Interns
Samuel Goldsmith
This writing discusses cases of household and workplace sexual abuse/harm/violence.
A three-year-old told someone at Child Protective Services about sex tapes his father made of him and his six-year-old sister. But the CPS worker was just an intern, so it didn’t count as evidence. By the time a bona fide case worker got around to talking with them, both children had clammed up. Now the father is suing for full custody, and he’s going to win it, because their mother won’t let him see the kids he abuses, no matter what the joint custody order says. Best case scenario, she tells my supervisor: the father’s leukemia kills him quickly. She’s probably right, but my internship ends before I learn how it resolves.
* * *
I have to keep the location of the office a secret. It’s a safety precaution; it’s not hard for a stalker to get a gun. More than once, I ride the elevator with an amiable stranger who, making small talk, asks what work I do in the building we share. They make a joke about James Bond when I say I can’t tell them. I laugh uncomfortably.
* * *
I’m assigned to interview a young professional about how her multinational company’s regional manager, while in town for business, drugged and raped her. She filed an internal complaint, and then the company left her out of meetings and events, persuaded her coworkers she was no good at her job, and demanded she apologize for lying. I have to use the mute button on my phone so I can breathe while she talks. She reminds me of C so much that I ask to be removed from the case.
My supervisor asks if I also want to be taken off the case with the three-year-old and the six-year-old. I say no. That case doesn’t remind me of C at all.
A week after my internship ends, C and I get married.
* * *
In order to finish my 10-week summer internship in time for the wedding, I start working a week before the semester ends. I finish a term paper in the evening after orientation.
Pinned to the board above my phone is a list of every crisis hotline and every rape hotline in the state, county by county.
* * *
In a conversation with one woman, I gather that her older cousin sexually abused her throughout her childhood. I learn little more than my supervisor could use for her case. More urgent to her is the host of a local radio show who, she tells me, sends her lewd, subliminal messages over the air. She emails our office every day with evidence she says proves it. We won’t be able to help her, not just because we’re incapable of understanding her story well enough to tell it in a courtroom, but also because she’ll lose credibility with a jury the minute she starts talking about the radio host when asked about her cousin on the witness stand.
* * *
When my supervisor speaks with a survivor, he says, “I hear you,” to show he’s listening.
What a wonderful thing to be told.
I hear you.
* * *
Meanwhile, one of C’s patients at her social work internship goes before a grand jury that is investigating her rapist. The grand jury’s first question: What were you wearing?
* * *
It’s 9:05 in the morning when the Supreme Court releases its opinion in the Obergefell case, invalidating same-sex marriage bans. An administrator on the other side of the office is crying; her friends who died of AIDS longed to see this day. After work, I meet C on the steps of the Supreme Court, where a man wearing a rainbow flag and a “Free Hugs” sign embraces a pair of Tibetan monks who had just been passing by, intrigued by the jubilee.
* * *
A college student’s classmates slipped something into her drink at a party and gang raped her. She reported it to a female police officer, who scolded her and bullied her into apologizing to her rapists over text message. The school substantiated her complaint, though the process took so long that they had already graduated by the time it was over.
Now, the rapists hire a big-shot men’s rights lawyer from Ohio and sue her for defamation. Our office gets the case dismissed quickly, before they can force her to go to a humiliating all-day interview and hand over buckets of private documents. The judge accepts an argument I come up with regarding qualified immunity; my supervisor sends me the opinion after my honeymoon. This will be the last time I believe litigation to be a thread that someone with dexterous hands can use to mend any torn fabric.
* * *
A woman’s boss had a friend who forcibly kissed her and groped her breasts at work. Her boss’s friend visited the workplace at predictable intervals, and the next day the woman expected him to show up, she couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. I help her appeal the denial of her unemployment benefits, but the appellate body says she quit voluntarily and isn’t entitled to anything.
