On December 12, 1988, Hedda Nussbaum made the cover of Newsweek. There had been other “battered women” on the covers of other magazines—Ms. for one—pretty, posed models, delicately bruised with makeup in subtle tones of mauve and heliotrope, their eyes cast down in simulation of shame or sadness. But nothing like this. Hedda Nussbaum was the real thing. The photo was shot as she testified against her companion of twelve years, Joel Steinberg, who was charged with murder for beating to death the six-year-old girl the couple had illegally “adopted.” (Hired as an attorney to place the child, Steinberg simply took her home.) Hedda Nussbaum’s bruises had healed and the discolorations faded, but her face remained permanently scarred and misshapen, remodeled first by Joel Steinberg and subsequently by Dr. Monte Keen, plastic surgeon—the man-made face of America’s most famous battered woman.
On the cover of Newsweek that face is contorted by grief or remembrance; the jaw sags away as though she were just recoiling from a blow. A tear slides from her left eye, though it is impossible to know whether this tear wells up from emotion or merely leaks from the tear duct that Joel Steinberg shredded beyond repair. In the photo her eyes are cast down or closed; readers can look at her without risking the terrible blank stare of those spent eyes looking back. Day after day in December 1988 that face came into our homes on our television sets, and there in the privacy of our living rooms, our kitchens, our bedrooms, Hedda Nussbaum stared at us. That face made some people weep. It made others want to destroy her. Especially women. Put her on trial, they said. Lock her up. Get rid of her. Just look at what she let him do to her. Look at what she let him do to her child.
At first, reporters could find a point of reference for that face only in the arena. Jimmy Breslin wrote in Newsday, “She looked as if she had just fought Fritzie Zivic in Pittsburgh. Fritzie used to get his thumb into an eye and turn it like he was dialing a phone number.”1 Pete Hamill of the New York Post was “most shocked by the nose.” He wrote: “This is the nose of an old pug, some club-fighting veteran of the St. Nicholas Arena or Eastern Parkway, battered and hurt and healed and hurt again, until it is no longer the nose worn when young.”2 Newsweek too led off with that “boxer’s face—the nose flattened, the left eye distorted, the upper lip still showing signs of a cleft so severe that nearby tissue was used to fill it.”3 The difference, of course, is that fighters earn their faces. Boxing is a sport, while wife beating is merely a national pastime. In the ring, boxers give as good as they get, and afterwards they get paid. For them the face comes with the job. For Hedda Nussbaum, it came with “love.”
She should have died. All the specialists and advocates called in to the case after Nussbaum and Steinberg were arrested on November 2, 1987, said they’d never seen a woman so badly battered yet still alive. A doctor from New York University Medical Center who examined Nussbaum “from head to toe” on November 3, 1987, described the forty-five-year-old woman to the jury as anemic, debilitated, malnourished, wasted, limping, and hunchbacked from osteoporosis. He found “old and new lacerations on her scalp, chunks of hair torn out from the right side of her head, an old ulceration and a new fracture on her nose, a black eye, lacerated upper lip, three- or four-month old fractures on both cheekbones, a scar on the abdomen, bruises on the abdomen and back, eight fractured right ribs, seven fractured left ribs, a very large new bruise on the right hip with many scarred areas around it, old abrasions on the left leg, and two deep, three-inch-wide ulcers on the right leg, which was infected, partly gangrenous, and red and swollen from foot to knee.4 The ulcerated lesions on Nussbaum’s lower right leg were “potentially fatal” injuries, the doctor said, which if untreated “could have led to blood poisoning and cardiovascular collapse.”5
But Joel Steinberg was a skilled and calculating batterer, until the end when cocaine got the better of his judgment; then, being less practiced in assaulting the fragile child, he underestimated the impact of his attack upon her. So it was six-year-old Lisa who died while Hedda sat by, unable to call for help, unwilling to show “disloyalty” to Joel. She wasn’t supposed to use the phone unless Joel was present, listening in on the speaker phone, to tell her what to say. She wasn’t supposed to open the apartment door to anyone, not even her own family, unless Joel was present. “Should I call 911?” she asked him. Only then, with his okay, did she telephone. Only then, did she “run,” as best she could on those ruined legs, to open the apartment door to the emergency team—and after them the police, the reporters, and all the world.
A neighbor who saw Lisa carried away said later, “I always thought it would be Hedda who’d be carried out of here.”6 If it had been Hedda—if she had died—we would have had nothing so terrible as the death of Lisa to forgive her for. At least, if Hedda Nussbaum had been carried out, the victim of gangrene or blood poisoning or a deadly blow, we would have been spared the ordeal of Hedda Nussbaum on the stand telling her terrible story.
Newsweek called it “a chilling tale of drug abuse, systematic beatings and a life of squalor hidden behind a middle-class facade.”7 But what’s “chilling” is the very ordinariness of that “life of squalor.” It’s true that the Steinberg apartment held some drugs and drug paraphernalia and a stash of cash and travelers’ checks not found in the average American home, and it hadn’t been cleaned in a very long time. (Police and reporters who saw it described it as “filthy,” “a pigsty,” and “a cave.”) But mostly the two rooms seem to have been cluttered, like any too-small New York apartment. Steinberg maintained a law practice of sorts out of his home and apparently kept his files on the only bed, his bed, and an accumulation of electronic junk in the living room. But the details that leap from every printed description are commonplace ones: a clean fishtank, a pet rabbit, ironing, Sunday afternoon family “quality time” with Mommy and Daddy and little Daughter cooking in the kitchen (little Daughter with her own small knife) while Baby watches from his “little seat” and the football game drones on the TV in the background.
In the courtroom men talked over Hedda Nussbaum’s injuries. Prosecutor Peter Casolaro wanted Nussbaum to tell the jury about some of Steinberg’s assaults, but because Steinberg was on trial for killing Lisa, not for assaulting Nussbaum, Judge Harold Rothwax had to decide how much the jury could hear—and which incidents should properly be excluded as “merely cumulative” or “inflammatory.” Under the law, which is supposed to temper excessive vengeance, it was considered unfair to Steinberg to give the jury the impression, however true, that he had a long-time habit of assault. At a hearing preceding Nussbaum’s testimony, without the jury, Casolaro outlined thirty-two “incidents”—some of them clusters of multiple assaults—and Rothwax decided which to let in. The newspapers printed summaries, like this list adapted from Newsday’s “Catalog of Abuse”:
1. March 17, 1978. The first time Steinberg struck Nussbaum, hitting her in the eye with an open hand. She required hospital treatment. Admitted into evidence.
2. In 1978. Steinberg gave Nussbaum at least ten black eyes.
3. Feb. 4, 1981. Steinberg ruptured Nussbaum’s spleen in a beating. She had to go to St. Vincent’s Hospital to have it removed. Admitted into evidence.
