Free Intimate Wars by Merle Hoffman Page B

sick with fear that this woman would be able to use her situational power to destroy my authority over the clinic and to separate me from Marty. The issue of shame and scandal was different then. Having a child out of wedlock or an affair with a married man could affect the rest of one’s life—it was not an audition for a reality show.

    One day I walked into the small waiting room we used for our patients and found her sitting there with a manila envelope on her lap. She had come to intimidate me, and to let me know that time was running out before she would do something with those photos . Our eyes met, and I felt terrified. I thought my entire life would be over. Our relationship would be unmasked, Marty would have to leave me, and I had no idea what his wife would do to us.
    Playing for time, I told her I would have to get back to her. I was waiting for the New York district attorney to review my transcripts and advise me on our legal course of action. After the evidence was reviewed, it was determined that although the employee was in fact blackmailing me, the tapes could not be used in any legal fashion.
    Marty fired her and warned her not to dare approach us again or she would be criminally liable. She left us alone.
    Shaken but immensely relieved that the episode had finally ended, I resolved never to give an employee or coworker the chance to take me down like that again. I would have to learn to watch my back.
    This was my first direct involvement with the law and its exquisite nuances. Dealing with lawsuits would come to be almost a second career for me; at times it felt like I was practicing law without a license—and thanks to Marty’s connection with Eugene Gold, it was also the first time I got to see the inner workings behind the presentation of political power, the personal strings that could be pulled to achieve a certain outcome.
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    THESE POWER STRUGGLES and political lessons were important for my coming-of-age as a leader. Without them I would not have been able to build and maintain a successful organization. But simultaneously, almost in spite of myself, I was
undergoing a sort of awakening I’d never imagined possible. My entrance into a field that I was also creating was giving me more than a chance to exercise my ambitions. As the volume of patients steadily grew, my political strife with my employees was tempered by a growing awareness that the power and meaning of Flushing Women’s extended far beyond my own life and dreams.
    Legal abortion had split the world open to the realities of women’s lives, laid bare in my counseling rooms. My patients had anxiety levels that matched their relief and dread. They were here, they had made the choice, but there was an accompanying fear of punishment and death. “Can I really do this thing and go on with my life?” they would ask. “I won’t be punished—I won’t be butchered—I won’t die?”
    It was that face-to-face connection that so drew me in. After a childhood spent largely alone, my heart was expanding to embrace others. I saw that the politics, the power struggles, the hiring and firing, the hours of work that went into the clinic, were all in the service of these women, my patients. Power, my power, could be channeled to facilitate this good. I was meant to do this. And my life collided and fused with the massive force of the history behind these issues.
    There were poor women of every race, many of whom had numerous children. There were patients as young as eleven years old and as old as forty-five, patients who so much wanted to keep the pregnancy but could not, Russian immigrant women with a history of multiple abortions, college students, and middle-class married women who never told their husbands. They all needed my help.
    The general ignorance regarding women’s bodies, health, and sexuality was astounding. Many patients had never had a gynecological exam. Our Bodies,