How power and subordination get whipped into a sex-in-the-city-sauce that seems accommodating… but isn’t.
My encounter with The Attorney wasn’t like the others. He was another powerful man and I was in a compromising situation again, but what made this experience with The Attorney totally different was that I really, really liked him. He was my dream guy already and I was crazy about him, even before he asked me out.
Which was exactly what he did, one year into our case together, while I was divorcing the father of my two young children. Smack in the middle of our procedure, he transgressed professional ethics and he asked me out on a date.
Well, actually he called for some other made up reason to feel me out first, then he asked if I could give him english classes and then he asked me out. But all in the same conversation.
And I somehow wasn’t surprised in the least. I was super excited even…
And within just 18 months, he went from my legal council, to my surprise sexual partner, then to my boyfriend and very quickly after that, with my divorce case still raging, to co-purchasing a beach house with me, planning our PAC and moving in together.
So I really, really thought he liked me too.
The American Bar Association however formally forbids Attorney-Client sexual contact during the conduct of a professional legal relationship, although there are no strict sanctions against it. But we were in France, where lawyers take only an oath to respect the values of honor, dignity and delicacy as relates to their clientele… for professional encounters in offices and court rooms and I suppose, apparently, in bedrooms, as well.
Two notable cases neatly sandwiched my love affaire with The Attorney and illustrate exactly why those oaths are made in the first place.
This first example, in the South West of France, took place about the same time The Attorney and I began our relationship… A case, on which I imagine, he was keeping a sharp eye at the time.
“Sex with a client is only an affaire déontologique*,” pled the winning defense for the accused man, an attorney and former bar association chairman himself. He had been accused by thirteen of his ex-clients of gestes déplacés*, (gestures which the jurisdiction would rule to have been easily interruptible, and thus apparently acceptable!) But also of rape, by three other clients (one of whom committed suicide before the hearing). His expert counsel though, pre-#Metoo, was able to get him off. So that lawyer was convicted of neither offense in the end and was simply suspended from practice for all of two years.
It was observed that the women in question had reached an age and acquired enough experience by then, making them supposedly “less sensitive to the prestige surrounding the exercise of certain professions”. And it was also noted that the clients in question had all indicated “really wanting to win their procedures.”
I mean, why would a client hire a lawyer otherwise, if it weren’t to win her case?
Back when I’d hired My Attorney, I had also wanted to win and was surely within that same less sensitive age-bracket. So in accordance with that judgement, basically everything that would transpire between The Attorney and me thereafter, would be considered, as such, all my fault too???
Like, really??? I shoulda known better???
The events of the second case however, in a town North of Paris, which also concerned a lawyer and an ex chairman of his bar, took place midway into our union with The Attorney, just before we’d wed. Although the case was only recently concluded.
This time, post #Metoo the guilty party, who had assumed consent when he’d forced himself upon his venerable clients in his own office, was ultimately given an eighteen month suspended prison sentence for taking advantage of his client’s psychological fragility… in spite of their ages and in spite of their desire to successfully conclude their procedures too.
A very hopeful bound forward in equality and notable shift in our societal visions about global, systemic misogyny and masculine power plays.
But I, myself, would never-ever have imagined accusing my then divorce attorney of taking advantage of my “psychological fragility” let alone of alleging rape, god forbid. I was totally consenting… because I liked him! Because I thought I felt great. Because when we’d started sleeping together, I was finally divorcing the man I wasn’t happy with and dating the man whom I believed to be saving my life.
But then…
I wasn’t the one who’d signed an oath either.
Nor had I ever had a lawyer or even a case pending in court for that matter.
I’d never been through a divorce at all.
I didn’t know how terminating a marriage (with children in the middle) could go.
I had absolutely no distance from the situation and couldn’t imagine the consequences liking, or god forbid disliking, my own lawyer could have on my case.
I did not consider my future ex-husband’s feelings at the time, nor the fall out my children would have to deal with.
And I never-ever entertained how getting into a sexual relationship with The Said Attorney would affect our fiduciary relationship in that case and in every single thing I was to do with him thereafter.
I didn’t know what fiduciary even meant, really.