4. In 1982. Steinberg beat Nussbaum and she sought treatment at St. Vincent’s for broken ribs.
5. In 1983. Steinberg used a broomstick to beat her on the feet, causing injury and scars.
6. Late 1983 through 1984. Steinberg beat her severely and repeatedly during this period. Her face was disfigured, her nose broken, and her ear cauliflowered. Steinberg restricted her movements, presumably so her injuries would not be noticed. Once, when she phoned her father for help, Steinberg threw her down. This point admitted into evidence. Feb. 11, 1984. Her knee was broken in a beating and she limped to Bellevue Hospital for treatment. April 14, 1984. She was beaten and ran away.
7. In 1984. Steinberg kicked Nussbaum in the eye, producing serious injury.
8. In 1984. Steinberg hit Nussbaum in the eye, leaving her with a swollen eye.
9. In 1984. Steinberg beat Nussbaum after she refused to take a cold bath and then threw her into the bath with her clothes on. She ran away.
10. In 1984. Steinberg choked Nussbaum, damaging her vocal cords.
11. August 1984. Steinberg gave Nussbaum a black eye. She lost her job with Random House while staying home to recuperate. Admitted into evidence.
12. Late 1984 to early 1985. Steinberg used a blowtorch used for freebasing to burn Nussbaum, leaving scars.
13. In late 1984. Steinberg took a bath with Nussbaum and then beat her “brutally.”
14. Late 1984. Steinberg used a broomstick handle to beat her hands, leaving them permanently injured.
15. In 1985. Steinberg used a stick to beat Nussbaum’s sexual organs, causing them to swell for several months. In a subsequent beating, she hemorrhaged.
16. and 17. In 1985. Steinberg urinated on Nussbaum twice after throwing her to the floor.
18. September, 1985. Steinberg handcuffed Nussbaum in the bathroom and forced her to sleep there.
19. In 1985. Steinberg handcuffed Nussbaum to a chinning bar in the bedroom and told her to sleep.
20. In 1985. Steinberg struck Nussbaum, chipping or knocking out teeth.
21. Late 1985 to early 1986. Steinberg knocked her down and she cut her wrist by falling against a filing cabinet, causing severe injury and scarring.
22. In 1986. Steinberg hit Nussbaum, knocking out more teeth.
23. In 1986. Steinberg beat up Nussbaum in a car on the way to visit his mother.
24. In 1986. Steinberg hit her head against a wall, causing her to bleed.
25. Late 1986 through 1987. Steinberg beat Nussbaum repeatedly with a metal exercise bar, especially during the two months before Lisa Steinberg’s death on Nov. 5, 1987. Admitted into evidence.
26. In 1987. Steinberg struck Nussbaum with his open hands, splitting her lip repeatedly.
27. In 1987. Steinberg broke her nose again in a beating.
28. October 1987. Steinberg grabbed her by one ankle and one wrist and bounced her on the floor, severely bruising her buttocks.
29. Late 1987. When Nussbaum refused to take a cold bath, Steinberg threw her into the bathtub with her clothes on.
30. In 1987. Steinberg pulled her hair out numerous times.
31. October 1987. Steinberg repeatedly poked his fingers in Nussbaum’s eyes, lacerating her nose once.
32. During the last nine years the couple lived together the physical abuse continued with regularity, “a persistent tool used … to control Miss Nussbaum, or … to break her will.”8
No wonder even Steinberg complained that for some time before Lisa’s death, Hedda wasn’t the woman she had been. He told one journalist that Nussbaum was “in a state” which he described as “trancelike”—though he attributed Nussbaum’s “state” not to physical or mental trauma but to “posthypnotic suggestion” made by someone else. Assistant District Attorney John McCusker described Nussbaum’s behavior at the time of her arrest as having a “total zombie-like quality.”9 When Child Welfare Worker Joseph Petrizzo went to the Steinberg apartment on the morning of November 2 to take away a second illegally “adopted” child, the sixteen-month-old boy then known as Mitchell Steinberg, he found Nussbaum “a mass of black and blue marks.” “Her nose was caved in,” he testified. “Her face looked like it was swollen.… She looked a bit dazed and confused.… She just seemed out of it.” Her daughter had been taken away in a coma to the hospital, and as Petrizzo prepared to take away her second child, “she never said anything.”10
When she took the stand herself, Nussbaum spoke like a woman who had forgotten how. The monotony of her voice, the lack of emotional timbre, the “flat affect” marked her as a severely traumatized woman, afraid to reveal anything in her speech and manner for fear it might be, as always, wrong. That was only to be expected, but Nussbaum kept lapsing into silence. Columnist Pete Hamill noticed that it happened when she tried to speak about the times Steinberg beat her. At those moments, Hamill wrote, “she stops, the eyes stare at nothing, and it’s as if some other image has scribbled across her consciousness, filling her with such fear and trembling that only stillness can ward off the fear.”11
Thirteen months after she hobbled out of that apartment for the last time, Hedda Nussbaum, encouraged by psychiatrists and advocates and teams of lawyers, was just learning how to speak again. Silence, for all its terrors, still was self-protection. To speak was to risk everything. And if she had never spoken, many would have found in their hearts more sympathy; for when she spoke she condemned herself. Then you could feel the public mind set like wet concrete, and harden in judgment, as sympathy for the battered woman evaporated.
At first, as Nussbaum testified, all New York seemed fascinated, and the Times explained why. “Most Can Identify,” said the headline. “Quite simply, people wonder what separates her from them. Her very ordinariness, experts in human behavior say, is the attraction, a reminder that even a life with all the trimmings of stability can slide into disarray.… ‘She crossed the line, and we all know that we have the capacity to cross that line, too,’ said William B. Helmreich, a professor of sociology at the City College of New York and an expert in group responses to public events. ‘That’s frightening. But at another level, it’s reassuring because we know that we didn’t cross that line.’”12 The formula is neat: not “There but for the grace of God go I,” but “There, thank God, goes someone who is most decidedly not me.”
But it leaves unanswered the more critical question: how does a life slide? How does one happen to cross the line? “People may ask themselves,” the Times said, “‘Could it happen to me?’” The answer (which the Times didn’t give) is yes. Judith Lewis Herman reports flatly that “under extreme duress anyone can be ‘broken.’”13 And survivors of severe trauma—combat soldiers, prisoners of war, rape victims, disaster victims, hostages, battered women—universally attribute their survival largely to good luck.14 But who wants to believe that our well-being hinges upon chance? Instead we trace the root of trouble from where it flowers. As we saw in the last chapter, we search the victim for those peculiarities of psyche and circumstance that made the life give way, or, worse, impelled the victim to step across the line herself, deliberate and heedless. Herman says that we try “to account for the victim’s behavior by seeking flaws in her personality or moral character” because, having no knowledge of terror and coercion, we presume that in similar circumstances we “would show greater courage and resistance than the victim.”15 Certainly, as Hedda Nussbaum testified, observers in the courtroom and the enormous television audience sought out the flaws in her.
District Attorney Robert Morgenthau had determined that on November 1, 1987, the night Lisa was taken to the hospital, Nussbaum was too physically and mentally incapacitated herself to be capable of either injuring the girl or taking action to save her; and in July 1988 he had arranged to drop murder charges against Nussbaum in exchange for her cooperation in prosecuting Steinberg.16 But until she took the stand, no one knew whether Hedda Nussbaum would be able to speak at all.
