Who is Matthew Schoenfeld? (2)
Posted on April 22nd, 2012 in Uncategorized |
A week or so ago, I wrote a post about Harvard Law Student Matthew Schoenfeld, who was being publicized by the Harvard Law School because he is president of the Harvard Law and Business Association and because, describing himself as a survivor of child abuse, he is trying to use that organization to raise money to fight the problem of child abuse.
I wrote:
Schoenfeld has worked for Lehman Brothers, spent a summer at Goldman Sachs…and worked at 3G Capital, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund in New York best known for acquiring Burger King.
So let’s see: Guy works at Lehman, Goldman, 3G Capital, and as a research assistant for Larry Summers. And Harvard is writing articles about him—widely picked up on the web—because he raised $11,000 for Big Brothers Big Sisters?
In a story titled Harvard Law Student Overcomes Abuse and Gives Back, today’s Boston Globe essentially rewrites Harvard’s press release about Schoenfeld.
Matthew Schoenfeld was Googling himself last year to prepare for a job hunt when he saw the newspaper article. It wasn’t a local-boy-makes-good story, though it could have been.
…the newspaper article’s Schoenfeld was not a 25-year-old wunderkind. He was a scared 11-year-old child.
In vivid prose, the article, from a 1998 copy of the New York Daily News, detailed a litany of abuses that began when Schoenfeld’s parents’ marriage fell apart and ended in fights so vicious that police often intervened.
His mother - according to the newspaper’s account of his father’s court testimony - hit and shook their only child, tried to sabotage his sleepovers, and once dragged him screaming off the bench during a Little League playoff game. She was stripped of custody, a rarity in New York.
“I hadn’t thought about a lot of that stuff in years,’’ Schoenfeld said.
I’m somewhat uncomfortable raising doubts about anyone raising money for a good cause, but…the Globe’s piece does beg some questions.
Such as:
There is no way that if you Google yourself, you will turn up a New York Daily News article from 14 years ago.
I tried a bit to find that article Schoenfeld refers to finding by accident, and the only way I could was by going to the NYDN site and typing in Schoenfeld’s name.
So maybe that’s a little bit of theater, then, on his part. Not the end of the world. He wanted to point the Globe reporter to a 3rd-party source for a difficult subject while making it seem as if he’d stumbled across it by accident.
Except that the Globe then says that Schoenfeld thought:
How should he handle this piece of his past, so incongruous with his present, now that he knew it was public?
Except…you’d have to go looking really hard to find any article involving Matthew Schoenfeld and abuse, and unless he talked about it, why would anyone do that?
It’s hard not to think that Schoenfeld is using his past for public relations while trying to suggest that he’s just concerned about setting the record straight.
Point two is probably more important: The New York Daily News article really doesn’t support Schoenfeld’s claim of abuse. The gist of the NYDN article is not that Schoenfeld was abused by his mother; it’s that he was caught in a vicious tug of war in a custody battle lost by his mother.
Why?
Possibly because of some racism (Schoenfeld’s mother is Indian), and possibly, the News suggests, because the judge had a conflict of interest: Though two court-appointed experts recommended that the mother retain custody, the judge relied on a contrary report from a third expert who was simultaneously advising him in his own bitter divorce.
The other experts described Raminder glowingly and saw no reason for such a step.…
The headline of the Daily News article:
MEET RAMINDER SCHOENFELD: SHE LOST CUSTODY EVEN THOUGH TWO EXPERTS SAID SHE’S A LOVING MOM
All this sounds messy and terrible and no child should ever have to go through such an ordeal. And of course who can know what really happened? (Schoenfeld himself calls the court decision “gutsy.”)
But one thing’s for sure: The article Schoenfeld points to, and the Boston Globe relies on, as evidence of his childhood “abuse” shows no such thing.
Schoenfeld is described by his peers at HLS as a master networker, which, coming from them, is saying something. He is also, of course, Larry Summer’s researcher, and says this of Summers:
For his own part, Schoenfeld said, he had found a role model in Summers, famously intense, [sic] himself. “Larry has said that while he was at the Treasury he tried not to suck up to the people above him. His goal was to help the people below him, which I think is really smart,’’ Schoenfeld said. “Helping people in general can only help you.’’
