August 2003

Murder, She Wrote: Former Sex Crimes Prosecutor Linda Fairstein Turns a Gritty Career Into Bestseller

By Paula Bernstein

With her manicured nails, refined manners and passion for ballet, Linda Fairstein has the air of a lady of leisure—but she's far from it. Fairstein has devoted her career to prosecuting some of the most gruesome crimes in New York City's history. As the chief of the sex crimes unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's office for three decades, Fairstein supervised the investigation and trial of every rape, sexual assault and domestic abuse case in the city's boundaries, including the notorious "preppie murderer" and the controversial "Central Park jogger" case.

Then, following the old maxim "write what you know," Fairstein went on to create a best-selling book franchise about—what else—but a well-bred New York City sex crimes prosecutor with a penchant for ballet. The Alexandra Cooper Mystery Series tracks the adventures of glamorous Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper as she investigates mysterious crimes and, inevitably, nabs the bad guys. Last year Fairstein resigned her post at the DA's office last year to devote herself to writing full-time.

Now Fairstein's fictitious doppelganger follows in her professional footsteps, solving crimes remarkably similar in nature to some of the cases Fairstein worked on throughout her career. "As I've said ad nauseum, Alex is younger, thinner and blonder than I am. Also, I gave her a trust fund, which I don't have," explains the 56-year old author, who, like her protagonist, took ballet classes from early childhood through her first years at the D.A.'s office and who carries herself with the grace and posture of a dancer. "'Til this day, I'd rather be at the ballet than do anything else. It transports me."

Not coincidentally, Fairstein, like her fictional counterpart, majored in English at a Seven Sisters school. Fairstein graduated from Vassar College's last all-female class in 1969, while "Coop," as Fairstein's heroine is affectionately known, went to Wellesley. In fact, the lawyer-turned-writer credits her single-sex education for giving her the confidence to shatter the legal glass ceiling. "One of the great gifts of my Vassar education was the stunning strength it gave me, and the belief that each of the women in my class could go on to achieve any of our goals," Fairstein told Bryn Mawr's graduating class of 2002.

At the University of Virginia Law School, she was one of only a dozen women in a class of 340 students. "It was a little bit of a rude awakening," she recalls. After graduating in 1972, she joined the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, becoming the seventh female lawyer in an office of nearly 200 (today, the office has more than 600 lawyers on the staff, half of which are women). At the time, no woman had ever prosecuted a murder case in New York.

When Fairstein tried her first rape case in 1974, the antiquated laws regarding sexual assaults were just beginning to change and DNA evidence was still in the realm of science fiction. Before 1972, rapes generally went unreported and unprosecuted. "You were told not to tell someone if you were raped," recalls Fairstein.

Naturally, people looked askance at a young woman who actually chose to work in such an unsavory field. "Early on, when I would say 'sex crimes,' most people assumed that something had happened to me that made me an activist in the field," says Fairstein. She still cringes when she recalls a tabloid story written about her in the mid-1970s, "Legal Miss Who Misses Kisses."

"The idea was 'why would anybody in the world want to go out with the sex crimes prosecutor? She must hate men. I can look at it and laugh now, but I was mortified at the time," says Fairstein, who married Justin Feldman, a lawyer, just days before her 40th birthday in 1987.

When Fairstein was named chief of the recently established sex-crimes unit in the Manhattan D.A.'s office in 1976, the general consensus among friends and family was that she was out of her mind to be devoting her career to such disturbing work. But those same friends and family members are the ones who helped her through the rough times. "My personal strength came from having a very loving warm, supportive family and a husband who believes in letting me talk things through when I need to," she says.

Fairstein enjoyed the work in part because of its highly charged emotional nature. "I didn't care about the car thefts that, at the end of the day, so-and-so's insurance would pay for and he would get his car back. I liked that there was this emotion invested in solving this problem for this victim or trying to see that justice was done," says Fairstein. "But there was a tradeoff. When it was time to go home, these are not cases that you leave on your desk. A lot of it came home with me. I certainly had nights that were very disturbing."

Ironically, it was the humanity of the relationships Fairstein formed with the victims and their families that gave her some of the most satisfying moments on the job. When she prosecuted Robert E. Chambers Jr. a.k.a. "the preppie murderer," who strangled 18-year old Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986, Fairstein become close friends with Levin's sister Danielle and her mother Ellen. Following a heated 11-week trial and nine agonizing days of jury deliberation, Chambers pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter in the first degree.

