“We went to church every Sunday,” said Ms. Franck. “He played the violin in the front row of the church while being a criminal all week long.”
And that’s where Lisa Lawler comes in. Ms. Lawler, 60, is the founder of the White-Collar Wives Club, a blog she started in 2013, three years after her husband of 26 years was sentenced to 24 months in jail for embezzling $2.5 million dollars from a health care company in Massachusetts. In 2014, she took it a step further and created the White-Collar Wives Project, which includes the blog and a private online support group called “The Secret Lives of White-Collar Wives,” with about 70 members from around the world. Her mission was twofold: To raise awareness of the stigma and financial ruin facing the families of white-collar criminals, and to help guide women through their trauma and legal morass.
She wishes she had something like this when she was going through her ordeal. As she quickly discovered, the wives of white-collar felons are often the last to gain sympathy. Most people assume they were complicit, or that they deserved what they got for being spoiled, entitled and leading lavish existences.
This enrages Ms. Lawler. She insists she had no idea what her husband was doing, and that most of the women in her group didn’t either.
“These guys are master manipulators,” said Ms. Lawler. “It’s so hard for people to understand. When you’re living a modest lifestyle and the paycheck gets larger and larger, you don’t question it. A lot of women sign things unknowingly or have their signature forged. A lot don’t want to know. You shut down the logical part of your brain that says, ‘this is impossible.’ You don’t want it to be true.
“The process from investigation to sentencing took three years, that’s the average,” she continued. “You lose your life. You suffer guilt by association. You go through hiding, physically and emotionally. Being married to someone who has done something so awful to society and the family — it’s embarrassing. It’s shaming. It makes you want to shut down. I call it an act of domestic terrorism.”
So does Libby Henry, 49, a stay-at-home mother in Louisville, Ky. In 2009, Ms. Henry’s ex-husband, Edward “Ted” House, the son of a well-to-do, prominent Indiana family, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for mortgage, bank and wire fraud.
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When it happened, Ms. Henry blamed herself for not asking enough questions about her husband’s work.
“I was financially illiterate,” she said. “I came out of college with the Mrs. degree. I was the 1950s housewife — willingly. It’s embarrassing to admit, but it’s the truth. I had a bank account and he put money in it, and I never thought anything about it.”
This is an unfortunate reality, said Eugene Soltes, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and the author of “Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of a White-Collar Criminal,” in an email. All too often “a spouse — like their partner — will engage in motivated reasoning and miss the warnings signs that something is amiss,” he said. “This is tragic since the person often best positioned to help stop an individual from going down a slippery slope is their spouse.”
The impact on children is also devastating, no matter how old they are. More than five years after the fact, Sarah Nolan, Ms. Franck’s 25-year-old daughter, is still sorting out the hurt and anger caused by her father’s deceit.
She was a college freshman when her parents came to tell her and her sister that their father had turned himself in to federal officials. Ms. Nolan promptly ran into the bathroom and threw up, she recalled in an interview. Until that point, she thought her parents had one of the better relationships out there; unlike most of her friends’ parents, they were still together. But it was all a lie.
For three months after getting “thrown into an emotional cyclone,” as she put it, she hid in her apartment. She didn’t go to class; she was afraid to see people. With failing grades, she dropped out of school. “The biggest thing to come to terms with was that my entire childhood was kind of bought with stolen money,” she said. “It was an identity crisis. As I look back, I beat myself up for kind of not paying attention. What was the indicator that I missed out on over and over?”
Therapy has helped her try to make sense of it, although she hasn’t seen her father in about two years.
“I’m not even mad about what he did to me, I’m so mad at what he did to my mom,” she said. “She’s never hurt anybody in her entire life.”
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Ms. Franck struggled after her husband’s crime. While she didn’t have to file for bankruptcy, like Ms. Henry did, she did sell her Ford Thunderbird to pay off her daughter’s college debt and some of her own legal fees after she was investigated by the F.B.I., and she had to get a second mortgage to cover debt left behind by her husband. She was also diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and not long after, had two bouts of colorectal cancer, which she said was in remission. “The doctor said it was stress-induced,” she said.
Ms. Franck and Ms. Henry divorced their husbands, something Ms. Lawler suggests all wives of white-collar criminals do. “I’m adamant about them divorcing to protect their assets so they are left with a fighting chance to recover their own losses as the first victims of a husband’s financial crime,” she said.
Still, she is astounded by how many women try to make the marriage work.
“The women want to live back in the safety of the bubble,” Ms. Lawler said. “Many of them defend their husbands: ‘He’s a good father, a good husband, a great member of the community.’ I say, ‘No, a good man protects his family and knows his place and role in society. Good guys don’t toss themselves and their families over a cliff. Love and trust go hand in hand.’”
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/your-money/white-collar-criminals-wives.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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