* * *
My first-year civil procedure professor had the class role-play as attorneys for Pfizer who, having found evidence damning to the company’s case, were tasked with using procedural rules to keep the evidence from coming to light. We broke into groups and cobbled together arguments to support the cover-up which, unbeknownst to us at the time, earned Pfizer’s attorneys ethics sanctions in the real case. After class, my friend H discovered herself to be in tears, heartbroken that she and the rest of us had been so allured by our fledgling ability to make legal arguments that we had lost track of the wider ethical context.
Out of our class of 100, only A, another friend, got it right. He said he would resign.
* * *
Years after my internship, I refer to the unhappy circumstances of the woman and the radio show host when I train new attorneys to conduct intakes and assess potential cases. It’s a lesson about non-lawyers who struggle to communicate in ways that lawyers prefer. But it’s also a lesson about the terminal limitations of litigation to help those in need, that a litigator sews only with frayed thread.
* * *
The intern at the desk opposite mine comes from a top law school, ranked higher than mine. Her career counselor discouraged her from taking this internship. Instead, he advised her, she should go the traditional route and intern for a big law firm where, per tradition, she could expect to receive a six-figure offer by summer’s end. Seeking out a nonprofit like ours was simply incorrect.
* * *
I chat with a different intern from another top law school about Alex Kozinsky, a powerful, famous judge who resigned after it became known that he sexually harassed his law clerks for years. The intern says Judge Kozinsky’s misconduct was an open secret at her law school, but the school encouraged its students to pursue clerkships with him regardless.
* * *
Whenever a case is especially affecting, my supervisor walks up and down a flight of stairs, up and down, up and down.
I have no strategy to recenter myself for when I finish an intake interview, or when I read through the college rapists’ social media posts, or when I review a court paper the father of the three- and six-year-old filed, or what have you. Nor can I even recognize when I need to recenter myself. So, I don’t. I take my lunch in a nearby park and read fantasy novels available for free online, and I get what I pay for.
* * *
One of the lawyers in our office used to be a district attorney. She wanted to prosecute sex crimes. She quit after years of nothing but assignments to drug cases.
She overworks herself so badly in the college student case that, the day before a key filing is due, she is taken to the hospital, and we have to ask the court to postpone our deadline.
* * *
As a public defender freshly after graduating, and unable to make rent without selling her plasma, H posts on social media: “How can I sleep when my clients have to sleep behind bars?”
Up and down, up and down.
* * *
C goes to the waiting room on the first day of her first internship to gather a patient who, she finds, has dropped his pants in order to show her his penis. She scurries to her supervisor, who bellows, “Oh no he didn’t!” and bounds down the hall to confront the man.
This is the last good impression C will have of her supervisor, who will later instruct her and the other interns to alter health records in order to secure government grants. One day, C raises a concern about health privacy under HIPAA, and her supervisor, genuinely confused, says, “Who’s HIPAA?”
* * *
I talk to a man who was raped by a family member as a kid in the 1970s. The statute of limitations, which usually stops people from litigating old events, has been extended for cases like his. But the family member is already dead, and even so, the man’s testimony is the only evidence.
I hear you.
* * *
In my second-round interview, the most senior attorney asks if I’m OK with swearing in the workplace. I say, “You should meet my fiancé.”
One day, I observe this attorney argue a case before the state intermediate appellate court. She’s nervous and it shows on her red cheeks and damp forehead. Her unsteady voice sounds like a ball rolling down a flight of stairs. She’s not much older than me. No one at our office is.
By the time of my first wedding anniversary, no one I interned with works there anymore.
* * *
My friend H now works for an insurance company. She works short hours and no longer has to sell her plasma to make rent. My friend A works for an intellectual property firm and dedicates a third of his time to pro bono work. Both are satisfied that their careers are, at least, not evil.
I still work in a legal field, though not as a litigator. Whether I’m satisfied with myself or not, I have started to go up and down, up and down.
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