The Wives of White-Collar Crime

• Author: Kate Silver
• Pages: 9-10

Opening

Statements

EDITED BY LIANE JACKSON

LIANE.JACKSON@AMERICANBAR.ORG

PHOTO BY TONY LUONG PHOTOGRAPHY

DECEMBER 2018 ABA JOURNAL || 9

The Wives of

White-Collar Crime

Support group aims to help families and end stigma

IN 20 07, L isa Lawler was blindsided when she learned her hus-

band was being investigate d for embezzling money from his

employer in Massachusetts to t he tune of $2.5 million. He was

ultimately convict ed and sentenced to two years in jail. A nd

Lawler was left to pick up the pieces of t he family’s life.

“There’s a kind of an identity crisi s in terms of, ‘What hap-

pened? Who are we now?’ ” says Lawler, whose son was a teenager

at the time. “It’s literally as if a bomb went o in our lives.”

After she’d made it through the worst—the divorce f rom her

husband, from whom she’d already been separated; t he selling of

her home; the move to Texas to start over; the acute shame—in

2013 Lawler decided to create a blog and support group ca lled the

White-Col lar Wives Club with the hope that other women whose

lives were similarly over turned could learn from her experience.

“I began blogging about this be cause I just felt so disenfran-

chised at the end of the day,” she says.

Today, the name has changed to the White-C ollar Wives

Project (thewhitecollarw ivesproject.org), and it includes a private

online support group with ab out 80 women from four continents

who learned the hard way that t hey were married to white-coll ar

criminals.

Many lost their partner, their fi nancial stabi lity and their

expected f uture after the crime. “They not only g ain support from

one another but also learn how to nav igate the legal and eco-

nomic morass,” Lawler says.

In addition to support and education, women in th is situa-

tion need their own legal represent ation, says Guinevere Moore,

a partner with Johnson Moore in C hicago. “I can’t say it strongly

enough—get your own lawyer, and do it right away,” says Moore, a

tax lit igation attorney.

Moore, who serves as vic e-chair of the ABA Section of

Lisa Lawler is founder of the White-Collar

Wives Project and author of The White-

Collar Wives Survival Guide.