Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Visiting the Einhorns' countryside house some 200 miles southeast of Paris in the rolling hills next to Cognac is like walking into the world of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, an American murderer who lives in bourgeois splendor just outside of Paris.
On one level, everything is normal. Annika Einhorn is a poised, pretty woman with long red hair, living alone with a black dog, Frieda, to whom she speaks in high pitched Swedish, running her house and caring for its grounds with quiet confidence. Wherever you go with her in the minuscule village of Champagne Mouton, townsfolk inquire after Monsieur Einhorn and express outrage at his treatment, and in their partisanship you feel their attachment to Mrs. Einhorn as much as their concern with her husband. Like her husband's, her frame of reference covers the familiar ground of an ecologically conscious, politically aware, left-wing European intellectual, although in Annika's case there is also the therapeutic and Buddhist-inspired vocabulary of the consciousness movement.
But on another level, as in Highsmith's chilling world, there is something slightly sinister. The fact is that some 15 years ago this sensible, competent, charming woman stepped entirely out of the path of her life: abandoned not just her family and her past but her very identity to join Einhorn in a dangerous and difficult life underground, and she did this in the full knowledge that he was on the run from charges of murdering his girlfriend. Nothing visible in the house spoke of childhood or family, and an aura of rootlesness, of disconnection permeated the household.
One would expect, then, rather an impressionable person, one with, perhaps, the frailty so often ascribed to Holly Maddux. In fact, however, the picture is considerably harder to explain. Mrs. Einhorn is no jail widow. Unwilling to risk possible arrest for aiding an American fugitive, and with Einhorn's lawyers unable to win a guarantee of immunity from prosecutor Joel Rosen, she has so far refused to testify in person at her husband's trial. She has declined to sell the Moulin de Guitry -- her single asset -- in order to pay for Norris Gelman's services, leaving her husband to public defense lawyers. Her opinions about her husband are open-eyed, neutral, and well articulated. She describes her years of marriage as a steady growth toward autonomy -- precisely, in an eerie way, the growth that Holly Maddux is depicted as achieving in the year before her death. That makes it all the more shocking, the irony that on a certain level, Mrs. Einhorn is both responsible for her husband's capture -- it was the use of her real name in a French driver's license application that led to their discovery -- and, now, key to his defense.
"Honestly Neil, I cannot say that I know if Ira killed or did not kill Holly." Talking across a bare wood table in her cozy, homespun, and eerie living room, Annika Einhorn explains what it is like to live with a suspected murderer. "What I'm saying is that the picture that has been presented of Ira as the murderer of Holly is not a picture that matches my picture of Ira, the person I lived with. He's not even near this impression. No physical violence, no physical abuse, all these things that he's consecutively presented with ... My feeling has always been that Ira is innocent. That has been a feeling and also a feeling that I've analyzed analytically by exposing him to questions so that I've also convinced myself intellectually."
When following the passage in Pennsylvania of the Einhorn Law, the Philadelphia D.A.'s office presented France with a new extradition request, Annika Einhorn found herself in the new role of activist -- a role to which, time would show, she was well suited. Soon, in addition to her lawyers, she had enrolled a wide spectrum of the French human rights establishment: members of the French government and of the European Parliament; Socialist, Communist, and Green Party delegates; the League of Human Rights, the influential human rights group S.O.S. Racisme. And as the extradition evolved from a legal to a political issue, so did the field of attack widen and the affaire Einhorn took on an increasingly political nature.
On Dec. 1, 1999, District Attorney Lynne Abraham wrote to then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright requesting her intervention, expressing high indignation that Einhorn remained free, "cavorting in the nude" for an Esquire photographer, "free on bail, eating strawberries and blaming the CIA for Holly's murder." Albright complied.
In equal measure, throughout France, human rights advocates gave their support to Einhorn. Fodi Sylla, a founder of the enormously influential S.O.S. Racisme, lamented the "climate of hysteria ... [the] Sacco and Vanzetti climate around Ira." League of Human Rights president Michel Tubiana focused on the role of Lynne Abraham. "The personal conduct of the Philadelphia D.A. was absolutely mind-blowing," he says. "This woman, if she'd had an equivalent position in France and behaved like that, she would have been fired. So already, how could we think of extraditing anyone in this context, in the middle of this hysteria?
French supporters saw the question of Einhorn's guilt as a far lesser concern than the legal issues of his extradition. Again and again, lawyers and politicians bluntly described their lack of concern with Einhorn's guilt or the evidence against him, turning the question instead to the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans in U.S. prisons, to the death penalty, to the strong conviction that the American press had judged Einhorn guilty before trial, to the constant worry that a fair trial for Einhorn, given his countercultural activity in the '60s, was impossible.
For many Americans, the French reaction was outrageous -- and given the overwhelming evidence of Einhorn's guilt, it was proof of both Einhorn's extraordinary powers of manipulation and of anti-Americanism in France. Buffy Hall, Holly Maddux's sister, long committed to bringing Einhorn to justice, described Annika Einhorn as "Cleopatra, Queen of Denial." Lynne Abraham's office, citing the pending trial, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in a published statement, Abraham made her feelings clear. "The truth is this," she said: "He is getting away with murder, and I am incensed, offended, outraged."
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