This is a neat trick: Sucking up to Larry Summers by praising his advice that you shouldn’t suck up to the people above you. Well-played, Mr. Schoenfeld.
Schoenfeld is off to Morgan Stanley after graduation. O, the public service.
Still, one suspects we will hear his name again, which is why it’s worth pointing out some of the cracks in the foundation that is here being built.
20 Responses
4/23/2012 6:43 pm
Hi Richard —
The abuse was also documented extensively in court papers (i.e., outside the Daily News article).
As for Google, I don’t know exactly how Matthew did the search he described to me, but there are certainly ways to get to the article without going through the NYDN archives. For instance, it’s the first Google hit for “Schoenfeld divorce.”
Thanks, Mary
4/24/2012 5:28 am
Thanks for writing, Mary. I do appreciate your feedback.
Couple things. I don’t know if Google can be gamed, but I’m wondering–did you Google “Schoenfeld divorce” *before* your article came out?
But also, to the larger question of MS’s rationale for going public with this story–what potential employer would Google “Schoenfeld divorce” when looking at Matt Schoenfeld’s resume?
And finally–the Daily News appropriately didn’t name Matt Schoenfeld in the article. He’s referred to only as “the boy” or some variation of that.
So I’m trying to imagine the conversation: “Matthew, your resume looks terrific. But I googled “Schoenfeld divorce” just for the heck of it, and I found an old article about a custody fight. You’re not mentioned in it, but are those your parents? And of course it’s not relevant at all to your job application–I’m just curious.”
It doesn’t add up.
On the “court papers” front—I know that the Daily News alluded to lots of things being introduced as evidence. Did you read any of them? I’m sure they’re not online, and that would have meant going to the bowels of some New York City bureaucracy… I doubt the Globe is paying for that kind of reporting these days.
My point was that, though clearly this was a marriage and a divorce filled with anger, the NYDN article does not establish abuse by Schoenfeld’s mother, as your article strongly suggests it does. You wrote a paragraph detailing the allegations against Schoenfeld’s mother, but say nothing about the allegations against his father In fact, the thrust of the NYDN article is to cast doubt on allegations against the mother and suggest that there was improper judicial conduct in granting the father custody.
Obviously a very sad, painful and complicated situation, and as I said before, no one should have to go through something like that. I’m sure there were limits to how deep you could go, but it seemed to me that your piece simplified things in a misleading way.
4/24/2012 11:55 am
Ok, I currently go to school with Schoenfeld. Just read this over and took a look at the articles linked- a few observations I felt strongly about:
1) Unrelated to the rest, but to Mr. Bradley, is this really the hard-hitting ‘journalism’ you’d hoped you’d practice when you were younger? Speculating on the degree of abuse suffered by a grad student raising money for abused children?
2) There are many ways to arrive at the article via any variation of the words divorce or abuse with ’schoenfeld’- it has nothing to do with an employer actually asking about it, by law they can’t ask about most things they’d find via a google search- it has to do with their knowledge prior to an interview- if Schoenfeld had gone through a rough/public custody fight, it’d probably be something he was sensitive to. Most students don’t just search their name.
3) You say ‘the article Schoenfeld points to,’ but Schoenfeld never refers to the article in anything. The Globe references testimony from the article and the Harvard news release says nothing about the article. This is a blatant lie.
4) “With three outs left, she ran to the bench, grabbed her son and carried him, screaming, across a Bayside, Queens, baseball diamond”
Schoenfeld’s mother admits to this in the NYDN piece. There is not a jurisdiction in the country that wouldn’t consider this evidence of physical and mental abuse. This is only a public example, I’d imagine that someone grabbing a ten-year old and physically forcing them across a baseball diamond in front of a crowd of his friends while he’s screaming is no picnic in private…
5) You also state that ‘Though two court-appointed experts recommended that the mother retain custody’- if you read the NYDN article, there is only one court-appointed expert, and that expert said that she was abusive and that she had “a mixed personality disorder with narcissistic features.’ The other two are not mentioned as ‘court-appointed,’ and it’s likely they were paid my Ms. Schoenfeld personally for their evaluations if they weren’t court appointed. Any judge/lawyer/1st year law student, knows that court-appointed psychologists will be given infinitely more credibility than paid personal expert witnesses. Even if this court appointed psychologist was himself going through a divorce, the odds of him maliciously diagnosing a woman with multiple personality disorder and narcissism are infinitesimal. Significant documentation would be needed to support such a diagnosis- these are serious personality disorders and this woman is likely pretty ill.The fact that you lie about the court-appointed psychologists (in conjunction with lying about ‘Schoenfeld pointing to’) is pretty serious, and in totality, it borders on slander/defamation of character.
