Betty’s answer: Yes.
In November 1992, nine months after Betty was convicted of second-degree murder, she sat down with Oprah Winfrey at the Central California Women’s Facility. In the interview she sounded all the same notes she had with me. “I thought we did have the perfect marriage,” she said. “I took those marriage vows, and I believe he did at the time, too, believing that we’d be together, and we’d get through everything.” It remains one of Oprah’s most-watched programs.
Four years ago, in 2005, on Oprah’s 20th Anniversary Follow-Up Show, Winfrey interviewed Rhett Broderick, Betty and Dan’s youngest son, who was ten at the time of the murders. Handsome and well spoken, he said his mother should be released.
“She’s a nice lady,” he said. “Everyone here would like her…if they spoke with her on any topic other than my dad.”
To Betty, it was still about Dan. To me, it shouldn’t have been. My smart, handsome journalist husband and I had a son in 1997. Then, in 1998, we divorced. When Betty committed the crimes for which she remains in prison, she was a single, divorced mom in her forties whose ex-husband had remarried. Today I’m those things, too.
In 1990, when she sent me her “For Shame” letter, she implied that my youth and naïveté were obscuring my vision of matrimony. I’m older now and at least a little wiser (today, for example, I wouldn’t be an extra in a TV drama—it felt heady at the time; now it seems a bit tacky). More relevant, I’ve experienced the heartbreak that divorcing people endure—both men and women. My divorce was the hardest time of my life. I appreciate, in other words, some of what Betty must have been feeling in November 1989. Even so, I can’t find any justification for what she did.
In the years since Betty’s conviction, there’s been a growing public identification with women’s righteous anger in the wake of a bitter divorce. Less than two years after Betty became a household name, Hollywood embraced a new kind of female avenger. In 1991, the year of Betty’s second trial, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars got even with their men: Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis inThelma & Louise, Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy. When the movie The First Wives Club was released in 1996, one newspaper columnist wrote that it might as well “be called the Betty Broderick Club.” In the film, Ivana Trump says, “Ladies, you have to be strong and independent. And remember, don’t get mad—get everything!”
By 2002, when Jennifer Lopez starred in Enough, a thriller about a young mother on the run from a violent husband, even the marketing slogans read like rallying cries: “Self-defense isn’t murder.” “Everyone has a limit.” Then, in 2003, Charlize Theron won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her sympathetic portrayal of a serial killer in Monster. The movie put her vile acts in the context of repeated battery at the hands of men.
Since the Broderick murders, such dramatic portrayals have been accompanied by plenty of real-world pain. Nicole Brown Simpson divorced her husband O.J. in 1992, claiming he had abused her—a charge that became all the more chilling after she was killed two years later. O.J. was acquitted of the murder but found responsible in a civil trial. In 1993, Lorena Bobbitt took a carving knife and severed her husband’s penis after intercourse that she charged was rape. He was acquitted. By reason of insanity, she was found not guilty of assault.
When the Dixie Chicks sang a hit called “Goodbye Earl,” about two friends who murder one of their abusive husbands, it made people laugh and cheer. She held Wanda’s hand / As they worked out a plan / And it didn’t take long to decide / That Earl had to die, the Chicks sang, telling how they poisoned Earl’s black-eyed peas, wrapped him in a tarp, and stuffed him into a car trunk—then got away clean because It turns out he was a missing person who nobody missed at all.
That same spiteful fantasy spawned a mini industry of products, Web sites, and a Broadway show. After Scott Schmeizer, a Long Island executive with a housewares firm, got divorced in 2004, he worked with a designer to manufacture the Ex, a knife rack that resembles a corpse with multiple stab wounds. It sells for about $70, complete with five knives.
Sounds like a Mad Men marriage…