January 15, 2007 Host: Charisse Dengler Guest: Linda Fairstein
Charisse Dengler talks with author and attorney Linda Fairstein about her previous position as head of the sex crimes unit at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and her current profession as an author. Fairstein talks extensively about what it was like to be one of only seven women in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and what it was like to be one of the first people to learn to use DNA with regard to trial work.
Fairstein also discusses what it's like to be an author and talks about where she gets ideas for her novels, the differences between working as an attorney and working as an author, and how she feels right before one of her books comes out. Recorded the day before her newest novel, Bad Blood, was set to hit bookstore shelves, this interview includes a detailed plot summary of Bad Blood. Duration: 00:17:53
Charisse Dengler: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another LawCrossing podcast. This is Charisse Dengler, and I am here with Linda Fairstein, author and attorney. She's going to talk to us a little bit more about her newest book that's coming out tomorrow and her transition from attorney to author.
...More about your time as with the Sex Crimes unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. When you started, you were one of only seven women there. If you could just tell me a little bit about that?
Linda Fairstein: Yes, I was there for 30 years. I never anticipated that of course when I went to the office there. It was 1972. I'd just gotten out of law school and there were as you say 170 women, 170 lawyers as women. The DA at the time was a man named Frank Hogan who was very famous nationally in law enforcement.
He's very well respected well known prosecutor and ran a great office. He was very old fashioned and he really didn't- That criminal court was an appropriate place for women to be working. He said that to me during my interview. He said this work is much too tawdry is the word he used for a woman of your educational background. He didn't let women go into the criminal court. All the women before me until two years before I got there worked in the law library doing research. Some were allowed to be in the grand jury and most of them did appellate work which was considered by him much cleaner. That they weren't dealing with blood and guts program.
He hired me but he was quite reluctant to do it and to do it with any of the women who had come before. I think he was being pressured by some of his senior staff because of this dischanging values and moray's. Dean was at my law school University of Virginia has been my criminal law professor. He really took my position, knew the DA well and fought to get me in. That was a huge toe in the door. Mr. Hogan died two years later. Bob Morgenthau, who's still the district attorney, became the next DA and had entirely different ideas. Was enormously progressive about diversity in every sense of the word and has really - He's the person who promoted me in 1976 to take over the Sex Crimes Unit which was very newly formed. He thought it was critically important to have a woman as the head of that unit. He just thought it would send an important message.
Charisse Dengler: Oh.
Linda Fairstein: Yeah, he just felt there were so- I mean you're too young to know but there were so few rape cases going forward. There were so few being handled. Nobody trusted the system as women who were victims did not have any reason to trust the system which had historically been so bad on the issue. He felt it would be a sort of seasonal look and find to women if he put a woman in charge.
I was only 28 at the time but I had handled some rape cases in the grand jury in my first year. That was like quite a lot because I was the only woman and most of the guys sort of wanted me to handle them. I took over the unit. I never dreamed I would stay for 30 years. I mean I thought I'd do it for awhile and then leave public service for private practice. That's the work that kept me in the office. It was so interesting. When I say exciting I don't mean that at the expense of the victims. Exciting because the laws changed radically in the 70s and early 80s. The system changed. There began to be units like ours throughout the country and in police departments.
Then in 1986 which was literally half-way through my 30 years in the DA's office that's the first time I ever heard the letters DNA. I was one of the first handful of prosecutors in the country who was asked to learn and use DNA. I started in 1986 and there was not a court to use it. I mean to learn about, study it and use it. There was not a court in the country that admitted it as a valid scientific technique until 1989.
That was one of the most compelling reasons that I stayed. It was just to suddenly see that these cases that had been impossible to investigate, get victims into the court room and have them be successful. Suddenly science was doing what the law had found almost impossible to do.
Charisse Dengler: Right; yeah. I bet that was really exciting.
Linda Fairstein: Yes.
Charisse Dengler: Whenever you first started writing you were writing and working at the same time right?
Linda Fairstein: Yes. I don't know how. I'm sorry.
Charisse Dengler: I was just going to ask how you managed to do both and ultimately what led to your decision to write full-time?
Linda Fairstein: My husband likes joke and say that I did it on his time. Said he was the one that suffered. My free time is when I could do it. I certainly couldn't do it sacrificing time from cases. The first book that I wrote was non-fiction Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape if you are aware of that or not.
Charisse Dengler: Okay, I don't. Yeah I don't think I knew that you had written a non-fiction one.
Linda Fairstein: I was asked to do that in 1986 and then federal major cases came along and I didn't do it. It wasn't published till 1993; it's called Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape. By no means a bestseller, but it's had a very respectable, still does, academic life and life in the prosecutorial criminal justice system. Someday I will update that.
The DA gave me permission to do that. We all thought it was important in terms of educating the public about the changes that we had made and how it was possible to do this work. That came out in 1993 and had taken me quite a long time to write. Once I did that since I'd always dreamed about doing fiction then I just sort of said to my husband, "Why don't I try and do what I thought about doing for a long time."
I've a very good friend named Esther Newberg she is my literary agent now. She was not for the non-fiction book because the publisher had come to me about that. She said to me, "You're positioned perfectly. You've written and published a book, Sexual Violence, that has a very respectable reception — was critically received. We know you can tell a story. We know you can finish a book. Everybody, especially lawyers, everybody thinks they have a book in them so don't get too carried away." She said, "Give it a try. When you go away on vacation," (that was the summer of '94), "you should write some pages." She said, "I'll look at them and tell you if I think you can do this or not."
That summer vacation of '94 I wrote about 65 pages. I gave them to her. She critiqued them, told me to keep going. Christmas time that year I had 96 pages and without telling me she showed those pages to one publisher who was interested. She showed two other publishers, and by January of '95, I had three bids on a book that became Final Jeopardy.