And who knew that when she spoke she would say unspeakable things? She said she had worshipped Steinberg as “God.” She said he had the power to heal. She said he was a wonderful man. She said he had left her alone with the unconscious Lisa for three hours, and during that time she hadn’t called 911 or the pediatrician who lived in the neighborhood because she “trusted” Steinberg; he had said that he would get Lisa up and heal her, and she didn’t want to show “disloyalty” to him. She said that when Steinberg returned she prepared cocaine for him and smoked a little herself, and then for hours worried about Lisa as she half-listened to Steinberg talk. She said that in effect she had let Lisa die. And she said, weeping, that she didn’t know why.
Reporters had a new story. To columnist Gail Collins, writing in the Daily News, Nussbaum’s inaction was “unforgivable.” Weighing one victim against another, she concluded: “Not even Nussbaum’s 32-part itinerary of abuse can make up for her failure to save that dying child on her bathroom floor.”17 Columnist Judy Mann of the Washington Post found “sickening” the “collusion between the state and its key witness to use victimization as an excuse for the most reprehensible behavior.”18 Michele Launders, Lisa’s birth mother, who had sympathized with Nussbaum before the trial, told reporters she found her as contemptible as Steinberg.19 Columnist Murray Kempton thought it “shameful” that the D. A. had “let her go free” with “an official certificate of innocence.”20 Commentators began to inquire pointedly about who was ultimately responsible for Lisa’s death, and talk shows addressed the thorny question of Nussbaum’s “culpability.”21 Author Susan Brownmiller, whose novel based on the Steinberg case was already in the stores, argued on the op-ed page of the New York Times that Nussbaum, “an active participant in her own—and Lisa’s—destruction,” should have been brought to trial.22 Daily News columnist Bob Herbert noted that Nussbaum, “in no danger of criminal prosecution,” was “home free.”23
The question of Hedda Nussbaum’s culpability became the subject of heated debates in the press and in private, especially among feminists. Susan Brownmiller, best known for her book Against Our Will, a history of rape, told reporters that when it comes to domestic assault, “‘classic feminist movement’ theory is wrong.” A battered woman is not simply a victim of a batterer, she said, but a participant in “a sustained relationship between two people,” a relationship in which “a woman decides to stay.”24 Most advocates for battered women, on the other hand, saw Hedda Nussbaum as a victim: a woman so badly assaulted, psychologically and physically, that decision was beyond her. They were dismayed at the sudden wave of “Hedda bashing.”25 Sympathizing with Nussbaum, Gloria Steinem tried to explain the disagreement among women: “Either you allow yourself to realize that it could have been you or you’re so invested in making sure it couldn’t have been you that you reject the victim.”26
Everyone seemed to agree that Nussbaum had a moral responsibility to act for the good of her child, and that no circumstance could make her any less accountable to a higher authority, or if you will, to God. It was all the more tragic then, many thought, that Steinberg’s abuse had rendered her incapable of taking the action she was morally bound to perform. But others, when they spoke of culpability, meant a narrower legal responsibility; they believed her guilty of specific criminal acts, the exact nature of which was also at issue. Reckless endangerment? Criminally negligent homicide? Murder?
Culpability, however, is not a term the law uses. Any person may be culpable—that is, to blame for doing an act (or failing to)—and yet not be legally guilty of a crime; for legal guilt is not based solely upon the commission (or omission) of an act. The law considers other circumstances, such as whether the culprit acted in self-defense or under duress or under the handicap of some mental disease or defect. Thus a person can be both culpable and not guilty at once. So it happened that the District Attorney considered bringing criminal charges against Nussbaum, concluded that no jury would convict a woman so badly victimized herself, and decided not to press for her indictment. Then all at once, as writer Marilyn French observed, Hedda Nussbaum became “really the one on trial, at least in the court of public opinion.”27
In the end, the same disagreement split the jury. When they started deliberations, Judge Rothwax dismissed five alternate jurors, and four of them, all women, spoke to reporters. Three said they would have voted to convict Steinberg of “something,” but it was Nussbaum reporters asked about and Nussbaum the alternate jurors talked about. “I just feel she was to blame,” one said. “I don’t think she should get away with everything.” Nussbaum was “partly responsible,” said another.28 “She’s a very sick woman,” said the third. “She should be convicted of something.”29
The twelve deliberating jurors were divided from the start. When they entered the jury room on January 23, four jurors were reported to be “strongly convinced” that Steinberg was guilty of murder, five “in the middle,” and three holding out for lesser charges because they believed that Hedda Nussbaum had killed the child.30 They emerged on January 30 with a verdict: Not Guilty of murder—but Guilty of manslaughter in the first degree.31
To many legal scholars and reporters, the verdict was mystifying, for the language of the manslaughter charge was a poor match for the circumstances of the crime. Clearly the verdict was a compromise—ending what the Times called “a long wrangle over the technical language and … the relative culpability of Mr. Steinberg and Ms. Nussbaum.”32 After reviewing testimony of medical experts, all twelve jurors finally agreed that Hedda Nussbaum “could not have delivered the deadly blows” to the child. Yet juror Anne Marie King said, “She should have been charged too.” And juror Helena Barthell agreed that Nussbaum should have been charged with “some crime.”33
As for Steinberg, Barthell explained that the jurors “felt there was a lack of proof of his depravity.”34 And “certain jurors,” took the attitude: “’Poor Joel. Joel’s a victim. We have to send a message to the system: ‘You don’t make victims out of nice men like Joel.’”35 Even though he’d beaten Lisa into unconsciousness, gone out to dinner, then freebased cocaine and talked through the night, he might not have realized, in his coked-up state, that the girl was dying. The jury apparently disregarded what it had been told about New York State law: that because ingesting drugs or alcohol is a voluntary act, a person “under the influence” is legally responsible. A person with a mental disorder or defect, on the other hand, is not responsible in the eyes of the law because mental deficiency is a condition for which one does not volunteer. The Steinberg jurors, however, thought Hedda guilty of “something” because of her “sickness,” while Joel’s drug abuse, legally a criminal act in itself, relieved him of legal responsibility for worse crimes. And with such a crazy “wife,” Steinberg came in for female sympathy. Juror Barthell said: “I feel sorry for Joel. He’s been through a terrible ordeal.”36 At his sentencing, Steinberg agreed. “I have remorse about losing my life,” he said. He maintained—and does to this day—that he hadn’t hit anyone. “It’s my loss,” he said. “I’m the victim.”37
People still ask me if I went to the “Nussbaum trial.” Watching the Steinberg trial from Boston, David Douglas who counsels batterers there, understood why Steinberg was “not the focus.” Douglas said it reminded him “of the way the guys we see are so good at pointing the finger at the woman.… These guys are scary, so it’s much easier to confront someone who’s not that scary, which is the woman. Social agencies do that all the time. Battered women get treated like it’s their problem and their fault. There’s something wrong with them for not leaving.”38 That’s what happened in “the Nussbaum trial.” The jurors, the press, and the public ran shy of Steinberg and beat up on Nussbaum. “She’s despicable,” said one reporter.39 “An absolute schmuck,” said a self-described “feminist lawyer.”40 We focused on her. We blamed her. We called her names. We made excuses for him. And somehow, like these neglectful parents, we forgot about the child.
