Washington, D.C., is completely still as I walk the perimeter of the main courthouse looking for the one door I was told would be open. It’s after ten p.m. on a Saturday night, two weeks before Christmas. Snowfall is expected and, in typical D.C. fashion, an overly thick layer of salt has been poured in anticipation and now crunches under my shoes, an ominous reverberating sound in the eerie downtown quiet. I’ve spent plenty of time here during the day, when it’s bustling, filled with attorneys and residents and often tourists who mean to be at the National Gallery but made a wrong turn somewhere around Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourth Street. There’s little that feels creepier than a bureaucratic building in a major city in the wee hours of a weekend night. Plus, I can’t find the one unlocked door.
I circle the entire city block that the courthouse takes up, and then retrace my steps. The building is made from smooth Indiana limestone, looming architectural squares with narrow windows built in. Finally I see the guard on duty, camped out behind the main entrance, obscured from view by the darkness and the door’s frame.
“I saw you pass the first time,” he says, teasing. He introduces himself as the “popcorn man.” Provider of snacks to the unlucky folks required to be here at this hour. Indeed, the faint smell of popcorn lingers. “Hang on just a beat,” he says, then dials an office upstairs.
Washington, D.C., is a strange place to live. It carries an outsized reputation, given how relatively tiny it is (sixty-eight square miles, a third smaller than Boston, though both have about seven hundred thousand residents). When people from other areas talk about it, it’s either staid and boring (New York and Los Angeles) or full of corrupt, morally bankrupt people (most everywhere else). I like to tell people that it’s a lot like Los Angeles—another city that carries a single unshakable association to outsiders. But the reality is that in both cities you can carve a life entirely separate from that association. Aside from the one time my daughter’s school trip was halted by a presidential motorcade, there’s very little that daily reminds me I’m in the nation’s capital. To me, the city’s most enduring characteristic is the way in which it can often hold an absolute dichotomy: a national government that may or may not have anything at all to do with the residential context in which it is operating. Today is a case in point, where we have a government composed of a conservative majority, and a citizenship comprising the most politically liberal people in the nation.1 Local government policies are so progressive that a friend of mine who works in government once joked to me that we were practically a socialist city.
To me this means that Washington, D.C., is the perfect city from which to view policy at the macro level and people at the micro. Here in this small urban area, where all the problems of any city—lack of affordable housing, crime, poverty, violence, gentrification—battle for extremely limited resources, Washington, D.C., incorporates many of the country’s more recent innovative programs. D.C., like a growing number of other towns and cities across the country, has taken the philosophy of coordination and communication that advocates like Ellen Pence, Kelly Dunne, Kit Gruelle, and others have espoused for decades, and tried to graft it onto the domestic violence field here, all across the city. And that is why I’ve come here on this winter night to the eerie courthouse, to see the hinge upon which this operation rests, something called the response line.
The popcorn man gives me the thumbs-up, hangs up his phone, and directs me to the elevators. The minute the doors open onto the fifth floor, I am immediately lost in a series of symmetrical, identical corridors for what is clearly a long enough amount of time that I hear a lone voice around a corner call out, “Hello?” It’s a woman, I learn, who has been here just shy of ten hours and who will be leaving momentarily. “Don’t worry,” she tells me. “Everyone gets lost.”
DC Safe runs the response line twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They have thirty advocates in total, and in addition to whomever answers the response line, there are also another two advocates on call at home. The orders of protection they do here are all civil. Unlike High Risk Teams, or larger community coordinated responses, they focus on the very short term—just days, usually—in the hopes of getting a victim to a place where he or she can make clear-headed decisions for the longer term. Primarily, police are the ones calling from on-site situations of domestic violence in one of the city’s eight wards. Advocates then formulate an immediate plan for victims and will most often call them back and discuss this plan in the minutes after a perpetrator has been arrested. This means that the response line is a fulcrum with a limitless number of spokes. Advocates can look up dockets for officers to find out if there are orders of protection in place, or warrants for arrest, or other pending cases. But they also help victims in an almost endless constellation of fairly small but significant ways. They have partnerships, relationships, and contracts with agencies all across town in various capacities: shelters, yes, but also locksmiths, grocery stores, victim services, hotels, attorneys. If an officer calls the response line, the advocate can arrange for shelter for a couple of nights, or get a bag full of diapers and formula out to a victim who’s fled her house, or get her connected to a forensic nurse at a local hospital who is trained to find domestic violence injuries, or get her a grocery store gift card if an abuser controls all of their money, or pay for a taxi to get to safety. Advocates walk clients through the system of obtaining an order of protection, how to apply for transitional or longer-term housing, and how to access free legal assistance.
