will anyone search the head of the corporate department's boxes when he finally retires?
I haven't looked up the stalker. But several months after he finally stopped stalking me, way back when, after my friends and family and I contacted everyone in his life and told them what he was doing, I ran into him as he was jogging. He looked terrified, and ran away.
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| Photos from ages 29 and 39 are above, so here's a current one at 49: Here I am earlier this year at the Chicago Rita Hayworth Gala to benefit Alzheimer's research, to which a dear friend from college generously invited me! I may or may not be striking a version of a pose from incredible Rita Hayworth's incredible film Gilda while wearing a very similar dress :) (She was 27 when she starred in the movie, since we're counting.) Chandeliers and Calder mobiles, silent auctions and gala events, pearls and individual expressions of femininity, oppression by law and freedom from oppression, authenticity through the ages; we are tying it all together, aren't we, at least in my mind! That's the beauty of hindsight, and one point of memoirs. |
We will move on to Lawyer Job 5 in the next post, featuring disasters involving variations of the misery and misogyny that were hallmarks of my disastrous law career, plus new experiences in that particular type of psychopathic-sadistic culture that can fester and grow in corporate America, plus the firm's central role in one of the biggest corporate scandals in corporate history. My role: I refused to break the law, and was punished by my boss for not breaking it.
To come...!
Valerie Beck
Another powerful episode.
ReplyDeleteWrite on!