Hedda’s Hellish Tale

She still limps. Despite plastic surgery, her nose is crushed and her upper lip is permanently split. But when she testified last week in a Manhattan courtroom against her former live-in lover, who is accused of beating to death their illegally adopted six-year-old daughter, Hedda Nussbaum spoke in a firm, clear voice. What emerged was a bizarre tale of violence, drug abuse, isolation and mind control inflicted by disbarred lawyer Joel Steinberg. Asked why she never escaped from Steinberg’s thrall, Nussbaum had a simple reply: “I worshiped him.”

Fighting back tears, the former editor of children’s books recalled how Steinberg had first wooed her by promising to teach her about life. The lessons, she testified, soon turned to assaults so severe that she lost her spleen, several teeth and partial hearing in one ear. Her eye was damaged, her nose broken, and one knee hobbled. Six times, Nussbaum claimed, she tried to run away, but she always returned. She had become convinced she “could not survive without him.” After one pummeling in 1984, she fled to a shelter for battered women and was sent to Bellevue Hospital. When doctors questioned Nussbaum, she said she belonged to a sadomasochistic cult. “Joel put the story in my mind,” she testified, adding that he “would encourage me to come up with stories, fantasies about what happened. Since I had no actual memories of this myself, I believed I had some sort of amnesia about it.”

According to Nussbaum, Steinberg, 47, assumed such total control of her life that she could not eat or leave their Greenwich Village apartment without his permission. One night last November, she said, he ordered her and Lisa to eat hot pepper, forcing them to drink glass after glass of tap water. A bit later, while Nussbaum was in the bathroom, Steinberg came in bearing in his arms the bruised and unconscious girl. When Nussbaum asked what had happened, she testified, Steinberg replied, “What’s the difference what happened? This is your child. Hasn’t this gone far enough?” He then ordered her to flush the toilet.

After he left the apartment, Nussbaum tried several times to waken Lisa, but abandoned the effort because she thought Steinberg could use supernatural healing powers to revive Lisa when he returned. Instead, says Nussbaum, he insisted the couple share some free-base cocaine before calling for help. Nussbaum testified that Steinberg admitted, “I knocked her down, and she didn’t want to get up again.” Nussbaum suggested a motive for the brutal beating: Steinberg believed Lisa and the couple’s other illegally adopted child, Mitchell, then 16 months old, were hypnotizing him with their stares.

In order to testify, Nussbaum, 46, was forced to come to terms with the horror of her ordeal. Originally police charged her, along with Steinberg, with second-degree murder. Prosecutors dropped the charge after becoming convinced she had been so battered psychologically and physically that she could not have participated in beating Lisa. After months of intensive psychiatric care, Nussbaum agreed to testify for the prosecution. On the eve of her testimony, Nussbaum made what her psychiatrist calls a “final declaration of independence” by slapping Steinberg with a $3 million lawsuit for the decade of abuse she allegedly suffered at his hands.