But DC Safe also has advocates ride along with police whenever possible. They go out on domestic violence calls with a dedicated officer, and can field victims’ needs immediately. Many jurisdictions are embedding domestic violence advocates more and more often in police departments (New York City and its five boroughs aims to have them in every precinct by 2019), and some, like Cleveland, have been doing this for years. DC Safe is unique in that it wants to formalize the process of advocates being not just in police departments across all of Washington, D.C., but actually in cars on ride alongs with officers. They would eventually like to have an advocate in a zone car on every shift, as well, but at the moment, the organization simply doesn’t have the personnel. The night I went on a ride along in a northeast ward, there was an advocate in another car—in a different ward—but we never crossed paths.
Natalia Otero, the cofounder of DC Safe, along with Elizabeth Olds, told me that in the throes of a crisis, victims are not in a position to make the kinds of informed decisions they often need to make to ensure their safety. Victims and abusers come to domestic violence services through police and crisis centers, of course, but also through emergency rooms, school administrators, coworkers, and clergy. So Otero’s challenge was how to get victims over whatever hurdles kept them in place so that they could make better informed decisions. Police reports are full of victims fleeing with nothing, not even shoes, coats, identification. A woman I once interviewed in San Diego had spent a weekend imprisoned in her home; she and her boyfriend finally drove to a convenience store, and as he pulled back into their driveway, she opened the car door and sprinted to a car backing out of a neighboring driveway. She had no money, no identification, no cell phone. In the moment, she had one single thought: get away. She didn’t think of where she’d go or how, or even who to call for help. It was just those two words: get away. Victims focus on small questions because the big ones are often too difficult to face in moments of chaos and fear. Otero told me that the biggest difference she sees when a victim has basic needs met for a day or two or a week is “their level of competence. They’re in such a better position to make longer-term decisions.”
Otero and I talked at a restaurant in Penn Quarter just a few minutes’ walk from the courthouse. DC Safe has so many partner agencies, so many funding needs, and so many plans and programs going on that she is in constant motion. She tells me she knew early on of the High Risk Teams and Danger Assessments and Campbell. She’d worked in domestic violence for years, but her background was business. When she graduated from Georgetown University with a business degree, she was approaching the problem not so much as a social issue but a challenge for a business, a market with unmet needs. Washington, D.C., was getting thirty thousand domestic violence emergency calls annually with no way to categorize or address those calls. “We needed one central clearinghouse, one organization to be the entry point for all the many first responders across the city,” she told me. And she wanted it to be in the courthouse, where access to records and to prosecutors and to judges could be procured. She began the response line full-time in 2011 and DC Safe now serves more than eight thousand clients a year.
I want to believe all this is making a difference, coordinated community responses like DC Safe’s program, the High Risk Teams, advocates partnering with police, abuser intervention. I want to believe that we’re getting better at working with the victims and intervening with the perpetrators, that we’re recognizing the vast and endless ways domestic violence devastates families and communities. And I want to believe all of this is a national call to action. Yet as I write this, I can’t help but think of how I sat in that ghostly midnight courthouse fewer than six blocks from the United States Capitol where Congress just weeks ago in September failed to reauthorize the 2018 Violence Against Women Act. Instead, it gave VAWA stopgap funding for another three months and this time—unlike when VAWA first passed with bipartisan support—there is not a single GOP cosponsor.2 And just today I got both an e-mail and a Facebook post alerting me to a new report from the Violence Policy Center that says that murder of women by an intimate partner has increased by 11% since 2014.3 This report, I should note, only covers single incidents, not mass shootings, familicides, or any other combination of deaths. And then, just days after this report was released, our current president stood on the White House Lawn and said in the aftermath of a contentious Supreme Court hearing, “It’s a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of.” He said this on October 2; two days into Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which he failed to mention.
