Janet Malcolm’s Cross-Examinations, By EMILY BAZELON

IPHIGENIA IN FOREST HILLS

Anatomy of a Murder Trial

By Janet Malcolm

155 pp. Yale University Press. $25.

   Two decades ago, Janet Malcolm published The Journalist and the Murderer,” her classic story of the story of a murder trial. Her subject was the relationship between the writer Joe McGinniss and the Army doctor Jeff­rey MacDonald, who gave McGinniss full access to his defense team when he stood trial for the death of his wife and children — and then discovered that over years of apparent friendship, McGinniss was writing a future best seller portraying MacDonald as a psychopathic killer. In her brilliant dissection of this betrayal, Malcolm exposed the “morally indefensible” nature of the work of her journalistic tribe.

Now Malcolm has written her own tale of a murder trial. The accused is Mazoltuv Borukhova, a 35-year-old doctor indicted in the killing of her estranged husband, Daniel Malakov, in 2007, in the midst of a brutal custody battle over their 4-year-old daughter, Michelle. The evidence tying Borukhova to the crime includes 91 cellphone calls, in the weeks before Malakov’s death, between her and the hit man with whom she is on trial. Yet Malcolm feels a “sisterly bias” toward Borukhova because she is a “gentle, cultivated” woman. “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it,” the journalist writes.

Malcolm never resolves this dualism in her book, which appeared in a shorter form in The New Yorker last spring. Nor does she offer a close-up portrait of Boru­khova, who did not agree to an interview. In “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Malcolm pointed out that you can’t betray a subject you barely know; the disadvantage, of course, is that even as Borukhova is convicted and sentenced to life, she remains an enigma. The same is true for the insular Bukharan Jewish immigrant community in Queens that she and her husband come from. Malcolm visits this foreign world without penetrating it. But if “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” doesn’t deliver the ordinary pleasures of a whodunit, its appeal lies in Malcolm’s sidelong observations about journalism and the judicial process. She is acute — and devastating — on how the custody fight helped to doom Borukhova for certain at trial.

   Three and a half weeks before Malakov’s death, Justice Sidney Strauss of the New York State Supreme Court suddenly awarded him sole custody of Michelle, even though until that point, the girl had lived with her mother and resisted visits with her father. The prosecution’s theory was that Borukhova had killed her husband to avenge this loss. (The book’s title comes from the Greek myth in which Clytemnestra kills her husband, Agamemnon, after he sacrifices Iphigenia, their daughter.) Malcolm treats Strauss’s custody ruling as a terrifyingly arbitrary exercise of state power. “I know of no other case where a well-cared-for child is taken from its mother because it sits on her lap during supervised visits with an absent father and refuses to ‘bond’ with him,” she writes. “How had this nightmare — every mother’s nightmare — become a reality? What malevolent fairy had written its surreal script?”

That character turns out to be David Schnall, Michelle’s court-appointed law guardian. As Malcolm explains, law guardians aren’t constrained by the ­wishes of their child clients. At their worst, they present the child’s best interests to the court in a light that merely reflects their own prejudices. Schnall never talked to Michelle, whom he wrongly called nonverbal. At the custody hearing, Malcolm says, he prodded a clinical psychologist who had interviewed Michelle and her parents into saying that Boru­khova lied “without conscience” and had falsely accused Malakov of molesting Michelle to manipulate the proceedings. After Schnall testified for the prosecution at the criminal trial, Malcolm asked to interview him. He called her and ranted for an hour about vague conspiracies — involving Communists, “zombie banks” and the government. Unsettled, Malcolm called Borukhova’s lawyer, self-consciously entering the story she was covering. But her intervention was in vain. The trial judge, Robert Hanophy, dismissed the defense’s motion to bring Schnall back to the stand to answer questions about his apparent delusions and paranoia.

In Malcolm’s telling, it’s an ugly, callous moment, all the more because she links Hanophy’s ruling to his determination to finish the trial in time for his planned beach vacation. To be sure, Schnall’s bizarre perfidy doesn’t negate the prosecution’s revenge theory: Boru­khova could have been driven to hire her husband’s killer precisely because the wheels of Family Court were turning so unjustly against her. Still, whatever the implications, Malcolm succeeds in indicting the state actors who sat in judgment of Boru­khova’s motherhood. As for the journalists who covered the murder trial, Malcolm says they were complicit. “Malice remains its animating impulse,” she writes of her profession. And later: “We explain and blame. We are connoisseurs of certainty.”

Well, most of us. At the book’s end, Michelle has gone to live with her father’s family, and Borukhova’s mother and sisters think she is being abused. There are marks on the child’s cheeks from pinching and a red lesion on her neck. Michelle’s uncle explains the pinching as “a form of affection” and says that Michelle hurt her neck in a fall at school. His account doesn’t exactly match the Family Court report of the incident. But Malcolm does not condemn the uncle by suspecting him of lying. “In life, no story is told exactly the same way twice,” she says instead. “Only in trials is making it pretty equated with making it up.” In some ways, this conclusion is more subtle than satisfying. But perhaps that is the price of refusing to be Joe McGinniss. For Malcolm, and for her readers, it is worth paying.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and the Truman Capote law and media fellow at Yale Law School.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-iphigenia-in-forest-hills-by-janet-malcolm.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print