That was the first novel; it was published in '96. I like many writers. Many of my friends who are writers and lawyers, many of them left the law to write because that's what they wanted to do. I loved my job and I loved the law. I took my (CLE) courses credit, I stayed very active. I didn't want to stop practicing. I wanted to do both so I did that. I think the first four books were written, Final Jeopardy, Likely to Die, Cold Hit and The Dead House were written while I was still prosecuting.
I think the books suffer from it I say with a big smile on my face. I think they're not as well written and in a sense not as well paced. I wrote that completely in 2002- After I left 2001 and 2002 after I left the office. For me leaving was a difficult decision because I loved the work. I needed to find a way to stay connected to that work which I've done through just advocacy and staying connected to victims of violence. Doing consulting work for police and prosecutors around the country.
It was 30 years. I sort of thought that was a good point which to step away. 9/11 played a part in my decision. It was after 9/11 that I just thought it was an important marking point to reassess where I was in life. Spend more time with my family and writing as well as doing advocacy just made that more possible. It was never for lack of interest or passion for the job that I had.
Charisse Dengler: Right. Now tell me a little bit about your latest novel. It's about to come out. If you could give me a little summary of it.
Linda Fairstein: Sure Bad Blood comes out tomorrow. The novel features a prosecutor named Alexandra Cooper, Alex Cooper. She's the head of the Sex Crime Unit in the Manhattan DA's Office which is very much the old adage, "write what you know." That seemed a smart thing to do. She's in this book — so it's the same continuing character. There are two detectives who are partners in all of this, Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace.
In all of the books, I try and do two things. One is fronting very I hope cutting edge, forensic, legal that Alex can do. You're entertained that's the purpose of these books but hopefully you're hit a little bit about while you read them about something new in the law. She's on trial with a case that's a domestic violence case. The defendant is a very well to do business executive in Manhattan. He seems to have a wonderful pedigree.
His wife has found out he was out of town the day of the murder. Alex has charged him in a conspiracy in which she claims she'll present evidence that he hired hit men to kill his wife. The trial starts and she's got a fabulous adversary. A very talented lawyer who kind of outsmarts her in the court room from the beginning. That gets into whirlwind to the second part of the book.
The other thing I love to do is sort of explore New York City history. I love to find things that are familiar to all of us who are either living here or tourists or else read about the city. Take things that are familiar and unlayer them and get behind the scenes.
That's what I've done here. I've taken the water tunnel that Dean built, and its 600 feet below the city, 60 stories down where I had to go down and do my research. Enormously creepy. It's fun because no women are allowed. There's a union that builds all the bridges and tunnels in New York, everything under ground. They're called Sandhogs. They're very superstitious. They don't like women in the tunnels. As soon as I heard that I thought it was a great place to put Alex, my character.
There doesn't seem to be any connection between the trial and what happens in the tunnel which is an explosion. Midway through the trial, that's the connection so it makes Alex go where she doesn't want to go, underground. There are not only the murder that the defendant's on trial for but then there's also it turns out a homicide in the tunnel that has burial connections to the man on trial.
If that's not complicated enough, read the book.
Charisse Dengler: Okay. How do you get the ideas for the stories in the books?
Linda Fairstein: I love that question. There's just no end to ideas. I mean I do it in two ways. I stay very current with the law and with forensics. I'm always looking for a turn. I have a DNA twister element in this book that fascinated me. I didn't know about it. I loved to find a way to weave it into the story.
In terms of New York thing, living here for so long, I've done the (book) was about museums in New York. Death Payouts, which is just going to come out in paperback, has to do with a murder at Lincoln Center in the Opera House. There really was a murder in 1980. It was a young prosecutor. It just fascinated me that you could take one of the most culturally elegant places in New York City, and in fact, a woman was murdered, a violinist, during the course of a performance while there was 4,000 people in their seats.
I killed somebody else...I do it for different reason, but I love to do my research in these places that we see every day. Where we come to visit as tourists, and they look so benign, yet many of them have really dark histories. I'm constantly clipping articles from papers or taking photographs as I walk around the city. Then beginning to research places and things.
Charisse Dengler: That's cool. That's really neat. It sounds so much fun. My last question I guess if you could just describe to me a little bit about how you feel like right before your books. I mean your book is coming out tomorrow, like how do you feel today? Are you excited or scared?
Linda Fairstein: My husband just tells me to calm down. Yes, it's a wonderfully exciting moment, and I've been on a January schedule like this for the last three books. It has fallen every time right after the Martin Luther King weekend. We're talking today on Monday, my ... has been closed for three days, the agents close for three days. My husband says I'm like a caged tiger. Kind of roaming around. Tomorrow the books will be out of boxes and the writing is very, very solitary. The legal job as I shared from my character was wonderfully... Did every ... with other prosecutors. There were people to talk issues through. It was quite a friendly partnership always. You never had to do anything serious alone if you didn't want to.
Writing is very solitary. I go into a room every day for the days that I'm writing which is many months of the year. My friends are sort of trained now not to call till after 4:00. A good day is a really quiet day with just me and my thoughts.
When the books come out I can travel, go to book stores, signings, meet people and hear why they're there. Whether it's some committee come for the law. As I travel the country or actually women who were victims or witnesses in cases who triumphed in the court room and gotten their spirit back. That's a wonderful (peace).
It's quite thrilling to think that these things that were just ideas rolling around my brain are finally between book ends and in a book (bag) and out to the world to face. It's a lot of fun.
Charisse Dengler: Oh it sounds like so much fun. Okay, well that's all my questions.
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