There are other dismal signs, too. A high profile case came out of Cleveland, a former judge named Lance Mason with a known history of domestic violence killed his ex-wife, a beloved teacher named Aisha Fraser. It wasn’t Martina’s district; the murder happened in Shaker Heights. But it made me wonder just how much we can expect any one person to make a difference. Then, in another mass shooting in Chicago on Monday, November 19, 2018, at Mercy Hospital, the fact that it began as domestic violence was left out of nearly all media coverage. There were three victims at Mercy Hospital, but the target was Dr. Tamara O’Neal, the ex-fiancée of the shooter. A headline from Melissa Jeltsen at the Huffington Post captured it best: “Tamara O’Neal Was Almost Erased from the Story of Her Own Murder.”4
There are other markers that worry me, too, especially those invisible ones. An uncomfortable misogyny creeping into areas that had, until now, seemed fully resolved to the idea of women’s equality. Congress, for example. The White House, with our current “grab ’em by the pussy” president, for another. The Supreme Court, for a third. Kit Gruelle’s quote about our current political situation haunts me more often than I’d like to admit: “We are leaping backwards at an obscene pace.”
There is more cause for concern about gun violence. Despite federal law that gives states and jurisdictions the right to take guns away from convicted abusers, including stalkers, there is ample evidence that even in this we are failing. Between 2010 and 2016, the number of guns manufactured in the United States nearly doubled, from 5.5 million to 10.9 million—and the overwhelming majority of those guns stayed here on U.S. soil.5 It is surely no coincidence that the states with the highest number of guns per capita also happen to have the highest rates of domestic violence homicide, including South Carolina, Tennessee, Nevada, Louisiana, Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, and Missouri.6 In a study for his 2007 book, Why Do They Kill, David Adams asked fourteen men who were in prison for intimate partner homicide if they’d have done it were a gun not available. It’s a common argument, that if someone wants to kill, he’ll find a way. But eleven of those men said no, they wouldn’t have killed if they hadn’t had access to a gun.7 In a study released in October 2018, the researcher April Zeoli looked at states where anyone served with a restraining order is automatically required to relinquish guns, and found there was a 12% drop in intimate partner homicides, yet only fifteen states required that guns in such instances be turned in.8 Similarly, Zeoli found that in California, where broader restrictions for anyone—including both life partners and dating partners (California calls it closing the “boyfriend loophole”)—convicted of a violent misdemeanor had to relinquish guns, there was an astonishing 23% drop in domestic violence homicides.9 Fifty American women are shot and killed every month by intimate partners; a further untold number are threatened with those guns, kept in line, kept quiet. (And then there are those killed by other methods. Stabbed, strangled, pushed out of moving cars, poisoned.) The United States is the most dangerous developed country in the world for women when it comes to gun violence.10 This is not an issue of partisanship, liberal versus conservative, though I understand many people view it that way; to me it is a moral imperative.
Why are our guns more important to us than our citizens?
I cannot come to any other conclusion than that retired nurse in Montana, knitting as she investigates on the fatality review team. Get rid of the fucking guns.
At the same time, I think there is reason to hope. I look around at my male friends, my colleagues, my brothers, my friends’ husbands, and I see allies everywhere. I see men who care, who speak to an insecurity that I and many women feel, who will say, unabashedly, that they will refuse to be influenced by the craven misogyny filtering through the country and even the rest of the world. I see an awareness among the many LGBTQ people I know, among women and minorities, and I see it in my young university students. All of them know more than any of us knew twenty years ago.