But Hedda Nussbaum—this bad mother, this revolting and culpable creature, this gray and desolated woman—was described perfectly by psychiatrist Elaine Hilberman in a now-classic study of sixty battered women published in The American Journal of Psychiatry—thirteen years ago. Hilberman writes:
These women were a study in paralyzing terror that was reminiscent of the rape trauma syndrome, except the stress was unending and the threat of assault ever present. Agitation and anxiety bordering on panic were almost always present. Events even remotely connected with violence—sirens, thunder, a door slamming—elicited intense fear.… The women remained vigilant, unable to relax or sleep. Sleep, when it came, brought no relief. Nightmares were universal, with undisguised themes of violence and danger. In contrast to their dreams, in which they actively attempted to protect themselves, the waking lives of these women were characterized by overwhelming passivity and inability to act. They were drained, fatigued, and numb, without the energy to do more than minimal household chores and child care. They had a pervasive sense of hopelessness and despair about themselves and their lives. They saw themselves as incompetent, unworthy, and unlovable and were ridden with guilt and shame. They thought they deserved the abuse, saw no options, and felt powerless to make changes.41
A few women Hilberman says, became “frankly homicidal” and a few fought back verbally or physically, but “passivity and paralysis of action more accurately described the majority of these women. Aggression was most consistently directed against themselves, in the form of suicidal behavior, depression, grotesque self-imagery, alcoholism, or self-mutilation.” It’s either that, or kill the batterer, as Hilberman concludes: “Passivity and denial of anger do not imply that the battered woman is adjusted to or likes her situation. These are the last desperate defenses against homicidal rage.”42
I quote Hilberman at length because although her work has been known for more than a decade, it doesn’t seem to have filtered into public consciousness. Rather, with our perverse habit of blaming the victim, we assume that when a victim does not rescue herself, she chooses not to; she chooses instead to stay because she wants or even needs to be where she is: looking like, but not truly, a victim. Further, when a victimized woman is unable to protect her children from her “partner”—as happens in perhaps half of all cases of child abuse43—we conclude that she chooses not to, that she chooses rather to betray them, to collude in their abuse, or worse, to abuse them herself, and that she claims falsely to be a victim merely to escape punishment for her dereliction.44
As a rule, when we contemplate the victimization of our fellow human beings, we have the least sympathy for the worst case. Psychologists know that this is just another common defense by which we distance ourselves from disaster, but it’s curious and disturbing nonetheless, violating at once the laws of logic and the leanings of the heart. No wonder that when the worst case becomes a public spectacle it sets us against one another, loudly defending our views against adversaries who seem bereft of common sense on the one side and compassion on the other.
We set victims against one another, too, in a contest of authenticity or worthiness. Think of the factions of the unfortunate: the “deserving poor,” for example, distinguished from the poor who presumably deserve nothing; bona fide refugees, as opposed to “economic opportunists”; “innocent” AIDS victims, as opposed to those who “asked for it.” And now “real” battered women who have no money or job skills or family, as opposed to Hedda Nussbaum who had all three. “Heroic” battered women who flee. Heroic battered women who save their children. As opposed to Hedda Nussbaum who stayed. Hedda Nussbaum who let the child die.
Illogical though it may be, the greater the abuse, the less our sympathy for the sufferer. We are inspired by those who gallantly pass through hardship, but we despise those who succumb. We admire those who triumph over adversity, but we condemn the full-blown victim. Thus, for many complex reasons, many who followed the Steinberg case—in the jury box, in the press rows, in the papers, on television—came to see Hedda Nussbaum as a “willing” victim, which is to say, really not a victim at all. And by focusing on the victim, they managed to lose sight of the criminal, and the crime.
Women and men on both sides of the divide described Nussbaum either as an active woman willingly participating in “the violent relationship,” and hence no victim, or as a passive and helpless victim of violence, and hence no active woman. In fact, she was something far worse than either side cared to contemplate: an active person reduced against her will to powerlessness, a woman reconstructed as a victim.
We can trace that terrible process in the history of Nussbaum’s relationship with Steinberg. But as we do so, it’s important to remember the distinction between powerlessness and passivity. Powerlessness is a political condition, while passivity is a strategy adopted by the powerless to survive. The process of victimization consists of (1) first putting the victim in a position of powerlessness relative to the victimizer, and then (2) repeatedly impressing the victim with his or her powerlessness, including the powerlessness to escape, until the victim eventually adopts passive and compliant behavior in order to stay alive. Once you recognize the process, you can see the importance of offering help to battered women early on, and if it comes to that, intervening. With some empowering help from the outside, a relatively powerless woman can get free, as most battered women do. Even a woman who seems to be passively complying may be biding her time, waiting for the right moment to escape; she holds her own by acting with extreme caution, and she too needs empowering outside help to get free.45 But once the victim is coerced to believe that resistance is futile, she may surrender voluntary action and judgment, and escape into a detached state of consciousness. Once she is “out of it,” she may no longer be able to seek help herself, or even to respond to it.46 Then, without decisive outside intervention—from neighbors or police or medical personnel, for example—she and her children will be trapped.
In the Steinberg household, where she lived for more than a decade, Hedda Nussbaum was more powerless than most: not a legal wife, not a legal mother, not even a legal tenant—legally she did not exist. But she was not passive. Only later, after her attempts to escape failed, did she try to survive by being passive: by doing nothing that Joel Steinberg did not approve or demand. Her final test came as Lisa lay in a coma on the bathroom floor and Nussbaum, alone with the child for three hours, thought of calling 911, thought of calling the pediatrician, and did not. Life posed her a cruel dilemma, and she chose inaction. “I was trying to be loyal to Joel and save Lisa,” she said in court. “I was trying to do both.”47 But how is a woman brought to the point at which the only possible action is not to act at all?
Batterers share a common aim—to control—but they use whatever tools come to hand. Joel Steinberg was a lawyer. He used words. “He was a fantastic orator,” Nussbaum said. “He was very intelligent, and I loved listening to him talk.”48 They had endless “conversations,” Nussbaum said. “He talked, I listened.” When they met at a party in the spring of 1975, she was thirty-two, good-looking, a rising editor of children’s books at Random House, and he was thirty-three, good-looking, a lawyer, and (like Nussbaum) Jewish. She was drawn to him, she said, by his “bright, shining, alive eyes” and by the attention he paid her.49
They dated for two months, and Hedda broke it off.50 Joel wanted to talk to her every day, spend every moment of every weekend together. Hedda wanted time to herself. But soon Joel came back. Hedda wasn’t busy. They went to dinner. This time he impressed her more—with his brilliance, his success, his friends in high places. He took her to Lincoln Center. He introduced her to the author of a book she was reading. “I couldn’t believe that this special man cared so much for me,” she said. In that respect he was different from other men she’d dated. She used the cliche: “He swept me off my feet.”51 And in all the years they spent together, he never stopped talking.
