Next Time, She'll Be Dead by Ann Jones

Next Time, She'll Be Dead by Ann Jones

Author:Ann Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504019538
Publisher: Open Road Media


6 A Woman to Blame

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.



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