And there are other hopeful signs, plenty of them. Multiple smartphone apps have been developed to help survivors in an emergency situation, or to assist teens and college students in danger, or give shelter options for the night, or to help bystanders figure out how to intervene. Dozens, in fact—and Campbell is involved in the formation of a number of them.11 At the same time that the High Risk Team was forming, Casey Gwinn, the former city attorney in San Diego, began his transformative family justice centers. FJCs colocate as many different partnerships as possible into one location, from advocacy to counseling to legal services to law enforcement, so that victims don’t have to tell and retell their stories. They have a single intake center for their clients: they can offer help filing an order of protection, for example. Or children’s services, or job training, or police reports. So innovative was this program that the Bush Administration earmarked $20 million to replicate it and now there more than 130 centers in the United States and across twenty-five countries.12
Gwinn’s most recent endeavor is Camp Hope, a summer camp with several locations around the country for children from violent homes; the camp’s aim is to disrupt that cycle of violence.
Campbell’s work is still helping to make strides. Former Maryland police officer Dave Sargent’s nationally lauded program began when Sargent took Campbell’s Danger Assessment, and whittled it down to three primary questions that a police officer could ask on scene to try to determine dangerousness quickly: 1. Has he/she ever used a weapon against you or threatened you with a weapon? 2. Has he/she threatened to kill you or your children? 3. Do you think he/she might try to kill you?13 Answering yes to these three will trigger eight more questions, as well as a call from the responding officer to the local domestic violence hotline who will then connect with victims on-site. The timing is crucial; Sargent understood how often domestic violence homicides are situations that escalated quite suddenly to murder. Local media outlets, police reports, and prosecution files are overflowing with statements like “I didn’t mean for her to die.” Sargent dubbed his model the Lethality Assessment Program, sometimes referred to as the Maryland Model, and it’s used in more than thirty states and in Washington, D.C., by first responders.14
There are other signs, too, that point to structurally deep social and cultural changes in how we address this particular type of violence. For example, the United States now has more than two hundred dedicated criminal domestic violence courts (New York and California are leading the charge). More and more of these courts are recognizing the particular psychology behind domestic violence, why victims recant or won’t show up for court, for example, and the usefulness of having domestic violence advocates embedded both in the court itself and in prosecutor’s offices.15 Still, more than 40% of those courts still don’t regularly order offenders to attend batterer intervention courses.
There is no doubt that we’ve made great strides in treating domestic violence as the public health crisis that it is. VAWA alone is often credited with reducing domestic violence by 64% between 1993—before it was authorized—and 2012.16 Though Lynn Rosenthal, the former White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, warns against putting too much emphasis on this success. “The likelihood of a nineteen-year-old getting kicked across the room by a partner is essentially the same as when we started,” she said. Stalking is now a felony charge in more than forty states.17 Strangulation is a felony in forty-five.18 The movement to keep victims out of shelter and in their communities is growing.
Rosenthal had just finished a listening tour called Youth Leads in high schools around the United States when she met me for lunch one day to talk about the broad view of all this. The aim of the listening tour, she said, was to try to determine best practices for addressing teen dating violence. A 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control found that more than eight million girls experienced rape or intimate partner violence before the age of eighteen; for boys, the number was about half that.19 Experts across the field note that the time to address dating violence starts as young as sixth and seventh grade. Rosenthal told me that in her sessions with high schoolers, she found herself heartened by the way young people, especially young men, talked about issues of domestic and sexual violence. “These young guys have a very different relationship to each other and to women,” she said, comparing them to elder generations. “They have a lot of questions themselves about it … They’re not going to let their peers engage [in sexual violence] without some sort of confrontation.”
We were eating at a local place called Busboys and Poets, where the owner, Andy Shallal, is one of the highest profile activists in a city full of high-profile activists. On the screen behind Rosenthal was her former boss, Barack Obama, giving a speech in South Africa. Rosenthal said something surprising to me in that moment, something I’d not really quite thought about until she said it. “In some ways, men have been the biggest beneficiaries of the women’s movement,” she said. “Look at all the men who have a very different relationship [today] with their children. They go to school events; they talk to their kids. In my neighborhood, the guys are always walking their kids to daycare, to school. Look at how involved young fathers are. It’s not perfect, and women still bear the burden in many ways, but they have experienced a change.”