In the beginning, when “everything was so wonderful,” she was intensely “flattered” by the attentions of this “wonderful” man. But his attention monopolized hers and focused it on him. He monopolized all her free time. He monopolized her career: he took an uncommon interest in her work, coached her on how to get ahead, and when she did get ahead, he reminded her that she couldn’t have done it without him. To Hedda, Joel’s interest came to seem not only “helpful,” but necessary to her continued success.
He monopolized her life: she moved into his apartment in January 1976, and although she held on to her own place for a few months, Steinberg angrily persuaded her to let it go. He monopolized her mind: he let her know she “wasn’t functioning at the level he liked” and set about “helping” her to “improve.” She dropped a therapist she’d seen for a couple of years and accompanied Steinberg to a Reichian “relationships” group. Steinberg himself undertook to “spend hours, usually almost every night, trying to work on and improve” Nussbaum’s “problems.” At his suggestion she took up jogging and dancing; she lost weight and started wearing high heels.52
“He built me up,” she said, but he also criticized her more and more “for her own good.” He criticized especially her failure to be “spontaneous” and to “give” herself sexually. She said she had a lot of “evidence that he was on my side,” but she began to live under threat, anxious that she “couldn’t live up to his standards.”53 The nightly psychobabble sessions increased her anxiety and wore her down. More and more he isolated her: he was rude and overbearing to her family, friends, and coworkers, who predictably avoided the couple, blaming Hedda for having chosen a partner they didn’t like. More and more he made the decisions, he set the standards to an increasingly fine gauge—his complaints were always about “little things,” she said—and he barked out snappy backhanded put-downs, especially in public.
A glance back at the Amnesty International chart of coercive methods (see chapter 3) will confirm that Joel Steinberg’s “help” was textbook brainwashing. Isolation, monopolization, induced debility, threats, occasional indulgences, demonstrating omnipotence, degradation, enforcing trivial demands—Steinberg did it all. Certainly a Greenwich Village apartment seems nothing like a jungle prison camp, but equivalent effects can be produced in any place where a diligent controller can hold his victim in relative isolation—in a religious cult, for example, or a brothel, or a family.54 Typically the effects of brainwashing are capitulation, compliance, dependence upon the interrogator, anxiety, and despair. On Hedda Nussbaum, the effects were predictable and grim.
On December 7, 1977, after two years of Steinberg’s attention, she wrote in her diary: “I must have Joel’s love and approval to survive. I’m worthless and helpless. I am a piece of shit.”55 This capitulation is not “willed”; it is what happens when, under relentless pressure, resistance gives way—when the will is vanquished. “Willing capitulation” is a contradiction in terms—as is “willing victim.” Hedda Nussbaum didn’t volunteer to become a zombie. Against her will, at the expense of her will, Hedda Nussbaum was victimized. Victimize: to make a victim of, especially to make a victim of by deception; to dupe; cheat; gull.56 Afterwards, as facts were revealed to her, Nussbaum said in astonishment: “Everything he told me was a lie!”57 She should have seen it coming. But she didn’t. That’s what it means to be a victim. On March 17, 1978, three months after Nussbaum wrote in her diary, “I am a piece of shit,” Steinberg hit her for the first time—not to gain control, but to demonstrate it.58
Like most battered women, Hedda Nussbaum was “shocked.” Steinberg said he was shocked too, but he “didn’t apologize.”59 Like so many of the most lethal batterers, Steinberg never used “remorse,” insisting either that he beat Nussbaum “for her own good” or that someone else did it; but he routinely followed violence with indulgence. “Afterwards he was very affectionate,” Nussbaum said, referring to that first blow. “We both thought it would never happen again.”60 Actually Steinberg had every reason to think it would happen again, for he had a habit of assaulting people, including a business associate, a colleague’s wife, and two former girlfriends; but that was one of the facts about Steinberg that Nussbaum didn’t know.61
In February 1981, after a beating, Nussbaum sneaked out to St. Vincent’s Hospital where her ruptured spleen was removed in emergency surgery. Steinberg, no doubt sensing he’d gone too far, became indulgent. What followed, Nussbaum testified, was “the best number of months in our whole relationship and in my whole life.”62 In May 1981, Steinberg brought home Baby Girl Launders, to be known as Lisa, and perhaps because the child now kept Nussbaum in place, he stopped the violence for six months. Everything was “wonderful” again.
Nussbaum was thoroughly “in love” in that peculiarly tenacious way that psychologists call “traumatic bonding.” It can happen, they say, when there is a power imbalance in a relationship. The person without power feels increasingly worthless, anxious, and depressed. The person with power feels increasingly self-important. The powerful one comes to depend utterly upon the powerless one for his relative sense of omnipotence—(which explains why batterers usually won’t let “their” women go)—and knowing she doesn’t like the abuse, he treats her nicely when he has to, to keep her from going away. The powerless one, clinging to the big shot as her last hope of affection, “bonds” to the “nice” side of his personality and overlooks the rest.63 The traumatically bonded battered woman “dissociates” one violent episode from the next, seeing no pattern of battering but only an occasional shocking “aberration” having nothing to do with the basically “nice” character of her powerful abuser.64 Hedda Nussbaum put it this way: “I didn’t see myself as being battered. To me, the beatings were isolated incidents. I always thought each one was the last. I loved Joel so much. I always felt there was much more good between us than not.”65
After months of intensive psychotherapy (following Lisa’s death), Nussbaum concluded that her own “fear of abandonment,” induced by her grandmother’s death, and her imperfectly developed “sense of self,” the result of her unusually close childhood bond with her sister, made her an easy mark for Steinberg.66 That may be true—the reasonableness of it apparently comforted Nussbaum—but such fears and imperfections can be found retroactively in all of us, to explain almost anything. Interestingly enough, both Nussbaum’s friends and her detractors diagnosed characterological problems contributing to her fate—different diagnoses, different problems, same fate. What we saw of Nussbaum’s character, however—in interviews, in court, on television—was the product of that fate, not its cause. The effects of traumatic bonding, like the effects of brainwashing, do not depend upon the character of the victim, but upon her situation.67 As Judith Lewis Herman writes: “The most powerful determinant of psychological harm is the character of the traumatic event itself. Individual personality characteristics count for little in the face of overwhelming events.”68
Successful brainwashing enables the interrogator to exercise extraordinary, if not total, mind control of the subject; and it is usually accomplished, as it was in the case of Hedda Nussbaum, without violence. Put brainwashing in the context of an intimate relationship where traumatic bonding is likely to occur, add physical violence, sexual coercion, sexual abuse, and drugs—and the subject’s world rapidly collapses inward. She restricts her movements, censors her thoughts, silences her opinions to match the demands of her increasingly powerful controller. Options disappear. Choice becomes dangerous. She is captive.
