Amy Sohn

As the Spitzer story broke, my Gentile husband said to me only half-jokingly, “Are you, as a Jew, embarrassed that he did this?” We have an expression “BFJ - bad for the Jews” that we invoke frequently in situations like this (Monica Lewinsky was BFJ, Sarah Silverman is GFJ and so on).
I responded that I was more embarrassed as a mother. And I am. Again and again I keep thinking of Spitzer’s teenaged daughters - and they are daughters, not “children,” as Bruno and others have referred to them - who have to go to school and deal with this, and how this will change them in terms of their sexual development, perceptions of men, and self-confidence.
A friend who suffered a personal tragedy far worse than this used the phrase “black hole” to describe the moment his life changed. As I watched Silda Spitzer next to her husband when he gave the first press conference, it seemed that the anguish on her face was more about the “black hole” into which he had cast their daughters than the black hole she herself had just entered as a wife.
Did he do it to get caught? Did he think he was above the law because of his arrogance? Was this a case of splitting, as a pop psychologist said on Anderson Cooper the other day? Splitting Spitzer?
I would like to believe that he did not think his daughters would ever find out, which was why he was able to engage in this behavior. But whether or not a man’s daughters might know, as a father of three girls - all coming of age sexually - he should have subjected himself to higher ethical standards.
When “Kristen” was only a few years older than his eldest daughter, how could he not think of his own daughters, and even the the fact that Kristin was some man’s daughter too?
Whether all married men should feel obligated to act out their sexual predilections with their own wives, whether “new p****” as the Chris Rock routine goes is so seductive it’s hard for any man to turn it down, whether prostitution should be legalized, whether Spitzer was set up by Joseph Bruno, Roger Stone, or anyone else, why the Feds reauthorized the wire so shortly before bringing down the case, are all valid questions. (My husband thinks I should write about married people who hide their true sexual identities from their spouses, and why they feel the need to. Maybe I will.)
But as a mother of a girl who, thankfully, is a decade away from adolescence, I simply feel sad for these three daughters. Their lives as Spitz’s kids may have been tough before (the agro dad, the affluenza, the public profile) but they now have a new league of problems. Because of what he did, and because their discovery of it coincided with the whole world’s discovery of it, they face a lifetime of depression, psychotherapy, and relationship problems. It’s hard enough being an adolescent girl in Manhattan as it is. I only hope they bounce back as well as Chelsea Clinton has, which will require equal parts Zoloft and denial.