My Not-So Happily Ever After

How I found myself, when I thought I had lost everything. By Jessica Gold

When I heard Atoosa was making a return to the media, I was thrilled. As someone who has spent her career in fashion, Atoosa has been a longtime hero of mine. I remember running up to her and her mom to introduce myself after spotting her at a charity shopping event, and she couldn’t have been kinder or more gracious. To me and to so many others, Atoosa was the living embodiment of success. She just had that thing, that way of speaking to women that showed she ‘got it.’ Well, lucky for us, she’s come back with Atoosa Unedited and I’m honored to write the first guest entry. Atoosa’s Earth School learnings, and mission to provide a safe place to share hard stories and lessons learned, are so needed now. We all meet tough times and bumps (some bigger than others) along the way, but the time and way we feel comfortable sharing those challenges can be an uncertain journey. I know I’ve wanted to share my story more publicly for a while, but wasn’t sure what the best venue would be for me. I’m so grateful to Atoosa for inviting me to do so now and I know it’s the right home for it. P.S: When she suggested I write this week’s entry, on a short deadline, I heard her Editor-in-Chief's voice and promptly replied, “I’m on it.” [Editor’s note: Jess, I bow to you. Truly. 🙌🏼]

Let’s rewind to 2007.

I was in my mid-twenties working hard at my dream job as a Marketing Director at a high-end fashion company. I had arrived in NYC a few years before, (on Sept. 11th, 2001, no less) as an assistant, and worked my way up, organizing fashion shows, photo shoots, celebrity shopping days and events in New York and LA. I had my own office and an apartment midtown. I was proud of myself for making it happen. 

Around this time, I noticed a not-so-subtle shift in the dating lives of the women I knew. I had spent my early twenties single and not thinking about it. Getting married just hadn’t been on my mind and it seemed the same for my friends. But soon enough, Facebook notified me that women I had gone to summer camp with had moved in with guys they had met in 6th grade, back when they were wearing oversized NBA tees and Umbros.  My college friends paired off with former fraternity guys whose penchant for binge drinking and womanizing is now more commonly recognized as toxic masculinity. Even my closest, most adventurous New York pals, whom I thought were satisfied with their cool singlehood, started to become desperate. The frantic frenzy among my peers to settle down meant putting careers and independent identities on the back burner.

I am shy by nature and have never been smooth in the dating world. I had plenty of male friends, but never really considered them romantic options. I thought I had time to decide about grown-up matters. As the oldest of three siblings, and part of  a wonderful, very close family, I knew deep down that I eventually wanted to replicate that type of life. So I took the plunge and started to open myself up to dating. Around that time, social networks were becoming a thing, and I was a member of a Facebook competitor, Friendster, a site that also incorporated dating. One guy, let’s call him J,  kept popping up on my ‘Singles near Me’ page. I checked out his profile a few times, and found his blog. He’d gone to Yale and had an indie film business. I liked that he seemed smart, funny and successful. So I reached out and... sent my intro note three times (as I said, smooth operator! 💁🏻‍♀️). After that amateur blunder, I thought he would never answer...but he did. He thought it was all funny and asked me out. 

We met a week later over drinks at one of his favorite midtown bars. J was funny, charming and from a somewhat similar family background to me. Spending time with him felt familiar and exciting all at once. He was from Silicon Valley and a self-proclaimed entrepreneurial wünderkind. J was kind of short, and I thought some of his self-aggrandizement and silly bragging was to counter that. I looked at it as part of his outside world personality, not the quieter, softer self that appealed to me. I remember telling my mom on the phone on the way home from the date, “That’s the type of guy I could see myself dating.” Over the next few months, we started spending all of our time together. I brought him home to meet my family and it went well: He was affable and generous. Everything felt easy and right. I moved in with him a few months later. By the following year, we were engaged. I had joined the ranks of the soon-to-be-betrothed and was utterly happy. 

Just as we started our life together, troubles began to find us.  J had begun to produce a large-scale film and...it crashed. I knew film was a risky business, but I wasn’t at all familiar with investor dealings and loan terminology. I had no idea that J had accepted sizable loans from investors that he never repaid when the movie didn’t pan out. Little by little, chinks started to appear in the armor of our lives: A rent payment was late. J handled all our finances from the get-go because he claimed finance was his forte, not mine. Although I worked on the more creative side of the fashion business, I did have some financial literacy. J seemed to meet each of my worries with just the right piece of consolatory information. Another time, he took some money out of my wallet without asking. We fought over my relationship with his boastful, blowhard family. But J was constantly reassuring and knew I wanted to feel safe. I asked him to show me bank and investment documents so I could better understand our financials. He showed me emails from our accountant confirming we’d paid taxes. Plus, this may sound sheltered, but divorce was a foreign subject for me. I never saw it in my family and it only rarely occurred in my hometown community.  I believed that if I tried hard enough, and accepted some things, it would all be ok. I wanted to blend in with my peers: To remain married and on the right track. In retrospect, I realize I turned a blind eye to red flags small and large because I wanted my relationship to work out. 