How a matter like family violence with such profound public consequences was ever considered a private issue is confounding in hindsight. Familial violence is not a problem in a silo. It is insidious, infecting so many other challenges we as a society face, in education and healthcare, in poverty and addiction, in mental health and mass shootings and homelessness and unemployment. Given the sheer span of issues that domestic violence intersects with, whatever solutions we imagine for the future must take this breadth into account. We cannot address homelessness without addressing the fact that domestic violence accounts for so many homeless families. We cannot successfully address educational disparity or poverty without addressing how much domestic violence can be a root cause of such problems. I think of the relatively minuscule funding we give to VAWA relative to other governmental expenditures, and remember Rosenthal’s solution: to “invest everywhere.” Her point was not about investing endless resources so much as acknowledging through our solutions the complicated ways that domestic violence launches so many of these other problems.
Rosenthal says the #MeToo movement is a sign of progress. It didn’t just erupt out of nowhere, she tells me. This moment in our lives, in fact, reminds her of the time around the OJ trial, when suddenly conversations about domestic violence began to happen on a national scale. From those conversations came changes—substantive, groundbreaking, important changes, many of which show up in this book. “#MeToo came from years of laying the groundwork. Lots of people having these discussions and suddenly conditions were right for it to happen,” she says.
David Adams, too, sees unique opportunities in this moment. “It’s discouraging,” he told me recently of our present time, “but I do think it’s [energized] young people … And more and more people—especially women and minorities—are getting mobilized.”
Throughout my reporting, it struck me how often I came upon such seemingly small changes that wound up making the difference between life and death, between a good decision and a bad one. A bag of diapers and grocery money, a laminated order of protection rather than paper, an afternoon court time rather than early morning, visiting a victim’s house rather than waiting for a visit, taking a literal step back from an argument rather than a step forward. If I had to whittle down the changing world of domestic violence to just one idea that made all the difference, it would be communication. Across bureaucracies, certainly, but also political ideologies and programs, people and systems and disciplines. So many of the changes I saw when I traveled around the country came down to this one single act. The High Risk Teams, family justice centers, youth programs and batterer intervention and court initiatives, fatality review teams and police protocols and any number of other programs all shared this one absolutely free resource: they talked to one another.
The night I visit the D.C. response line, a woman whom I’ll call Naomi20 was working the phone. Like many of her colleagues, she works four ten-hour overnights a week. And like many who work in domestic violence all across the country, Naomi witnessed violence first in her home. She and her mother were in and out of shelters when she was growing up. After she got older, she began volunteering for a shelter where she once lived as a victim with her mom. Some of the advocates still remembered her from when she was as a kid.
Tonight she sits in a cube in DC Safe’s headquarters. Books line one wall: Next Time She’ll Be Dead. Loving to Survive. When Love Hurts. The first call that comes in is from an officer at a house where a woman’s grandson came home high, picked up a dining room chair, and crashed it into the floor until it was broken. This isn’t the first time she’s had this problem with her grandson. The officer gives Naomi birth dates, contact numbers, and names of the grandmother and grandson, then a synopsis of the incident. Naomi types it all into a database. Any high risk cases will get flagged in their system by Naomi (or whoever is on shift) for follow up by the advocates on shift tomorrow. Naomi’s off the phone with the officer in just a couple of minutes (with less serious incidents, officers might wait till the end of their shift to call the response line). A few minutes later, Naomi calls the grandmother—I’ll call her Irma—and introduces herself. “I’m calling to see if you’re interested in filing an order of protection?” Naomi asks her.
Irma says she tried to get a stay-away order six months earlier, but was told that unless her grandson was actually violent, she didn’t qualify. “I would like for him to get help,” Irma says. “Maybe be evicted with whatever his problem is. I don’t know how you go about doing that.”