Not that Nussbaum didn’t try to find a way out. But when she reached for help, she met only denial, indifference, and blame. What seems extraordinary in this story is the failure of every person who might have helped her. It seems that sheer chance should have produced at least one helpful person among the many to whom Nussbaum turned. On the other hand, the murders of so many abused women and children remind us that there are thousands, like Nussbaum, abandoned by the world.
Late in 1981 Steinberg resumed the physical assaults with greater intensity. He completed Nussbaum’s isolation by beating her so badly so often that in August 1982 she lost her job. Then he destroyed the free-lance work she brought home, so that her employers judged her incompetent; as a result, she lost all paid work and contact with colleagues. Steinberg put her to work himself, as a paralegal, in his service, without pay, at home. (As Lisa lay dying, Nussbaum was dutifully straightening Steinberg’s files.) He induced her to stop seeing her friends; and in 1983, claiming her parents had “a terrible effect on her,” he barred them from the apartment. Once when Steinberg was out, she called her father to come and get her; but Steinberg returned while she was packing, beat her up, and, when her father arrived, ordered her to send him away. Steinberg made a rule after that: Nussbaum couldn’t leave the apartment without his permission. (“I missed my parents,” she said, “but I was actually relieved when they stayed away because I began to believe the things Joel told me about them.”)69 Towards the end, he told her they weren’t her real parents anyway.
In 1983 and 1984 Steinberg took to freebasing almost nightly and stepped up the violence. In February 1984, feeling she couldn’t take any more, Nussbaum escaped and walked to a shelter for homeless women, which referred her—because she had a broken knee—to Bellevue Hospital. Although she made up a cover story about a mugging, Bellevue doctors recognized her as a battered woman—and called Steinberg. They held her a few days in the psych ward where she repeated to them as “fact” Steinberg’s obsessive fantasy: that she was involved with, and had been beaten by, a pornographic sadomasochistic cult on Long Island.70 Then they told Steinberg to take her home.
Two months later she escaped again to the office of an old friend’s brother. She asked to stay with his family for a while, but he told her she “owed” something to Joel. He phoned Joel to come and get her. Some time later she took a train to New Haven and spent two days with a former Random House colleague; the woman turned her over to a social worker who telephoned Steinberg and sent her home. Later in 1984, after a beating and a prolonged ice-water “bath,” she ran in her nightclothes to a doorway down the street; someone sent her in an ambulance to St. Vincent’s Hospital. And there she telephoned Steinberg so he wouldn’t “worry.”
The very first time she fled to a hospital, after Steinberg first hit her in 1978, she told the doctor (a woman) that her boyfriend hit her; then, fearing legal consequences and Steinberg’s wrath, she asked the doctor to change that part of the report—and the doctor did. So Nussbaum learned right away that the authorities didn’t particularly want to hear how she got injured. Nevertheless, each of her subsequent escape attempts carried her a little farther, lasted a little longer—until someone to whom she had turned for help notified Joel Steinberg and sent her back. On that last sad trip to St. Vincent’s she called Steinberg herself, exactly like a child who wants to run away, but knows she will be punished for crossing the street. In December 1985 she got all the way to LaGuardia Airport, planning to flee to another ex-colleague in St. Louis, but she telephoned Steinberg, again so he wouldn’t worry, and never got on the plane.71 During that period, when Nussbaum was trying to flee, someone reported the couple to the Child Abuse Hotline. Caseworkers who visited the apartment found nothing wrong with the family, and Nussbaum never tried to leave it again.
Steinberg increased “disciplines”—such as the ice-water baths—to reinforce her habit of compliance and increase her debility. He deprived her of food; her weight dropped from 125 to 100 pounds.72 He deprived her of sleep. He assigned her the floor, often without a blanket; and in the last months, as his cocaine habit rocketed out of control, he kept her up most of the night—on her feet, so she wouldn’t doze off—listening to him talk. (He slept during the day, while Nussbaum looked after the children.) He degraded her more and more—urinating on her, beating her sexual organs—and now she lived constantly under the threat of his violence. The beatings “hurt a lot,” she testified. “I hated it and I told him that I didn’t want him to keep doing it,” she said. “But I had a problem getting angry then.”73 “He always warned me just before he’d hit me,” she said. He listed one by one the offenses for which he was about to beat her. She testified, “That was the time I was most afraid of him.”74
Paradoxically the threat of violence bound her to Steinberg even more closely. “I was very connected to him,” she testified. “Not like someone who hurt me.”75 Psychologists studying hostages and terrorists find similar bonds. One study observed that hostages in life-threatening situations may experience “spontaneous identification under stress” and “become satellites of the person who threatens their life.”76 Other studies of hostages describe “traumatic psychological infantilism,” a condition which amounts to being “scared stiff.” One expert calls it “frozen fright,” a state common to hostages and to battered women “brainwashed by terror.”77 The victim may appear to be behaving normally, albeit without much animation, but is in fact totally focused on survival, concentrated utterly on the terrorist or abuser. As the experts put it: “The condition of traumatic psychological infantilism causes the victim to cling to the very person who is endangering her or his life.”78 (Nussbaum said of Steinberg: “I needed him and wanted to please him.”)79 Psychologists studying hostages also describe a characteristic attitude shift, technically a “pathological transference.” The victim sees that the terrorist has the power of life and death over him, sees that so far the terrorist has let him live, and comes to think gratefully of the terrorist as a “good man.” (“I always believed he meant to help me,” Nussbaum said of Steinberg.)80
Taken together, these two phenomena—traumatic psychological infantilism and pathological transference—comprise the Stockholm Syndrome, that peculiar psychological somersault by which a hostage aligns himself with his captors and their concerns, and against his rescuers. The Stockholm Syndrome may account for attitudes and behavior which to onlookers can only seem inexplicably bizarre—such as Patty Hearst’s “enlistment” in the Symbionese Liberation Army. Such as the promise of an American male hostage upon his release from the 1985 TWA hijackers: “I will be coming back to Lebanon. Hamiye [one of the captors] is like a brother to me.”81 Such as the sentiments Colleen Stan expressed in notes to Cameron Hooker, the man who kidnapped her and for years raped and tortured her and kept her locked in a box under his bed: “You know how to make me feel good about myself. And I love you so much for it.” And “my love for you is growing with every changing day. You fill my life with happiness and love. And I pray that that happiness and love will never end.”82 Such as the answer Hedda Nussbaum gave, when asked what she thought about bringing a baby into the violent Steinberg household: “My perception of Joel was that he would be a good father and not continue to hurt me or certainly hurt a child.”83 Such as Hedda Nussbaum’s belief that Joel Steinberg “had supernatural … godlike powers.” Such as Hedda Nussbaum’s hope: “to spend the rest of my life with him.”84
This is not to suggest that Hedda Nussbaum was simply a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome. There are too many differences between the experience of hostages and those of battered women for such a tidy comparison. Most hostages are male, for one thing, men still being more “important” in the world, more likely to lead consequential public lives. Hostages usually are held in groups in which they can support one another, or at least infer from the presence of other adult victims that their victimization is not their own fault, while battered women are isolated individually. Hostages usually are held briefly, often a matter of hours or days; battered women usually are held longer. Hostages are rarely subjected to serious physical violence or abused sexually; while battered women (and some female hostages) regularly suffer physical violence, sexual abuse, and rape. Hostages know that authorities are working to free them, while battered women learn that no outsider is likely to intervene, even when they ask for help. Hostages know they’ll be treated with sympathy when they’re released, perhaps even as heroes, appearing on television, lunching at the White House. Certainly they’ll never be blamed for having been taken hostage. But battered women know they’re likely to be found at fault.