Over the course of our eight-year marriage, J and I both started various fast-growing businesses, ran in chic entrepreneurial social circles, worked hard to get along with each other’s families and began to think about starting our own family. To the outside world, we looked like the picture of a successful young couple. Much of the time, J seemed like a good partner who loved me. He was kind and open and he strove to help me with both the apparel business I was building and household chores. But over time, the cracks in our relationship deepened, and they weren’t just financial. I spent most of my time with J, cut off from friends and sometimes family. I had become an entrepreneur at his urging, which was fascinating and all-encompassing...and closed me off from the office life J scorned and I craved. I didn’t notice it happening, but my family did and urged me to think about life beyond J. Unfortunately, I was so committed to the life we were building together, I dismissed those suggestions. He also used controlling tactics to undermine my confidence in my professional capabilities, my driving, my cooking... He would say things like, “You just don’t understand money.” “You’re clumsy.” “Dinner’s fine but next time I’ll cook.” He established himself as the lucky one who could score last-minute reservations and smooth things over, and me as the unlucky one, for whom personal and professional matters often fell apart. If the factories I produced my clothing in were running late, or if I had a quibble with a family member, J would play the rescuer with his charisma and quick wit. He would gaslight me if I challenged a lie he told or if I questioned his business dealings too deeply. “It’s all in your head.” “You need to settle down.”

I’m embarrassed to think that I became less and less the woman my mother raised me to be and instead was a dependent, hair-trigger sensitive, meek version of my former self. Rent payments continued to occasionally be late, strange calls with investors seemed to last for hours, things just felt… unsteady, even as his new gym businesses grew and grew and we moved into a nice new apartment...a roomy Upper West Side Pre-War with a dining room and a Washer/Dryer. I wasn’t sure life felt stable enough to start a family but I wanted to try. Again, red flags be damned, we loved each other and we still had a lot of good in our lives. I believed it would all work out in the long term. In retrospect, I realize that J abused my empathetic and trusting nature by building up a dependency on him. This is known sociopath behavior, and only now do I recognize it clearly. 

That’s when it all came crashing down.

One morning in May 2015, I heard a loud knocking on our apartment door at 6am. Was it my Women’s Wear Daily morning delivery? Was our older neighbor having a medical emergency? Suddenly, a dozen armed FBI agents rushed into my hallway and my bedroom. They had J handcuffed against the wall. We were both in our pajamas. The FBI held me in the bedroom while they had J get dressed and took him into custody. He said nothing to me before he left: My two small dogs and I, in our room, crumpled and crying. I’d never seen a gun before, let alone have a huge number of them in my bedroom. I was horror-struck. I went to court that day for the arraignment, holding my brother and J’s brother’s hands, terrified. 

What was going on? I was completely and utterly confused and disoriented. That day, J was charged with federal wire fraud. It turned out that the loans he was liable for years back had become the impetus for a long-running illegal Ponzi scheme in which he raised money from one investor, only to pay back part of an old loan or to cover some part of our personal finances. I heard an Assistant District Attorney behind me utter, “He’s as good as cooked.” His attorneys pleaded with me not to read the criminal complaint for legal reasons and I complied. I was told NOTHING by J, his attorneys or the federal government and yet my world had fallen apart and my future seemingly destroyed all in one morning. My head was spinning constantly, I woke with panic attacks and shut myself in my apartment. J’s arrest hit the NY Times and articles about his crimes ran 8 different times. There was no hiding. 

My parents were deeply worried about me. They arrived in NYC the day after the arrest and urged me to come home to Boston a few weeks later. I was only getting worse and it seemed like a good idea to get out of town. On my train ride up to Boston, I read Christina McDowell’s memoir, After Perfect, about her white collar criminal father. Her father was her idol and protector, yet went on to destroy his family, and steal from his own children. It shattered me to think that J could resemble McDowell’s father. And yet...it had me thinking. When I got back to NYC the following week, I finally found the courage to read the criminal complaint. Who was this person the FBI described? The man I loved had stolen from dozens of people, faked documents and had been kicked out of the business he purported to run. It made me sick to think he had hurt so many people. And most of all, he had hurt me. J had lied about almost everything in our life and as a result, all those dreams for our life I was holding on tightly to, just vanished. 