Naomi says that since the situation seems to be escalating, Irma may be granted an order this time, and that DC Safe can help her file it. She’ll have to come to the DC Safe office Monday morning. Washington, D.C., has two dedicated domestic violence courts with judges assigned to cycle in annually.
“I was trying to give him a chance,” Irma says, “to find out why he’s so angry.”
“It sounds like that’s not really working,” Naomi says.
“No, it’s not. I’ll have to go further.”
“Part of the order will be him vacating the property,” Naomi tells her. “You can also request that he do some kind of drug or alcohol counseling, or you can put just general counseling. The judge would grant it with those stipulations on there.” Naomi gives her instructions on where to go Monday, what to say when she arrives. She tells her to bring a book and a snack and be prepared to wait a few hours. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office is going to see if you want to assist them in pressing charges,” Naomi says. “You just need to make sure your phone is on and the volume all the way up. They’ll only call once and they won’t leave a voice mail or anything. They’ll call between eight and noon.”
D.C. has an unusual order of protection that allows an abuser to stay in contact, to co-parent, to even sometimes continue to live together. Called HATS, the acronym stands for: no harassing, assaulting, threatening, or stalking. But abusers and victims can remain in the same house. This kind of protection order has obvious shortcomings, but in a city like Washington, D.C., where affordable housing is perhaps the greatest challenge to any social service agency,21 it can help create, as Naomi put it, “a line in the sand saying I’m taking this seriously. This is a warning.” Often, victims don’t want an abuser to vacate the premises. They may need the financial and parenting support. “Clients are often like, ‘We have kids together. We pay the bills together. I can’t kick him out.’ This makes them more willing to [file].”
Calls come in steadily as the minutes and hours stack up, most of them more or less the same relatively low level of violence as the grandmother and her grandson. The phone rings through the empty cubicles, a muffled sound. Midnights in the response line office are calm and quiet in a way I hadn’t expected. I thought there’d be a whole phone bank of people, multiple conversations happening at once. But no, it’s just this one woman, this one phone, this one cubicle. Naomi wears a red turtleneck that sets off her green eyes; textbooks sit on the desk beside her computer. If she has time and it’s not a busy night, she studies for one of the classes she is taking by day. Her aim is to someday be a psychologist.
A call comes in from one of their clients who is currently in a shelter. The shelter’s heating system is working, but the temperature is set to fifty-nine degrees and no one can access the locked thermostat box. Another call comes in that a woman with a protection order in place had her ex-boyfriend take the keys to her rental car and make off with it. The key ring also had her house key on it, and it’s her only set. Naomi arranges to have her locks changed later tonight, then calls a maintenance man to access the shelter’s thermostat.22
In the early morning hours, an officer phones in from one of the wealthier northwest districts of D.C. A woman has been strangled, but is alive and stable. He uses the word “choked.” The couple had recently broken up and they’d gotten into an argument. The offender was arrested. The officer says he offered for the woman to have a forensic exam (a forensic nurse who works out of the Washington Hospital Center was on call) but she said she didn’t need one. Naomi asks some questions about the woman. What was her demeanor? What did she remember of the event? He says the choking lasted only a couple of seconds, that the woman had been drinking, but he detected no signs of the strangulation. Her voice wasn’t raspy. There were no marks.
Afterward, Naomi phones another advocate who’s on call that night to discuss whether they should intervene more assertively to get the woman to see the forensic nurse. After a few minutes, they decide it’s not a situation of high lethality and since he’s been arrested, the woman’s safety is not in question at the moment. She’d promised to come down to the courthouse to fill out an order of protection Monday morning.
It strikes me just how banal all of this is. These relatively minor acts of violence. The police call in and they speak to Naomi with the same dispassion as they would a dispatcher. This happened, then that. Off to the next incident. The response line is just part of their protocol. In other words, there isn’t even a barrier to break down between systems and cultures any longer. The entire thing has become procedural. Its very ordinariness is perhaps its greatest success.