In short, battered women are so much worse off than hostages, that it seems unfair to compare them—except perhaps in the effects of captivity under threat.85 When they can’t get away, when they feel the threat of death over their heads, battered women, like hostages, may be scared stiff; trying to survive, they may focus completely on the abuser, and in extreme cases, like that of Hedda Nussbaum, they may come to think of the abuser as “a good man,” even perhaps a “god.”
The threatened hostage instinctively focuses on the captor. The brainwashed subject, focused by the interrogator, focuses on the interrogator. And if ever one human being focused on another it was Hedda Nussbaum on Joel Steinberg. Like the god she thought he was, he issued “commandments” and she wrote them down. “If he was displeased with some of my behavior,” she said, “we’d have long talks about it and he’d have me write ideas that were beneficial to me. I would write them repeatedly. I would write things about how to improve myself so I could look back at the book and improve as a person.”86 She was a writer. She wrote.
But all she wrote was what he dictated. For example, an assignment introduced in evidence at Steinberg’s trial was headed: “My goals in terms of Joel’s interest.” They included: “Give myself sexually,” a rule always prominent in Steinberg’s program. “Be more direct. Learn to really care for Joel and show it. Learn to take risks. Be honest. Be spontaneous. Be responsive. Be alert and aware. Get bedroom cleaned up. Get kitchen cleaned up.” She wrote pages and pages of loopy script listing things she should and would care about, all of them boiling down to Joel. “I want to care about Joel’s hair,” she wrote. “I will care about Joel’s hair.” Next line: “I want to care about Joel’s clothes. I will care about Joel’s clothes.” Next line: “I want to care about Joel’s work. I will care about Joel’s work.” And so it went, through Joel’s “shaving,” Joel’s “feelings,” Joel’s “shirts,” Joel’s “dinners,” Joel’s “health,” Joel’s “happiness,” Joel’s “problems,” Joel’s “diet,” Joel’s “future,” Joel’s “teeth,” Joel’s “legal malpractice insurance,” Joel’s “goals,” Joel’s “image,” Joel’s “concern,” Joel’s “recreation,” Joel’s “bike riding,” Joel’s “fun.”87
There were “punishment lessons” too, in which Hedda had to write Joel’s instruction ten times. Most of these lessons were upbeat and inspirational, aimed at instilling in Hedda the drive she needed to get the kitchen cleaned and to go on caring about Joel’s teeth despite her depression and her flagging health. “Can do.” “Will do.” “Spontaneity creates energy.” “I feel better when my energy is up.” The rest were clear lessons in compliance, which apparently even then was not sufficient, not quite perfect. “Anger is destructive, not constructive.” “Self-defense is regressive, not progressive.” “Arguing, being defensive and negative, reinforces bad habits.” And another frequent assignment: “I will not resist Joel.”88
To survive, powerless Hedda kept active and busy being passive: busy denying what was really happening, busy paying attention to Joel, busy caring about Joel and showing it, busy giving herself sexually, busy being afraid, busy being anxious, busy trying to see everything Joel’s way, busy—when she could think of it—taking care of the children. Busy writing. Busy improving as a person. “Adoption of these submissive postures is an instinctive response to a life-threatening situation from which the victim cannot escape,” the experts say.89 Diplomats and international businessmen who may not trust their submissive instincts can now get behavior training for survival from expert psychologists, just in case they should be taken hostage. They’re taught not to be aggressive or hostile or angry or “to develop any negative transference.” They’re taught to be passive and submissive and docile without lapsing too far into active and annoying obsequiousness. They’re taught to behave in a “feminine” way. They’re taught to behave like Hedda Nussbaum. Hedda Nussbaum apparently figured it out for herself, or did it by instinct, and for a long time, it worked.
Certainly no one helped her. Not her co-workers, who said impatiently that they’d told her to leave. Not her parents or her sister, who when ordered by Steinberg to stay away, stayed away. Not her friends, one of whom talked endlessly to reporters about what a wonderful woman she’d been years ago, and about how he’d noticed, when he called on Steinberg in recent years, the strange way she lurked, half-hidden, in the background, looking like a bag lady. Not the school administrators, who didn’t seem to note Lisa’s bruises and matted hair and disheveled appearance, even when teaching assistants pointed them out. Not the child welfare worker who in 1984 found nothing wrong with the Steinberg “family.” Not the doctors at one hospital or another who patched up Nussbaum and sent her back to Steinberg, like a wounded soldier back to the lines. Not the neighbors, some of whom listened for years to Nussbaum’s cries. (One said: “Ten years ago it was unbelievably loud—screaming and yelling.… in the last couple of years it got much more quiet, but she was still getting beaten up very badly.”)90 They told reporters they’d called police time and time again for a decade, but the precinct records showed only one call, less than a month before Lisa’s death.91 Not the police, who responded to that anonymous domestic violence call on October 6, gave Nussbaum some printed information about Family Court, and left without making an arrest. Not the State Police, who, having been alerted by a toll collector that a child in a car was being abused, possibly kidnapped, stopped the car, talked to Steinberg, photographed Lisa, and waved them on their way together—and later reprimanded the alert toll collector for having sent them on a wild goose chase.
To be fair, Joel Steinberg could be an intimidating man. Nobody wanted to tangle with him. “He was big, he had connections,” said a woman from Random House.92 “He was a lawyer,” said the state patrolman. “What could we have done?” asked Nussbaum’s sister.93 The New York City Police, when they went to the apartment on October 6, had both the power and the authority to arrest Steinberg, like any other perpetrator of assault, on probable cause—that is, if they had cause to believe an assault had taken place—but instead they left it up to Hedda Nussbaum. A police Department spokesman first reported that Nussbaum had been “hit in the face,” had only a “slight injury,” and “refused” to press charges; but Police Officer Glenn Iannatto later testified that when he and his partner finally got inside the apartment—after talking for half an hour with Steinberg through the door and summoning a sergeant to back them up—they found Nussbaum “covered with bruises.” “We observed that her face was pretty battered,” he testified. “She had bruises, a swollen lip, a bruise about her eye. We couldn’t see much of her body. She was holding [her] housecoat up around her neck. She kept saying she was okay.”94 They took her word for it. (Why is it that so many male police officers, notoriously skeptical when a woman reports rape or battering or threats of violence, take a bruised and bleeding woman at her word when she says she’s “okay”?) They left Hedda Nussbaum to take care of her bruises, and the man who bruised her, all by herself.