I couldn’t even fathom the vastness of what I was losing: My home, the possibility of starting a family, and of course, my marriage.  I was in no trouble of my own as I’d been in the dark and had only a small amount of money in my personal accounts, but I had to close the clothing business I had dedicated the past five years to building because while I prioritized paying my contractors’ invoices, J was busy draining my company’s accounts. 

When I returned home to Boston, I pulled myself together one day to meet with a rabbi for spiritual advice. I was shocked when he said I should “jettison” J and leave my marriage as soon as possible. He told me J’s family would never chastise him: That their boastfulness could translate into massive denial and in turn, I would suffer when I could instead start over. The worst had happened and we all had to get real, fast. J’s family stopped speaking to me entirely when I left. Over the next two years, before reporting to prison, J made my life extraordinarily difficult by prolonging divorce proceedings when there were no assets to divide other than our two dogs, whom he fought for, using the defense that my parents’ two older schmoopy dogs in Boston would bully them. I simply said that I would care for the dogs while J was in prison and I won. Telling my story to the judge on the stand in a public setting was hard, but also liberating. 

I continued to suffer from PTSD and panic attacks, but I began to rebuild my life with the support and love of my family. I saw therapists who helped me to see J as the deviant sociopath I now know him to be. I learned about the love bombing, compulsive lying and lack of empathy individuals like J are known for. As frightening as it was, I worked to uncover the damage he’d done to my psyche, my status and my security. I made calls to banks, insurance agents and old business contacts of J’s. Virtually nothing I’d formerly known to be true was. “White Collar Wives,” as we’re known, are rarely given the benefit of the doubt, but it’s this group who incurs the most psychological damage as a result of their husbands’ crimes. Although we are not party to our husband’s crimes, we are left to deal with the fallout on our own. The public often damns White Collar Wives, thinking they should have known better or need to be punished for living like The Real Housewives, when in reality, most of us never lived large and only tried hard to take care of our husbands, and (if we had them), children, too. We aren’t the criminals; our husbands are. 

To begin repaying my apparel company’s debts and to find some standing, I took a job as a florist near my parents’ home, working with women who nurtured my strength and autonomy. I rectified my personal and professional taxes for the past 10 years, and began to improve my credit. I made sure I had consistent healthcare insurance coverage after learning J had turned my plan on and off repeatedly over time. I explored dating after a year. J moved on quickly during our separation to another much younger woman who (oddly) shared my first name.  It was a one step forward, two steps back era for me, but I just kept moving.

I finally found some peace when J was sentenced and reported to federal prison for two years. The judge in his case had coincidentally also gone to Yale, and was publicly horrified by J’s abuse of privilege. I had a full-time corporate job by then and had more substantial savings on hand. I made friends and spent time with my beloved family. Although the pandemic has meant starting over again after being laid off, I still feel very grateful to be independant and making my own decisions about my future. 

I know now that as much as I want a partner, I don’t need one, unless that person brings honesty and positivity into my life. I am OK. I am resilient. I still have anxiety and PTSD that I am cognizant of and work on. I know I would never again let another person control me or to decide my financial future in any way. I read Atoosa Unedited and Cleo Wade and listen to Glennon Doyle’s podcast. I read and garden and do the things I enjoy. I reclaimed the tough person who had been erased by eight years of a marriage that I didn’t recognize as toxic. 

My advice or lessons learned? Everyone meets trouble in their lives, it’s just a matter of when. We can’t outsmart it and there is no emotional insurance that will protect us from unexpected illness, family troubles, financial upsets or any other number of unwanted experiences. Some may argue that marriage is a social construct: That professional women don’t need to have families and lives. I would counter that. Marriage and partnership can be beautiful if they are sincere and fulfilling. I still have hope for myself, but mostly, I am proud that I am standing on my own two feet again. J is out of prison, and we haven’t spoken since he left. I feel lighter and more focused on the future. It’s not perfect and it’s not easy. Peers have alienated me because my story scares them, or because I don’t fit the mold any longer. Dates have rejected me for my past life. Social media makes us feel that everyone else’s lives are perfect and happen on a prescribed timeline. I know it’s not true, but it’s a trap so many of us fall into. All I can do now is be kind, patient, and brave and make the most of the rest of my life.

Jessica Gold

Beloved reader, I am truly in awe of Jess and the incredible strength and resilience she has shown. If you want to send her a message, feel free to shoot me an email. Likewise, if you’re interested in doing an Atoosa Unedited Takeover, email me at atoosa@atoosa.com. I continue to be here for you 24/7, as always. 🤍🖤❤️ xo atoosa

The soundtrack of Jess’ Journey :