What Lisa Knew

Description for WHAT LISA KNEW: THE TRUTHS AND LIES OF THE STEINBERG CASE by Joyce Johnson:

SHE WAS FOUND IN DARKNESS---THE BRUISED, COMATOSE FIRST-GRADER WHO WOULD NEVER WAKE UP TO TELL ANYONE WHICH OF THE TWO ADULTS IN THE SMALL, FILTHY GREENWICH VILLAGE APARTMENT HAD BEATEN HER.

Although on January 30, 1989, Joel Steinberg was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter after a twelve-week, nationally televised trial in which his former lover, Hedda Nussbaum, was the star prosecution witness, the story of what really happened to Lisa Steinberg remains as mysterious and inconclusive as Henry James's THE TURN OF THE SCREW, which is also about children at the mercy of evil surrogate parents who use them in their games with each other. "The truth will set you free," Nussbaum wrote Steinberg shortly after Lisa's death. But "why should either of them---collaborators in the destruction of a child---have been set free?" Joyce Johnson asks, as she questions the moral validity of what swiftly became know to attorneys as the "Hedda Nussbaum defense." Its basic premise: that a battered woman cannot be held responsible for failing to act to prevent the abuse of a child or perhaps even for participating in it herself.

Attorney Joel Steinberg and former children's book editor Hedda Nussbaum were neither Lisa's natural or adoptive father and mother. The loopholes in the adoption system---part of our nation's glaring failure to protect children---had enabled them irresponsibly to acquire both Lisa and her sixteen-month-old "brother", Mitchell, as infants. The unmarried couple would never have passed inspection, for despite their professional credentials, they had come to belong more to the criminal underworld than to the upper middle class. Cocaine dealers, prostitutes, distributors of pornography---these were the people they chose to associate with. Lisa Steinberg's death was the culmination of years of cocaine abuse on the part of Steinberg and Nussbaum, years of their narcissistic pursuit of sensual gratification through the escalating brutality of their own relationship.

In this compelling, passionately written, often devasting book, Joyce Johnson not only examines the mysteries still surrounding Lisa Steinberg's death but also addresses the even more painful question of how she lived, in a harrowing account of what is know about her last days and hours, when no one acted to save her.

What happens to a child when her life is secondary to the dangerous and obsessive needs of adults? In a time when the physical and sexual abuse of children has risen dramatically with the incidence of drug abuse, Lisa Steinberg becomes emblematic of thousands of other small, nameless victims of societal indifference and adult madness. Johnson's acute psychological insight has enabled her to see beyond the headlines and to interpret the truth, lies, and mythology of the Steinberg case with power and resonance.