Cloaking falsehoods in ‘All this sounds messy and terrible and no child should ever have to go through such an ordeal’ and ‘Obviously a very sad, painful and complicated situation’ does not make it ok. I hope he sees this and goes after you personally. There is probably a clinical professor here who would take up the case gratis after seeing this garbage. Schoenfeld probably won’t as it would be a significant time expenditure, but it would be funny to see you in court trying explain why you thought it was important to lie and cast aspersions about a law student half your age raising money for charity. Good luck avoiding a judgment, I’m sure you wouldn’t be seen as a sympathetic figure…
4/24/2012 1:39 pm
HLS Student, why don’t you give your name? Your defense of MS would be more convincing if you felt strongly enough about him to actually identify yourself. Anonymous character testimony doesn’t count for much–shouldn’t a law student know that?
A couple quick responses; my numbering corresponds to yours.
1) Mr. Schoenfeld is (about to be) a lawyer. He is a graduate of Columbia and, soon, Harvard. He is a former employee of Goldman Sachs,Lehman Brothers, and the hedge fund 3G Capital, and a future employee of Morgan Stanley. He is tight with Larry Summers and, apparently, the dean of Harvard Law School. This is not a man without resources, but one associated with some of the most powerful institutions and people in our country. Journalists scrutinize the powerful, and by the standards of, oh, 99% of the people in this country, Matthew Schoenfeld fits that description, and will likely do so more and more with the passage of time.
2) There are not “many ways” to link the words “divorce or abuse” and Schoenfeld; there are three. (Really only two, but, as an act of good faith, I’ll give you one.) One of them turns up the Daily News article. The others….no.
To be fair, it’s possible that the others do many, many Google screens back; I gave up after seven or eight.)
Schoenfeld’s troubled past didn’t seem to bother Goldman, Lehman, 3G or Larry Summers, if they even knew about it. They probably didn’t: Why a potential employer would search for “Schoenfeld” and “divorce” is not immediately obvious. And, again, the one relevant article doesn’t actually mention Matthew’s name.
The only reason a potential employer would know of alleged abuse in Matthew Schoenfeld’s background is, well, because of Matthew Schoenfeld.
3) You’re wrong. The Globe piece says Schoenfeld told its reporter the anecdote about stumbling across the article during a Google search.
4) Actually, there are many jurisdictions in this country–and many reasonable people–who would not consider the example you provide child abuse. Arguably, that suggestion is an insult to abused children all over the world. Nor does it necessarily mean that worse behavior occurred in private. As a law student, you should know that.
On the question of the number of court-appointed experts, you are right and I am wrong: It was one, not 3. Mea culpa.
But you are wrong on another point: The court-appointed expert was not himself going through a divorce; he was counseling the judge, who was going through a divorce. You claim to be a law student, so surely you know what a conflict of interest that would create.
But I don’t actually believe that you’re a Harvard law student, because if you were, you wouldn’t be making these intellectually juvenile accusations. You’d also know that the standard for arguing libel is much higher than you suggest. Truth is, the person who has anonymously and erroneously accused someone, in a public forum, of “falsehoods” and “lies” is more likely to be sued for libel than someone blogging about a public figure. Stop wasting your time writing comments on blogs, “HLS Student.” It’s time to hit the books.
4/24/2012 4:17 pm
With all due respect sir, that’s a pretty serious ‘Mea Culpa’- if the other two therapists weren’t appointed, then they were paid by outside parties, and offering their testimony credence is equivalent to offering credence to oil company ‘scientists’ studies of global warming. If you feel strongly enough to write a blog post about someone, you should be careful not to overlook important details.
