The scanner groans as it memorizes the contents of the folder my mother gave me. My living room floor is a patchwork of brittle newspapers, magazines, and stale papers, each one placed on glass and pixelated for posterity, or just to subdue the recurring fear that they will all be burned up in an electrical fire. The headlines read “Tennis Pro’s Dark Secret,” “Coach Would Kill to Keep Sex Slave,” “Stalker Hired Despite Warning.”
The salacious coverage had flooded every newspaper in the country before washing over into Hard Copy–style news programs and the midsections of magazines.
But it’s the clips with smaller headlines and shorter inch counts that contain the subtler clues to Gary’s past.
In response to People’s feature story on Gary (“Stroke of Madness”), a Manhattan couple wrote a letter to the editor that the magazine published. They’d known him for ten years—their daughter was a former student. Gary had even cared for their dog when they went away on vacation. Reflecting on his kindness, they recounted how Gary called them crying when their dog was stolen under his watch. He offered to pay a stated ransom fee of $1,000 to ensure the pet’s safe return. This story is supposed to offer a counterpoint to the media’s villainous portrayal.
“How could this kindly, sensitive man degenerate into dangerous madness?” the couple writes. “In judging Gary Wilensky, we know there was a very nice person, then something unfathomable happened.”
The letter’s defense of Gary speaks to his evident ability to charm parents, or if nothing else their willingness to dismiss the severity of his crime. But reading into the letter, knowing Gary’s conflation of violence and compassion for young girls, I find it reasonable to assume that the kidnapper of the girl’s dog was Gary himself. He was possibly intrigued by the emotional torture he could inflict on his student, and later guilt-ridden and remorseful, concocting a story of heroism to cover his own tracks.
Another article, published in Newsday titled “It’s Just Not Their Kind of Problem,” calls out “parents of privilege” who have chosen to brush aside the Wilensky case as something of an inconvenience.
In the piece, parents of students interviewed on the condition of anonymity reflect a lack of concern in the wake of his crime. “It’s not changing our lives,” one parent who sent her daughter to Wilensky told the paper. “There’s no change in terms of protecting the children.”
A former student had a similar reaction. “We’re not dwelling on it.”
“We don’t even want to think about it,” another student told the New York Times, again on the condition of anonymity. “We’re in no-comment mode,” an administrator at the Brearley School, where Gary coached the varsity team, told the same Times reporter.
But farther upstate, hundreds of miles from the Upper East Side, a local paper published an op-ed from a concerned parent who’d sent his daughter to camp with Gary. She’d told her dad what a nice guy her coach was, and how he’d even invited her for pizza and movies in his cabin.
“We put our youngest child in his care,” wrote the girl’s father, Richard Grossman, in the Syracuse Post-Standard. “He is every parent’s nightmare. And now he is ours.”
“Was it your nightmare, too?” I had asked my mom after reading this article. “Is that why you kept the folder?”
“I kept the folder because it was something that happened in our lives,” she’d said. “It’s like the photo albums we have in the house. They’re just memories.”
But memories hold meaning, even those buried in a drawer for years. I want to know why these memories were forgotten, why they matter now, and whether the answer to both questions is the same.
I flip an article from the Troy Record facedown on the scanner. The headline reads “Stalker Wanted a Family.”
“Do you have kids?” the sex therapist who knew Gary Wilensky had asked me during our interview. When I told her I didn’t, she asked if I wanted them. I don’t know, I responded, I guess I was waiting for the decision to be made for me. I’m still waiting, though at thirty-eight, not deciding has become a decision in itself.
I had expected motherhood to develop inside me, the way puberty had—without my input, and within the same time frame as others my age. Uncomfortable initially, the alignment with other women experiencing the same stage of maturity at the same pace eased the awkwardness of transition. Motherhood seemed the final step to becoming a woman, and like all the others, mostly required time. But it’s not children that usher in maturity, it’s the ability to make decisions.
“Are you a reporter?” someone else I interviewed had asked. Yes? No? For a decade I’ve been writing and editing women’s lifestyle content for major news outlets. Reporting was an aspect of the job, but what constitutes women’s lifestyle hovers between news and entertainment. At each publication, the criteria for women’s content have been carved into categories: food, fashion and beauty, relationships (though limited sex), health and diet, and parenting. Politics were filtered through the lens of fashion (what [insert first lady’s name] wore to the state dinner), entertainment through relationships (what we can learn about love from [insert celebrity divorce/romantic comedy/Oscar speech]), news through parenting (how to talk to your children about [insert headline-grabbing tragedy]). Service, I learned, was key to any women’s story. What she can take away from this story on [insert interview with cookbook author], how she can improve from reading about [insert hair trend/diet trend/fashion trend]. We can always be better.
When a new generation of young women became the target audience, and the Internet provided more accurate measurements of interest, political action, feminism and intersectionality, body image, and cultural appropriation were shoehorned into the same categories. There were countless debates about whether a story about body shaming belongs in the section marked fashion, or whether campus assault could be filed under health. The labels were useless, outdated, but still slow to be replaced. As an editor, I could have fought or merely suggested a change. But there were more pressing priorities, and I still believed that such categories appealed to women, even if they didn’t appeal to me. Whoever invented them knew what it meant to be a woman more than I did. I believed this in the same way that I believed that women cared about gift guides, fashion week, and viral proposal videos; in the same way I made a nasal prolonged sound when someone showed me their baby’s picture or their engagement ring or a story about a man who did something nice. I was covering up the fact that I didn’t feel anything. I was pretending to be a woman, in the way women are perceived, in the hopes that it would quiet the girl inside me who resisted.
More scanned articles. Albany Times Union. The New York Post. Newsday.
“Meanwhile, police searched Gary Wilensky’s one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment and found binoculars, porn videos and photographs of young girls.” This line appears in a Newsday article about cops searching Gary’s Manhattan apartment after his crime. I’ve read the article before but never noticed the line. Another article about the raid of his home also mentions these other photographs. He was following multiple girls before he died. I wonder if I am in his photo album, too.