"Author Patricia Cornwell awarded $50.9m in suit" by Milton J. Valencia | Globe Staff, February 19, 2013
She is sitting in her posh home in the North End with a scenic view of Boston Harbor, and Patricia Cornwell is at once ecstatic and still livid. One of her famed works of crime fiction would not have this much drama.
A federal court jury had just awarded her $50.9 million in damages, finding her former financial company cheated her, her wife, and her company out of tens of millions of dollars. A federal judge could increase the award, too.
And Cornwell is sitting, one leg crossing the other, just a couple of hours after the decision, lamenting the journey she had to go through in the first place, the type of challenges not even a hero in one of her novels should have to face.
“It’s just, we have fought long and hard,” she said, her Southern drawl deepening as she gets more heated while discussing the betrayal of her former finance manager, Evan Snapper, and his company, Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP.
“It’s just been harrowing, but we felt we needed to do the right thing, we needed to fight,” she said, in an hour-long interview with the Globe.
For the last seven weeks, Boston has had an uncensored view of Cornwell’s life as it has played out at the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, after she sued Snapper and his company for negligence in the handling of her finances.
She has been forced to lay out her lavish lifestyle and her struggles with depression and bipolar disorder. With the words of a writer, she speaks of how she “has been eating arsenic for weeks,” and how “a whole mountain of rocks has been lifted off me.”
But by Tuesday afternoon the fight — an “autopsy” of her life, as she put it — had been worth it, she said. She had felt it was her responsibility to bring legal action, knowing there are people who would not have the resources to do it if they were in such a position, playing a leadership role as her heroine, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, would have.
“I tend to be outraged by injustices,” said Cornwell, 56. “It’s about as complicated as one of my novels; that’s for sure.”
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Cornwell, looking out at the harbor as she reflected on the case Tuesday, said she felt vindicated, regardless of the monetary award. A multimillionaire, she not only testified in the case but sat there each day of the trial, in the front row, she and her wife Staci Gruber bringing their own cushions to help pad the court’s wooden benches as she listened to hours of testimony.
She knew that her personal life would be exposed, including the messages she had sent in confidence to others, never believing they would become public. Some of them had criticized friends, former employees. She regrets the messages now, the way she wrote them....
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Related: Crime stranger than her fiction
Curling Up With a Cornwell
That's why I put this post up for you, readers. Good night.
