Review: Johnson, What Lisa Knew

[truepenny]

What Lisa Knew by Joyce Johnson




One of the many sad things about Lisa Steinberg is that I'd never heard of her before. Her murder is yet another cause celebre that vanished overnight--all those Crimes of the Century that turn out not to be--the major difference in Lisa's case being that she was only six years old when she died in 1987, the victim of a combination of child abuse and child neglect. It's questionable, I suppose, whether her alleged parents (black-market adoption, and they never bothered to get the paperwork done to make it legal) meant for her to die, but one of them beat her to death and they both failed to call an ambulance for possibly as much as 12 hours.

Johnson's major point--aside from the general outrage at the way Lisa was treated and the way that all the adults around her seem to have been struck blind when it came to noticing egregious signs of neglect and abuse--is the way in which Hedda Nussbaum (Lisa's "mother") and her attorneys deployed a set of narratives and cultural beliefs, about mothers, about battered women, to simply shut down any line of questioning that wondered about Nussbaum's complicity--or agency--in Lisa's death. They put it all on Joel Steinberg; Nussbaum testified against him, and that, too, provided a very simple narrative schema, where her role as witness/victim of Steinberg's abuse (and I don't want to deny that Steinberg abused her; they may have had a BDSM relationship, but it was neither safe, nor sane, and while it started out consensual, I'm not sure it stayed that way) precluded her being an abuser herself. Johnson does not believe this narrative and goes to considerable, careful lengths to re-open those thorny questions. Her abhorrence of both Nussbaum and Steinberg comes through very clearly.

This is a very good, very sad book.



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