I spent so many years looking at the highest risk cases, looking at the men who killed their whole families, the fatality review teams who take up cases where it is already too late for the people involved, the families and advocates and law enforcement personnel who worked with Michelle and Dorothy and a thousand other victims who never became survivors. In fact, I spent so much time in this darkness, I nearly missed the significance of this night with Naomi entirely. It’s what Kelly Dunne had told me so long ago and I had, for a long time, not really understood. That the best shot we have with domestic violence is to disrupt it in the misdemeanor phase before it becomes something bigger. These calls to Naomi, one after another, from officers or to clients, when I took the long view, were an incredible sign of progress.
Naomi went home early, and took a portable phone with her so she could continue working the line until her shift was over. She had to beat the snow. D.C. is prepared for a lot of things: terrorist attacks, political standoffs, government shutdowns. But snow is not one of them. It is nearly three a.m. when I walk out of the courthouse, that same echoing quiet, the crunch under my shoes. As I wait for my late-night Lyft driver, it strikes me that Naomi isn’t just a symbol of progress because of what she does. She is a symbol of progress because of where she’d come from; she herself was a survivor, yes, but a survivor who’d found a way to disrupt the cycle in her own small way. A former hurt person helping to heal people. There is a place in the system for her now, just as there is for Jimmy. And maybe someday even for Donte. Like there was for Victoria, the woman I’d seen years earlier in the San Bruno jail whose father had once planned to kill her in a Denny’s restaurant. Nearly everyone I’d ever met in the world of domestic violence had stories of abuse, as victims or perpetrators or witnesses. Hamish Sinclair and David Adams had abusive fathers. Suzanne Dubus was raped one winter night by two men. Jacquelyn Campbell had her former student, Annie; Martina Latessa had her sister, Brandi. Jimmy and Donte had the men they’d once been. Behind every one of them was this shadow of another body, a terrible story. But all of them were also the disruptors now, changing the future narrative.
It reminded me of a story. One evening several years ago, I sat in Dunne’s office with her at dusk. It was summer and far past dinnertime. Dunne had always been so matter-of-fact when she talked to me about her work. I’d watched her in trainings play the 911 tape over and over from the night Dorothy died and she’d always focus on what the case showed, how you could graph Dorothy’s story atop Campbell’s research and you’d have a perfect fit. Mirror images of each other. All the risk markers and signs of escalation, yes, but the other things, too, so common in extreme violence. Their love at first sight, Dorothy’s youth, William’s morbid jealousy. You could graph all these onto Michelle and Rocky, too. Dunne never got emotional in these trainings. She was meticulous and impassive, a perfect picture of the lawyer she had almost once become.
On this night, she showed me something she’d written on a pink message sheet the day she met Dorothy, a note she keeps close: Very lethal case. I had heard about this note from Dubus, read about it in local news reports. I wanted to see it. I didn’t tell Dunne, but Dorothy’s death had haunted me, too. When I was writing about her years ago for the New Yorker, I used to get a sandwich for lunch and park on Green Street at Dorothy’s house and sit eating it in my rental car. I don’t know what I was doing, really. There was no evidence of her life or her death there now, but the street was quiet, idyllic. Sometimes I was sure I could smell the sea. A faded Big Wheel sat like a prop in the grass. It was a time when—between interviews and research—I could be reflective. Maybe Dorothy had become a shadow body in my life, too. So often when reporters write about issues, we are covering stories of the living, speaking to change makers, policy makers, who are alive and well. But in domestic violence, I suspect for many of us it is often the dead with whom we really commune.
I asked Dunne, sitting in her office, what she would say to Dorothy today, if she returned from the dead and walked right back into the office.
Dunne started to answer; then something stopped her, like her body suddenly hit an invisible wall. She bolted from her desk to a bank of filing cabinets, where I could not see her. I heard her short sharp breaths, a sniffle. “No one’s ever asked me that before,” she said.
I sat without speaking.
Dunne came back to her desk, wiped at her eyes. Then she looked at me and whispered, “I would tell her I’m sorry.”