Even if the court-appointed psychologist had counseled the judge on his divorce, implying that they came up with a grand scheme to diagnose a woman they didn’t know with serious mental conditions is far fetched- this conspiracy theory would involve a court-appointed psychologist putting his career on the line and fabricating some serious and copious documentation to screw over someone he had no prior relationship with or knowledge of. This seems somewhat unlikely. It seems more likely that he just evaluated the people he was asked to evaluate and wrote an opinion.
I think you might be overlooking the point. The guy grew up in circumstances that you admit were pretty brutal and were not of his own making. He’s raising money for charity and he’s turned a tough childhood into what appears to be a successful result, going to Columbia and Harvard. The truth is, and I think you’d admit this, you really never will know his motivations because you’ll never be able to read his mind. Speculating on it based on where he’s worked and whom he knows might not be constructive. I’m ok with this. If he’s managed to do well coming from a rotten situation he didn’t ask for and he’s raising money for other kids in tough situations, I hope he keeps doing it. Kudos.
4/25/2012 8:52 am
Michael–All very reasonable points, reasonably made. I’d like to respond to a few of them.
First, I don’t have to read Schoenfeld’s mind to know his motivations; I just have to read his quotes. As he told the Boston Globe, “Helping people in general can only help you.” That’s fairly straightforward: The point of service is to help yourself. Do you agree?
Second, I agree that my mistake about the court-appointed experts is significant. The two who endorsed Rami were representing her, and so, absolutely, that has to be factored into any evaluation of their testimony. I believe in acknowledging mistakes, so I’m happy to acknowledge this one.
That said, you are naive, I think, about the level of small-time corruption necessary to contaminate this case. A judge getting a divorce is paying a counselor, who will one day represent him, possibly in a custody battle of his own. The judge does the guy a favor by appointing him to custody cases, boosting the expert’s earnings and professional standing. The two have a close relationship, as one might expect given the personal nature of the dispute they were working on. So when the expert comes back with an unusual recommendation, the judge possibly gives it greater due than it deserves. After all, he doesn’t want to undermine the expertise of the guy who’s later going to be testifying on his own behalf. Perhaps the recommendation itself is influenced by issues in the judge’s own divorce and the expert’s sense of what the judge would like to hear.
This isn’t some paranoid conspiracy theory. It’s pretty standard, run-of-the-mill behavior. I imagine stuff like this happens in the court system, especially little-watched courts like family courts, all the time.
I wanted to introduce a new point that I should have mentioned before.
In her Globe piece, Mary Carmichael quotes a “financier” named Anthony Scaramucci, who praises Schoenfeld.
—“He’s able to create relationships with people that frankly are overscheduled and impossible to get to,’’ said Anthony Scaramucci, who as a prominent financier is one of those people but has nonetheless spent hours advising Schoenfeld on plans for the student group. “It helps that he’s a 1,000-year-old-person in a 25-year-old body.’’—
I vaguely remembered hearing that name, and the generic term “financier” should have reminded me: Anthony Scaramucci is actually a highly problematic figure to have in your corner—although in some ways, he seems a perfect one to be connected to Schoenfeld.
Here’s Felix Salmon, the Reuters blogger, writing on Scaramucci in a post titled “Anthony Scaramucci’s Sleazy Sales Pitch.”
“Scaramucci is a master of self-promotion; in the secretive world of hedge funds, he stands out as the guy who will spend whatever it takes to get noticed. …Scaramucci is a fund-of-funds manager, posting returns even he admits are lackluster: he more or less tracks the S&P 500, while making big, risky bets (a third of his assets are in MBS), investing in leveraged hedge funds, and reserving the right not to redeem his clients’ money upon request. Which means that he only has two ways to make money: either find stupid people to give him their money, or else shower himself with so many conspicuous indicia of success that people just want to buy into his perceived success.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/09/09/anthony-scaramuccis-sleazy-sales-pitch/
Salmon adds that Scaramucci is targeting his sales pitch at investors with assets from $100k to $1 million, which is actually a very risky strategy; most hedge funds aren’t good investment bets, and people with that level of assets shouldn’t invest in them–they’re likely to lose money they can’t afford to lose. You know–like buying houses you can’t afford because you think their value will always rise.
But hey, he says nice things about Matthew Schoenfeld and gives him advice, so it’s all good–let’s just sweep these awkward little issues under the rug.
