A Dish Best Served Cold

And then there was the matrimonial bar's feeding frenzy. Not surprisingly, any of the TDK members who pled guilty or were convicted found themselves named in divorce proceedings. The smarter wives struck before the plaintiff's attorneys got to their respective husbands' assets and at least got a decent property settlement, if no alimony or child support. The slower ones ended up in far worse shape financially. For some of them, having to go to work for the first time since marrying the TDK member was a real struggle. There were lots of high-end houses and expensive cars on the market in the wake of the criminal cases. Women and children who believed that they were entitled to a life of wealth and privilege as a result of their marriage or being born to a TDK mover and shaker found out how hard it is to live down at the level of ordinary folks. They didn't get a lot of sympathy, even if they had not been involved at all in the TDK activities. Guilt by association, I guess.

When the videos were released, there was a second wave of matrimonial actions among the families of the older TDK alumni whose prosecutions were barred by the statutes of limitation. A lot of wives of those older TDK alumni were happy to take advantage of the extremely negative connotations that being a former TDK member created to negotiate a generous financial exit from marriage to a man who had abused women in his past. The risk to these wives of any kind of revenge by their former husbands was mitigated by the loss of office, power, status and influence that the former TDK members experienced as a result of being tarred with the TDK brush.

When the bloodletting was done and the dust settled, TDK had ceased to be of any meaningful influence in our state. Maddie told Jack and me that there was some discussion among the state's bar association about giving us an award for all the lucrative work we'd generated for so many of the state's leading criminal, civil and matrimonial law firms. We think she was kidding. Or at least we hope she was kidding.

We never did find out who assaulted the five TDK members that launched the entire series of events, although Jack and I have a theory. During the course of an interrogation of one of the fraternity's officers, we discovered that Magda had not quite been candid with us about Ivan's actions. It seems that Ivan had downloaded all the TDK videos before scrubbing the ones that involved any of Magda's working girls. When he finished, he'd retained a copy. He'd actually made two visits to TDK, spaced more than a year apart, to deal with potential blackmail of one of Magda's girls, not one. The first visit had been prior to the first TDK member's being found bound, gagged and penetrated on campus. We knew that Magda's sense of propriety, which objected to abuse of women notwithstanding her operating an escort service, would have been offended by what was going on. Ivan's skills and their connections to the underworld would have made obtaining the necessary drugs and administering them to the TDK members an easy task. And he was certainly astute and observant enough to know how to avoid leaving a record or a trail.

We also liked Magda and Ivan for the release of the videos to the media and the law firms. But we were never able to prove any of this. Shortly after the TDK scandal exploded, Magda quietly sold Angela's Angels to one of her senior staff and she and Ivan moved back to Europe. We think they're living in Portugal, in a small villa somewhere along the coast, based on the rumors we've heard. Absent additional information concerning the assaults or the release of the recordings, we'll have no reason to determine where they might have settled. And to be honest, no one seems concerned that the assaults on the TDK members have been allowed to achieve the status of cold cases.

When the TDK prosecutions were completed, Maddie and I took a three-month leave of absence from our jobs. We were both burned out and needed time to recover. And we also needed time to work on our baby-making project. I am happy to report that we succeeded in both recovering and getting my wife pregnant. In fact, we succeeded a little too well in the latter task. According to her OB/GYN, we're expecting twins. I can promise you they won't be going to the State U when the time comes for them to select a college.