Paulette's diary (10): frame-up; falling apart
Paulettec
HARASSMENT DIARY, by Paulette Cooper (1982)
Part 10: Falling apart
My 1997 editorial comments are enclosed in [[double square brackets]].
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It was also around that time that I became extremely afraid of
going to prison and began having the recurring prison dreams which I
am still plagued with to this day. Jay [[my lawyer]], who would
always predict the worst happening, said that with a fingerprint (1)
[[...]], I had a 95% chance of conviction. He also felt that I had a
small chance of a short prison sentence ("hopefully," he added) and I
became frightened of physical and sexual dangers that would be harder
to fight because of my small frame.
My biggest fear, though, and the one that caused me the most
anxiety was that the story of my indictment and arrest would leak out
in the press, especially since the public doesn't generally know the
difference between someone who's indicted and someone who's guilty. I
was petrified for my career, which had been going along so
beautifully. But certainly no editor would ever give an assignment to
someone indicted for sending bomb threats to people she had exposed.
And if I was forced to leave freelance writing, which I had worked so
hard to succeed in [[I already had four books out by the time I was
30]] and was one of the few people to do so, I doubted whether it
would be easy for me to get a job again with that kind of background
if it was publicized.
These problems hounded me for years, as did acute anxiety
about possible public humiliation -- and the fact that it was all so
bizarre made it likely to get extensive press coverage -- to me and my
parents. I hardly wanted every detail of my life coming out in the
newspapers while looking like a criminal and I felt even worse for my
poor [[adoptive]] parents. Everything I had ever done in my life had
been to make them proud of me, and not feel that they were wrong in
adopting me. And now we were all about to be hurt and embarrassed
publicly.
Footnotes: [[paragraphing added today]]
(1) The fingerprint was also weird, because it was just one quarter of
my third finger on one side of the page. This was not consistent with
my holding a single piece of paper (in which case, it would have been a
fingerprint on the other side as well) as the government contended.
I was to realize much later, however, that it was consistent with my taking
a pile of stationery and tossing them to Joy's side, as I frequently did with
her
stationery which cluttered up my section of the apartment.
In addition, I was later to wonder whether Margie Shepherd [[the mysterious
woman who visited my apartment right before the bomb threats were sent]]
hadn't placed that paper under the clipboard which held the petition I signed
(which also would have [[line undecipherable but it probably said "also would
have explained the fingerprint being only 1/4 of a finger on one side only)."]]