"At the end of the trial, the only joy was that Danielle had her first child," recalls Fairstein, who was named godmother to the baby. After serving the maximum 15-year sentence, Chambers was released this year.

Her experience prosecuting Chambers and other violent criminals only cemented Fairstein's dedication to activism. She serves on the board of directors of the New York Women's Agenda and chairs their domestic violence committee. In addition, she serves on the board of directors of the National Center for Victims of Crime, Safe Horizon, Mt. Sinai Hospital's Sexual Assault Victim Intervention Program and Phoenix House Foundation.

"My husband says he sees less of me now than when I worked from seven in the morning until seven at night," says Fairstein, who lives with 84-year old Feldman in a spacious apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side and an 1810 farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard, where they spend summers.

Growing up as the second child of Samuel and Alice Fairstein, a doctor and a nurse, in suburban Westchester County, New York, Fairstein inherited her father's love of mystery novels and always dreamt of becoming a writer. "I started out with The Hardy Boys before Nancy Drew because I had a brother who is three years older, so they were already in the house. Then I moved on to the classics like Edgar Allen Poe and Conan Doyle." She's still a voracious reader.

When she finally decided to give writing a shot, there was never a question about what the subject matter would be. "I thought that what I could bring to the genre was the authenticity of the work I had done. I thought I could do for law what Patricia Cornwell had done for forensic medicine. It didn't hurt from my perspective when I was setting out to write that I thought I had the most interesting job in the world."

In 1996, Fairstein realized her long-time dream of becoming an author when Final Jeopardy, her first novel, was published. The book was well received and Fairstein followed it up with Likely To Die, Cold Hit, The Deadhouse and The Bone Vault, which was released in hardcover in January. The next addition to the Alex Cooper series, The Kills, about a historical object that inspires murder, will be released in January 2004.

Final Jeopardy was adapted into an ABC miniseries starring Dana Delany in 2001, Fairstein is currently in discussions with Hollywood about bringing Alex Cooper's adventures in The Bone Vault and The Deadhouse to the big screen.

Fairstein is no stranger to Hollywood. She's served as a model for various screen characters, including Valerie Harper in the 1982 TV movie Farrell for the People and Greta Scacchi's character in Presumed Innocent and The Accused, which earned Jodie Foster an Academy Award for her portrayal of a rape victim defended by Kelly McGillis.

Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan and Kim Cattrall have all been mentioned as possibilities for the role of Alex Cooper, but Fairstein won't allow herself to fantasize about which actress will play the part. "I don't want to jinx the process." She foresees writing an Alex Cooper book a year, as well as nonfiction books and a second series of novels. "I want to write more books, many many more books," she says.

"Unlike a lot of lawyers who write because they want to stop practicing law, I had the dream to write even before I went to law school. Once I saw I could do both, I was ecstatic." But coming on to her 30th year at the Manhattan D.A.'s office, says Fairstein, "I realized that the political parts of the job and running an office were not the parts that interested me at all," she says. "I had one passion, which was violence against women, and I could still be as aggressively involved in that work and write."

She also wanted to spend more time with her family, including her husband, her mother, her two step-grandsons and her four godchildren. "I did it the easy way. I skipped all of the bringing up kids," says Fairstein, whose sunny apartment is decorated with photos of her extended family.

While she was at one time considered a frontrunner for the position of Manhattan District Attorney if Robert Morgenthau, who has held the job since 1975, ever retires. Fairstein dismisses the possibility outright. "I have absolutely no interest in running a bureaucratic office of 600 lawyers and having no time for my issues. I found a fit for me that could not be better," she says.

As if to prove her point, Fairstein begins to read aloud from a letter she received recently from the victim of a rape and stabbing in New York City 18 years ago. "The fact that your organization took these crimes seriously and offered support helped me tremendously and gave me courage to go through the trial. I almost gave up my life after this event," writes the woman, who went on to get married, have children and start an architecture firm. "You have no idea how much you help women like me," reads a visibly moved Fairstein.

"That's the kind of thing that made it easy to go to work every day. You get that and it's all worthwhile."

PAULA BERNSTEIN IS A NEW YORK-BASED FREELANCER.

Copyright © 2003 Biography Magazine.