But Ted did.
Ted knew all of that — all too well.
And he was “The Attorney” after all.
I perceived no link at the time between an attorney’s powerful professional standing, the fact that he was my legal council and the invisible stranglehold our love affaire had created. I didn’t think I felt coerced. I couldn’t imagine Ted taking advantage of his position or profiting from my weakness…
But all that set the sickening tone of our relationship, because I’d even go so far as to tell a journalist a few years later, when Ted’s manipulative techniques and his obsessive sexual demands were at their peak… but when I still was in full denial, that I had a fucking great life, because… what else was I really going to tell her? That Ted was a controlling, narcissistic bastard who’d seduced me while I was his client and was now forcing me to fuck strangers?
Of course not. I was still convinced in those days that Ted adored me too. In his own way.
And anyway, it apparently seems you cannot accuse someone in divorce of something you, as a victim, should have been well aware of before entering into that contract.
Ted and I had in fact lived together for several years as concubines with a French legal contract before getting married, so any grip he had on me as my boyfriend cannot, in French law, be held against him in divorce, I guess. In fact, his boyfriend-abuse counted in his favor because I should have known better before marrying him. Which made whatever the obscene faults I accused him of in our divorce, actually all my own, for having “accepted” them to begin with.
Which is a little like telling a serial killer’s victim’s family that she should have known better than to have crossed her murderer’s path before the stabbing took place.
I was no psychologist though, so knew nothing about narcissistic manipulation back then. And I wasn’t an attorney either. I didn’t know the legal rules about anything in those days. Ted was my sole legal counsel, of course.
But the same Ted had my head so whipped around throughout our relationship, on his whirlwind-love-bombing-tour of restaurants, vacations, expensive boutiques… and of course sex… that his interspersed gaslighting and rejection… seemed all normal.
I certainly couldn’t stop the merry-go-round to assess the situation or consult another professional. My own boyfriend and future husband was that lawyer. I didn’t think I needed to second guess him about anything legal at all. Why ever would I?
It was only became an evidence while we were divorcing?
Only then did I realize how he had actually planned the whole thing out, stitched it into the seams of our everyday life and woven it into the very DNA of our union and controlled the whole game from A to Z.
It wasn’t for love.
He’d seduced me in the beginning only to make his then girlfriend jealous, but had stayed because she wouldn’t have him back.
He’d acted like he loved me, but just enough to scam me into the sex games he’d always only dreamed of playing.
He kept me without a career so I’d only have time for his hobbies.
Penniless, so he could provide me with whatever he chose then strip it away at a whim.
And so wound up in his worries, that I wasn’t addressing my own.
But most importantly, he made sure that none of our paper work was ever notarized, so he could easily falsify the documents in his favor, put all of our purchases in his own name and contacted the bailiff of his own choice to verify his own assertions.
Then Ted made it his objective to swindle the legal system too. He falsified testimony and translations and even chose the judge so he could easily plead to her convictions.
Easy-peasy!! This was not obviously Ted’s first rodeo.
When I’d initially met him, Ted had been billed as the best in the region. I thought it was because he was the most conscientious and hard working, the most legally astute and ethical.
But that was not the real him.
A good lawyer, Ted always used to say, knows his client intimately. He thinks of her day and night. And a really badass legal advisor knows how to make the law work in his own favor, no matter what. No matter the law. No matter the ethical implications. No matter the lies.
That Attorney was 100% Ted and as it turns out he was far more formidable than either of those confreres* of his, who were both got caught with their hands in cookie jars. So maybe he really is the best!
He’s still practicing today. Still in the same little town, surrounded by the same cohorts and pleading to the same judges. Still vying for power and spinning the everyday lives and the conditions of others into his own giant work of human comedy to be played out at the expense of everyone else.
So if you enter into relationship with ol’Ted, whether personal or professional, you’ve really got to have a rich sense of humor to get him.
I can at least attest to that.
Translations from French to English :
affaire déontologique* = a case of ethics
gestes déplacés* = (hand) movements considered inappropriate, inconvenient, improper or uncalled for…
confreres* = fellows, work colleagues or peers…