Listen, it’s no fun being the guy who stands outside the PR machine of feel-goodness and says, hey, wait a second, some of this stuff doesn’t add up. People are getting a picture of this guy that isn’t driven by a desire to tell the truth, but a desire to make Harvard look good or for the Globe to fill its pages with a human-interest story.
But if we don’t think critically about the carefully massaged, neutered information whose original source isn’t trustworthy, we all stop thinking just a little bit, and we lower our standards for what is commendable just a little bit, and start thinking that abuse is not being allowed to get your last at-bat in Little League, and that getting other people to give money to a charity outweighs whatever issues are raised by working at Goldman Sachs et al, even though it kind of feels like this charity work is more directed at burnishing the resume of an aspiring financier than it is about helping the charity. Hey, people used to say stuff like this about Buddy Fletcher too–he’s black and went to Harvard, so let’s praise him without really thinking about him, let’s write about his claims of racial discrimination without actually scrutinizing them—and now a lot of retired firemen in Louisiana might lose their pensions as a result. But hey, he gave money to Harvard, so it’s all good.
These are complicated issues and there’s no simple answer to them. But you’re not going to find them raised in a Harvard Law School publication or the Boston Globe. Aren’t they worth discussing?
I think they are. But hey, it’s your choice. As Morpheus once said,
“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
So it goes.
4/25/2012 7:33 pm
Richard, I applaud you for raising these uncomfortable issues and I think your last response here is terrific - a shame you had to spoil it with a reference to a movie as overrated as The Matrix.
4/25/2012 9:05 pm
Thanks, madder, I appreciate that. Even though I still like the Matrix.
4/25/2012 10:26 pm
reporters have same power as judges behind closed doors. what goes around comes around, OMG. Sad to see Matt caught between his parents once again. Who should he choose, hand that gave him opprtunity or the hand that could only make into slumdog millionaire. Later is tougher.
4/25/2012 10:43 pm
By the way, I could have sworn I typed “mad@er.” I think my autocorrect took control there–sorry.
4/25/2012 10:52 pm
http://securities.stanford.edu/1028/CREE03-01/2003616_f05c_03CV0549.pdf
4/26/2012 2:01 pm
Could you give us a little context for that, shark?
4/27/2012 7:35 pm
I was wondering why there hasn’t been any response to what I wrote. I’m wondering why Mary Carmichael hasn’t responded. In addition, I would like to know which documents she read that speaks of abuse?
5/25/2012 1:02 pm
I have asked Baron, Boston Globe editor to let me review their source of information twice, they have yet to respond.
4/21/2013 2:20 pm
Boston globe never looked into this article.
5/10/2013 10:51 pm
Anyone who wants to know more about this, get me on Facebook, rani kalra, the mother
5/14/2013 6:50 am
I did not see Matthew for 17 years. Huis father made visits difficult if not impossible. Daily news is reporting what was in Supreme Court files. Amatthew’s dad attended graduation and Matthew thanks his dad for changing his life, and you as a journalist don’t see anything wrong without it?thats crazy, it would have been l
Different if I was a white Jewish woman. Nothing different then how black missing kids don’t get the same long media attention, not to mention any India kid. You are prejudice, shame on you. Get out of journalism. Is there a board of ethics for you guys or you are just loose cannons.
5/14/2013 7:35 am
Martha L Minow should leave been informed by Mary Carmichael, even awho ever wrote the article in Harvard news should have done their job, this is law school fr god sake………I forget its business law not domestic or family law so they have the right to act ignorant and not have the mind of a lawyer who is to think so so they don’t leave any stones unturned. I think you simply believed Sidney Siller is telling the truth…….too bad I’m not berg, berg, Feldman, shulman r something Mary would have treated me different or even Martha singer? Minow would have had second thoughts about it…….shame shame real shame, shame that a man who should be taken away fr parental alienation stands proudly that he had an opportunity to defame me after daily news article………anyone for my PI report. E had his son serve him on a silver platter, my father changed my life? Really?
5/14/2013 7:37 am
Shame n you Martha Minow……..
5/14/2013 8:46 am
Minow is an expert on human rights and advocacy for disadvantaged populations.
Ha ha, look at me, I’m disadvantage population, judge took care of me by branding with narcissistic personality…..pardon me for spellings…..ooohhh