That’s how it happened that everything came down to Hedda Nussbaum’s choice. Lisa, neglected, abused, terrorized, and finally pounded or shaken into a coma, lay on the floor, and Hedda Nussbaum had to decide what to do. She didn’t know what was wrong with the child, who “seemed unconscious.” (She asked Steinberg, “What happened?” And Steinberg replied: “What’s the difference what happened?”)95 Nussbaum checked Lisa’s eyes, her neck pulse, her breathing. She pumped her chest and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She testified that when Steinberg went out for dinner, leaving her alone with the child, she did “nothing”; but in fact she continued to do quite a few things, dabbing at details in the feeble, ineffectual way of a person who fears the consequences of a mistake. (Much later, trying to help Steinberg, the “healer,” she tried to look up the problem in a medical dictionary, but she passed over the word “coma” as “too permanent.”) Lisa drooled. Hedda wiped her face. Lisa soiled her underpants. Hedda took them off and washed them. Lisa lay still. Hedda sat still and watched her. When Hedda figured out that her constant watchfulness had no effect on Lisa, she decided she could safely do something else. That’s when she went to work on Joel’s files. But she kept checking Lisa’s breathing and her pulse. And she thought about making a phone call—to 911, or to the doctor.96
There seemed to be a choice involved, between helping Lisa and being loyal to Joel. As she said, she wanted to do both. Who knows what thought she was capable of at that moment? We know she didn’t want to anger Steinberg. We know she counted on him to help. And we know that nobody else ever had helped her. So there was a certain cruel logic to her decision, though it looked as though she simply failed to act, too passive to do anything; and perhaps that’s all there was to it. In any event, Hedda Nussbaum’s failure was a measure of Joel Steinberg’s success. It was also a measure of society’s failure to help either the woman or the child.
Yet we resist the thought that what happens to others may be out of their hands, and that it may consequently fall to us to protect them. For that would imply that what happens to ourselves may be out of our hands, that things may befall us, that in the face of deliberate evil, we may go under. Far better then, despite all we know of terrorism and victimization, and of the collusion of those who look away, to blame the victim. To that end, journalist Daphne Merkin assured readers that somewhere in Nussbaum there were “needs being met.”97 And writer Joyce Johnson reported that Hedda Nussbaum definitely had an “appetite for self-annihilation.”98
To that end too, it’s useful to postulate another party, a secret or subconscious inner being, to take the rap. Thus, Merkin wondered “if somewhere in Hedda Nussbaum is a woman waiting to be beaten—to be pummeled out of her senses.”99 And Joyce Johnson, discovered in Hedda Nussbaum a “dangerous, second self” who “pressed to be released,” a Hedda “underneath” who “burned to violate taboos, to do things and let things be done to her that were impermissible.”100 Murray Kempton detected the same struggle, but with the players reversed: Hedda Nussbaum (the visible one) “in active pursuit of the destruction of her inner self.”101 And Susan Brownmiller, writing in Ms. about Hedda Nussbaum on the witness stand, saw “what was left of her shriveled soul” fly across the courtroom “to the defense table to rest at Joel’s side”—figuratively speaking, you understand.102
But such literary excess is not innocent. It practices a deception upon readers by presenting as a kind of observed fact something the writer has entirely imagined. Worse, it fabricates a blameworthy woman and passes her off as a resident in the body of a real woman who suffered real harm. This is the worst kind of psychological second-guessing, suggesting guilt by association: the inner woman is guilty, so the outer woman must be too. Readers thrilled by the titillating prose may forget that the guilty inner woman lurks not in the real woman but in the minds of the writers. This kind of ill-informed commentary has other dangerous implications as well. It privatizes a political act—the domination of three people (a woman and two children) by another. It represents a long series of (male) criminal acts as a (female) psychological problem. It reduces a social problem to an individual one. By recasting forcible domination as romance, life-threatening assault as eccentric love, and sexual abuse as sophisticated consensual kinkiness, it draws the musty nineteenth-century curtain of privacy again over woman beating, precluding altogether the public discussion of social policy and social change. And it obscures the fundamental point that because women have an absolute right to be free from bodily harm, aggravated assault is aggravated assault, even in the odd case where a woman’s perverse second self feels the need to be bludgeoned into oblivion.
To be sure, in the wake of Lisa’s death, many commentators and public officials raised issues of social policy and practice, suggesting communal responsibility for children like Lisa, and even women like Hedda Nussbaum. They raised disquieting questions about the role of schoolteachers, neighbors, doctors and hospitals, police, and child welfare workers. But the Times, the “newspaper of record,” which had joined New York City’s more flamboyant papers in weighing the “culpability” of Hedda Nussbaum, warned against such fruitless “speculation.” In a remarkable editorial writing finis to the Steinberg case, the Times said: “to speculate too much about society’s failure to protect this child is to miss the message of the Steinberg case. Lisa Steinberg died because she was living with brutes.” What we have to learn from this case is that “we remain fascinated by the abominable.”103 So much for wife and child abuse. Hedda Nussbaum and Joel Steinberg become abominable together, a partnership of “brutes,” joint victimizers of a “pretty little girl”—whose death seems as inevitable as it was sad and “fascinating.”
Still, commentators went on about Hedda Nussbaum—and the second Hedda Nussbaum and the inner Hedda Nussbaum—and we forgot all about the simple, obvious questions like: How come Officer Iannatto didn’t arrest Steinberg, like he’s supposed to? And: How can you protect a child if you won’t protect her mother? Joel Steinberg’s assaults on Hedda Nussbaum were criminal, no matter what the character of the woman and no matter what the nature of the relationship between them, just as his assault on Lisa amounted to murder; but because we don’t hold him fully accountable for one, we don’t hold him fully accountable for the other. In the end Steinberg got off with a manslaughter conviction and a sentence of 8⅓ to 25 years for killing the child Lisa—and no punishment of any kind for what he did to Hedda Nussbaum.104
A few weeks after the Steinberg trial, reviewing an historical study of family violence for the New York Times Book Review, sociologist Kenneth Keniston observed that “the fact of wife beating … was once acceptable if it conformed to ‘the rule of thumb’ (no rod thicker than the husband’s thumb could be used). Today, the same fact is morally (and legally) unacceptable.”105 So reasonable men and women would like to believe. But these days, it seems, even the rule of thumb does not apply. Joel Steinberg bludgeoned Hedda Nussbaum with a steel exercise bar as thick as a man’s arm, and when we learned this fact, reasonable people, influential people, “feminist” people, said the fault was hers, or at least that being bludgeoned was no excuse for being a bad mother.
Steinberg used to beat up Nussbaum, then make her sit down with him to watch television as though nothing had happened. Thus is violence fastened to the victim alone, subsumed in the fairy tale of the loving American family, and “normalized.” For months we watched that woman with the boxer’s face battered again and blamed, not only for failing to protect her child, but for her own battering. (Steinberg used to say to her: “Just look at what you’ve done to yourself!”)106 Then academicians, journalists, and government and criminal justice authorities reassure us that our society regards wife beating as morally and legally wrong. It is as though nothing has happened. Although one of Nussbaum’s neighbors, who remembered that years before “she was an attractive human being,” said that watching the woman go downhill was almost “like watching the disintegration of a person.”107