When I was a kid, the scene I dreaded most featured my parents entering my bedroom—quietly, holding hands—to say we needed to have a “serious” talk. I already knew the phrases this talk would include: “We still love each other, but not in that way,” “Sometimes adults fall out of love,” “It’s not your fault.”
By age 12, life had already taught me the lingo of modern divorce. Though my parents stayed together, so many of my friends’ parents were splitting up in the early 1980s. I figured it was only a matter of time. Whenever my mom and dad argued, my heart would pound and an inner voice would say, “Here we go! Get ready for the overnights in a rented apartment, awkward introductions to a new girlfriend, or mom’s new boyfriend.”
Between 1970 and 1980, the divorce rate grew by more than 100%. “This meant that while less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did,” Brad Wilcox once explained in National Affairs. “And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11% of those born in the 1950s.”
The Kennedy assassination was the defining childhood event for the Boomers. It created their sense of the world and how it works. JFK conspiracy theories remain breaking news because the Boomers are still trying to make sense of their childhood. For Gen X’ers who grew up during the “sexual revolution” and the resulting domestic wreckage, divorce was our Kennedy assassination. It minted a sensibility characterized by cynicism. By middle school, we already knew most relationships would come to a bad end, that “richer and poorer” and “till death do us part” were conditional vows; that love, like milk, came with an expiration date.
Though we agreed on little else, many of those who came of age after Watergate and before cable TV did agree on this: We would not do to our kids what had been to us. By staying married even when it was hard, we would raise a generation that could grow up without worrying they were always just one serious talk away from domestic upheaval. This is what you see in the drop in divorce rates. According to divorce.com, “Gen X divorce rate is 18 divorces per 1,000 people, putting this generation and the Millennials at the bottom of the divorce rate table.”
Along with the danger of smoking, this is one of the few lessons we actually seemed to learn. Which is why I found the tragedy of Jennifer Dulos, which I have reported on for my new book, Murder in the Dollhouse, so bewildering: One morning in May 2019, Dulos, in the midst of a contentious divorce, dropped her five children off at the New Canaan Country School in Connecticut, went home, then vanished; her body has never been found. Though Jennifer and her husband, Fotis Dulos, were born in 1968 and 1967, the heart of early Gen X, they seemingly never learned to properly fear divorce court. To my mind, this case, which ended in the disappearance and death of both parents—Fotis took his own life rather than appear for a bail hearing—and riveted much of the nation, is, among other things, about the danger of divorce.
Jennifer and Fotis represented the American elite. She grew up rich, the daughter of a banker and the niece of designer Liz Claiborne. A graduate of Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, where high school tuition is now more than $60,000 a year, she went on to Brown, where she met the man she would marry, a handsome Greek national named Fotis. The couple had access to every variety of expert and specialist, meaning they not only knew the dangers of divorce—for the children, the psyche—but of the legal system, which turns every interaction into a cudgel. She married late, driven by her desire to have kids and have them fast. A brilliant young playwright in 2006, pursuing dreams in New York and LA, she was a mother of five by 2016, tethered to an inattentive husband and lost in a suburban mansion near Hartford. Then came the other woman, the paramour, which, in the age of social media, means public shame as well as heartbreak. By June 19, 2017, when Jennifer put her kids in the car and left her husband and their home in Farmington, Connecticut, for New Canaan, she had decided the only possible escape led through what members of our generation came to know as a savage crucible: divorce.
This case dominated not just the headlines but the conversations and mental lives of my friends, most of us born between 1960 and 1990, because it was the first tabloid murder mystery that focused on members of what a 20th-century sociologist might call “our set.” Jennifer and Fotis, but especially Jennifer, whose works were produced in downtown Manhattan and written up in The New York Observer when that was cool, whose casts attended parties thrown in the loft of doomed Gen X wunderkind Robert Bingham that unfolded to the sound Evan Dando and Pavement—was a familiar figure from our youth in the literary Manhattan in the ’90s. I felt connected to Jennifer Dulos (née Farber) in the way I felt connected to my wealthy New York cousins. I knew the same bands and books, schools, fears and dreams, all of which turned up in her writing, but also, painfully, in the search warrants and police reports that appeared like a toxic bloom in wake of her disappearance.
At heart, this is a story of domestic abuse. When Jennifer accepted Fotis into her life, it was because she felt she knew him as he too seemed to be from “our set.” A graduate of Brown and Columbia, Fotis haunted the same quads and common rooms at Brown. But familiarity can create a dangerous illusion. It led Jennifer to misjudge Fotis, who was arguably a psychopath. He was the abuser, she the abused. And, in the end, he was the killer. Jennifer took her kids and got away as the marriage fell apart, but, as this case demonstrates, no amount of money can protect you from a bad person who truly wants to do you harm. But the element that struck the deepest chord in my own memory was the divorce at the center of it all, how a legal process meant to be the way out can turn into a trial from which no one, not the adults, nor the kids, emerges unscathed.
The depositions and documents read like a divorce in a childhood nightmare. It’s all restraining orders, supervised visits, motions of contempt, and psychological evaluations. A cautionary tale, Dulos v. Dulos stands as one of the most contentious divorces in Connecticut history. There’d be four different legal teams, dozens of court-room hours, and hundreds of court filings by the time Jennifer vanished. Many members of the Connnecticut bar blame the system itself. “The divorce lawyers involved in this case share a good portion of the culpability for what happened,” attorney Lindy Urso told me. “You’re playing with lives when you mess around with a person’s ability to see their children to gain advantage in a divorce. If you do that enough times, you’re going to come across somebody who is going to snap.”
At one point, Fotis, having dismissed his lawyer, decided to represent himself in court, which was probably just an excuse to cross-examine his wife. High drama. The moment he’d been waiting for, a chance to get Jennifer under oath and browbeat her into a confession. He seemingly wanted her to admit that he, Fotis, was in fact the better parent, that the kids loved him more.
You can feel the tension building in the documents. It’s like a drop in the barometric pressure. You know the storm is coming. No one involved—neither the lawyers nor judges—seemed to know how to stop it. As if the tragedy was predestined: Jennifer murdered by Fotis, Fotis dead by his own hand, the paramour in prison, the kids, the object of the courtroom battles, left with the worst legacy imaginable.
The pivot—the moment when the story might’ve gone this way instead of that—came on the second day in court. After hearing several hours of testimony, Judge Thomas Colin broke routine and spoke directly to Jennifer and Fotis. Warning them from the depth of his experience, he tried to snap them out of their trance and make them see where they were and where they were about to go. “I’ve known you now for no more than 24 hours and you seem like nice people with wonderful children,” said the judge. You have “all the opportunities in the world that many families don’t have—with healthy children, wealth, and all that provides. But the one thing it doesn’t provide is happiness. I hope that you can put this all aside and maybe, in the next week or 10 days, as things cool down, figure out a way to solve the problem yourselves instead of having three or four lawyers, a judge, a court monitor, a clerk, all involved in your life,. Because, obviously, it’s not ideal to have the government involved in your life like this. If you can’t do it, then the court’s here to do it. But I encourage you to think about all the fortunate things that you have in your lives that many people don’t, and think about how the kids would feel if they sat in the back of this courtroom and watched this hearing.”
It was like the sign you see before you enter Manhattan on Route 9A: last exit before toll. They blew right past it—because they did not understand its importance, or because they understood but didn’t care. If any lessons can be learned from the Dulos disaster, it’s only this: There are some kinds of victories that cannot be won in court.
Rich Cohen is a columnist at the WSJ and the author of several NY Times bestsellers. His new book, published this week, is called “Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story.”
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